The learning assessment market: pointers for countries – part 2

By Silvia Montoya, Director, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Luis Crouch, Senior Economist, RTI International [1]

In a previous blog, we argued that the market for learning assessment is very inefficient and therefore warrants public action. As things stand:

• More than half of countries do not participate in a cross-national assessment, makes it hard for them and for the international community to benchmark their progress towards the learning outcome indicators in SDG 4.
• Countries that may want to participate in a cross-national assessment, and agencies that could cover the cost, both face obstacles standing in the way of effective and cost efficient solutions.

Today, we want to contribute further by proposing a series of possible solutions for five forms of inefficiency and the problem of inequity. While the solutions have different political and monetary costs, they are all relatively easy to adopt. And, in an ideal world they would all be carried out more or less simultaneously as they are all highly complementary with each other.

Aid to education falls slightly in 2017, shifts away from primary education

In 2017, aid to education totaled US$ 13.2 billion, down 2% or US$288 million compared to 2016. The figures analysed by our team show that the level of aid to education continue to stagnate, growing by only 1% per year on average since 2009. These figures raise questions about the global commitment to achieving SDG 4, the global education goal.

A drop in aid to education could be something to celebrate if it looked like it was due to governments needing less, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Governments in low income countries spend, on average, 16% of their budgets on education, far more than richer countries, and are off track meeting even the 2015 target of universal primary education.

There has been big talk about ambitions ever since 2015, when our new education agenda was set. However, efforts have focused on elaborating the financing architecture and not increasing the financing. A new multilateral mechanism, the International Financing Facility for Education, which aims to lower the cost of borrowing for education for middle income countries, is expected to be announced later this month. It adds to the Global Partnership for Education, which provides grants to low income countries, and the Education Cannot Wait fund, which focuses on emergency contexts. It seems that donors may be shifting money around, tinkering with different ways to spend a fixed sum, but not giving more.

Global Action week for Education: Civil society urges citizens to claim their right to education

By Global Campaign for Education

The Global Action Week for Education (GAWE) is a flagship event for the civil society education movement.  Since 2003, this annual week of action led by the Global Campaign for Education has successfully chosen topical and timely themes relevant to education challenges of the day. This year it has been no different. The 2019 overarching theme: Making the right to an inclusive, equitable, quality, free public education a reality under the slogan My Education, My Right(s) is a call to citizens to claim their right to education.

Worldwide, 2019 is a critical year to ensure the timely delivery of free quality education for all by 2030. Children starting school in 2019 will complete their 12 years basic education by 2030, a global deadline set aside to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We call on the international community and vested education stakeholders to act now and ask government to realise the right to free, inclusive, quality public education for all by signing this petition.

Despite significant improvements in literacy and narrowing of the gender gap, still 750 million adults, two-thirds of whom are women, remain non-literate in 2016. Today, millions of children and youth in school lack the minimum literacy and numeracy skills due to overcrowded classrooms and inadequately trained teachers. More than 617 million children and adolescents are not able to read or handle mathematics proficiently.

School doors might be about to open for undocumented children in South Africa. Let’s make sure they do.

First issued in the Mail & Guardian, South Africa

Last November, we commented in the Mail & Guardian on the contradictory laws in South Africa that discriminate against children of immigrants. There are now signs of change, with a letter issued to the African Diaspora Forum (ADF) from the minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga, announcing that “as an interim measure” the department will “ensure that no learner without proper documentation is refused admission to a public school” and has developed a circular for the provinces directing that “all learners, irrespective of their citizenship status, should not be denied admission to any public school”.

This move is something we have been pushing for since the launch of our latest report on migration, displacement and education. Building Bridges, Not Walls looks at practices that help or obstruct migrants and those forcibly displaced to fulfil their right to education. These range from countries that have made choices to overlook paperwork, financial implications and politics to open school doors, to countries that outright excluded them.

The learning assessment market: pointers for countries – part 1

By Silvia Montoya, Director, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Luis Crouch, Senior Economist, RTI International [1]

Measuring learning outcomes is key to the Sustainable Development Goal for education (SDG 4). There are about a dozen indicators that measure learning outcomes.

Data for these indicators are provided via a market. It may seem odd to think so but think about it for a moment: there are data producers, there are data consumers (countries, policymakers, international agencies and researchers), and there are goods and services exchanged for money (prices) to produce the assessment data.

Wikipedia, for example, characterizes markets as institutions that “facilitate trade and enable the distribution and resource allocation in a society. Markets allow any trade-able item to be evaluated and priced. A market emerges more or less spontaneously or may be constructed deliberately by human interaction in order to enable the exchange … of services and goods.”

While the specifics of a market will obviously vary, there are two central questions: does it allocate resources efficiently and equitably? In this blog, we ask this of the learning assessment market, and find the answers fall short.

Remittances well exceed aid as the most important external finance source for poor countries: let’s make the most of them

Next month, the GEM Report will release the breakdown of global aid figures for education in its annual policy paper. But the signs do not look good. ‘Poorest countries bear the brunt as aid levels fall for second successive year’ and ‘New aid figures reveal ‘incredible lack of ambition‘ are some of the headlines reacting to the release of the total aid levels last week.

On the back of this news, the World Bank analysed the figures from a remittances perspective, showing that migrants from Africa are the top contributor of foreign inflows to the continent, reaching a record $46 billion in 2018, far more than the $27 billion dollars that were received in foreign aid in the same year.

The 2019 GEM Report looked at the extent to which these finance flows benefit education. Using 2017 remittance figures, our calculations showed that remittances increased education spending by over 35% in 18 countries in Africa and Asia and by over 50% in Latin America.

The GEM Report at CIES 2019

More than 2,500 education professionals will be in San Francisco next week for the 63^rd Comparative and International Education Society’s conference under the theme ‘Education for Sustainability’. The Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report is joining the crowd, taking part in no fewer than seven events over the four days as detailed in the card below.

On Monday, we will have the opportunity to present the 2019 GEM Report Migration, displacement and education: Building bridges, not walls. The 2018 National Teacher of the Year, Mandy Manning, along with Associate Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School, Sarah Dryden-Peterson; Senior Education Specialist at Global Affairs Canada, Dan Thakur; and Executive Director, Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs for the city of San Francisco, Adrienne Pon, will present their perspectives, from local to global.

Earlier in the day we will also be taking part in an event to present our analysis of aid financing for refugee education, mapping the two key international databases against each other.

New Financing for Sustainable Development Report argues “action is needed at all levels” including on education

The 2019 Financing for Sustainable Development Report (FSDR) of the Inter-agency Task Force, whose fourth edition was released today, reviews the global financing landscape to make recommendations for governments. It puts special emphasis on the five Sustainable Development Goals under review at the High-Level Political Forum this July, which includes the education goal, SDG 4.

Ahead of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF and the United Nations ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development, the 2019 FSDR assesses the global macroeconomic context and progress towards the commitment to establish national integrated financing frameworks that was made in the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in 2015 (known as the Addis Ababa Action Agenda). It discusses the seven action areas of the Agenda, ranging from domestic public resource to international development cooperation.

The 2019 FSDR emphasizes the financing gap for education using our 2015 policy paper, with least developed countries needing to increase their annual spending on education by three times in order to achieve universal pre-primary, primary and secondary education. The IMF used these calculations to show that the SDGs on education, health, roads, electricity, water and sanitation for 155 developing countries would require additional spending worth $2.6 trillion by 2030.

Aid to pre-primary education: the gap between rhetoric and reality

By Professor Pauline Rose, Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Many donors increasingly voice their recognition of the importance of pre-primary education in their education policy, but few are matching their public statements of support with tangible investment. In the last two years, aid to pre-primary education has decreased by 27%, at a time when overall aid to education increased. This paints a stark contrast between donor rhetoric and reality.

A new report, “Leaving the youngest behind”, produced by the REAL Centre at the University of Cambridge and global children’s charity Theirworld, has tracked progress in aid spending for pre-primary education over the past two years. It reveals that 16 of the top 25 donors to the education sector have either given nothing or have reduced their previous spending on pre-primary education since the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  SDG target 4.2 calls for all girls and boys to have access to quality pre-primary education by 2030. However, aid spending on pre-primary education is now even smaller than when the SDGs were adopted in 2015. Aid to pre-primary education is a tiny, and declining, priority of overall aid spending, accounting for just 0.5 per cent in total in 2017 – down from 0.8 per cent in 2015.

Accountability in action in education in Jamaica

Last week, a meeting of the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) of the Parliament in Jamaica called for officials at the Ministry of Education to appear before it to give an account of the Ministry’s operations. The reason for the summoning is a suspected corruption case that hit the news on March 20 that saw Ruel Reid, Minister of Education, Youth and Information, handing in his resignation, while maintaining his innocence.

“I see that there is a problem that signals a governance issue, a breakdown in supervision and oversight by the Minister and I have to intervene” said the Prime Minister before the House of Representatives, as the news broke.

The case unfolded with the questioning in an audit of the Ministry of Education conducted by the Auditor General’s Department (AGD). The audit is focused on “whether the selected public entities procurement and contracts management activities were conducted to attain value for money (which encompasses the achievement of economy, efficiency and effectiveness)”.

Source: AGD website