Does school choice really exist?

An idea that has gained popularity in some circles in recent years is that giving a choice to parents over where their children are educated and introducing competition in an  education ‘market’ will raise standards across the system through healthy competition and the closure of ineffective schools. Given information, parents could voice concerns, undertake improvements or move their children to other schools. Choice and its effects could improve the functioning of schools and systems, incentivize innovation and result in better student outcomes and parent satisfaction.

In the last three decades, reforms rooted in the school choice logic have been implemented in more than two-thirds of OECD countries, for instance. Across the 72 systems participating in PISA 2015, the parents of around 64% of students reported that they had at least two schools to choose from for their children.

However, a closer look at the evidence suggests that school choice often doesn’t work as it’s meant to, and can in fact increase inequalities and undermine quality education.

Key takeaways from the 2017/8 GEM Report

The 2017/8 Global Education Monitoring Report, Accountability in education: Meeting our commitments, fulfils its mandate to follow countries’ progress towards achieving the global education goal but also focuses on the theme of accountability in education. Why did we choose to write about accountability this year? Here are some of the most frequently asked questions surrounding this year’s Report. 

WHY DOES ACCOUNTABILITY MATTER?

Despite strong progress in education, there are significant challenges to achieving the global education goal, SDG 4: Children cannot read after several years of school in sub-Saharan Africa; examination pressure is having an impact on gender gaps in China; the excess focus in education on employability is being questioned in Germany; decentralization is posing challenges for underfunded rural schools in Pakistan; low-quality private universities are proliferating in Paraguay; refugee children have severely constrained education chances, especially those fleeing war in the Syrian Arab Republic.

Faced with education challenges, the public wants to know who is responsible and policy-makers look for urgent solutions. Increased accountability often tops the list. When systems fail, people call for someone to be held responsible and for mechanisms to be in place that ensure corrective action.

Learning from Promising Practices in Refugee Education

By Emma Wagner, Education in Emergencies Policy & Advocacy Adviser, Save the Children

Earlier this year Save the Children, Pearson and UNHCR formed a new groundbreaking partnership to tackle the refugee education crisis. The Promising Practices in Refugee Education initiative sets out to identify, document and promote innovative ways to effectively provide quality education to refugee children and young people.

Why this initiative?

The world is witnessing record-high levels of human displacement. Over 65 million people have been forced from their homes, including 22.5 million who have crossed an international border to flee persecution and reach safety.

In times of crisis, education provides hope and a place of safety, and reduces the risk of child marriage, child labour, and children being recruitment by armed groups. Refugee families prioritise education, as they know it is a passport to a more fruitful future for their children.

However, the barriers to accessing quality education remain challenging and varied. Shockingly, refugee children are five times more likely to be out of school than non-refugee children. Only 61% have access to primary education, and only 23% have access to secondary school.

Encouragingly, there is cause for optimism: numerous projects are reaching refugees in some of the most difficult regions and providing innovative interventions to the education challenge with promising results.

That is why Save the Children, Pearson and UNHCR are collaborating to increase awareness of the important work happening in the sector and to demonstrate the diverse ways in which organisations are providing quality education for refugees.

One week on from the 2017/8 GEM Report launch: a round-up

Not even a short power cut, which plunged the ballroom of Maputo’s Gloria Hotel into temporary darkness, could stifle the anticipation of those gathered to mark the global launch of the 2017/8 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report- Accountability in education: Meeting our commitments.  UNESCO’s Deputy-Director General Mr Getachew Engida was joined by Ministers of Education from across the continent as he officially launched the 2017/8 GEM Report with H.E. Ms Conceita Sortane, Mozambique’s Minister of Education and Human Development, in front of over two hundred civil society representatives, teachers, policy makers, academics and donors.

“Minsters present should consider themselves the guardians of education,” said Mr Engida as he opened the event, calling upon all governments to establish, monitor and enforce regulations to ensure the world meets the aspirations of the global education goal. A keynote address delivered by Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister H. E. Dr Demeke Mekonnen referenced some of the challenges facing the continent: for example, only one in four youth complete secondary school. “I confirm my country’s commitment to addressing these challenges, increasing expenditure on school construction and maintenance, and hiring and training thousands of new teachers, administrators and officials,” he said.

Governments need to ensure rules are followed in education

By Manos Antoninis, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report, UNESCO

No matter your job, you need standards to ensure that you are working to meet your objectives. Unfortunately, where education and schools are concerned, these standards sometimes do not exist. Or, more often, they are not enforced. Schools are decidedly sub-standard in some places. Many teachers are not sufficiently prepared, classrooms are overcrowded, infrastructure is crumbling and learning is suffering. Standards are slipping where they could easily be applied, which is putting our global education goal at risk.

Even though the number of children not in school has stagnated between 2008 and 2015, this doesn’t mean that the number going to school is stagnating too. Richer countries may have achieved universal primary education some while ago, but a rapid growth is occurring in poorer countries. During the same period, 30 million more children enrolled in primary school in sub-Saharan Africa alone. That’s more than all the children enrolled in primary school in the United States flocking to schools in sub-Saharan Africa in seven years looking to be educated. Is it any wonder that standards are slipping?

Depending on what side of the fence you sit, the diversification of education providers, which has mushroomed often in the form of low-fee private schools to meet this challenge, can be a blessing or a curse. Many of these schools sprouted in densely populated slums, where governments did not wish to set foot. They attract families aspiring to improve the education of their children. But oftentimes these schools do not live up to expectations.

What the newest Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, Accountability in education: meeting our commitments, shows us is that governments must establish standards and regulations that lay down the law for all education providers, public and private. If they do not, negative practices quickly take hold.

New GEM Report says ‘Don’t just blame the teacher when the system is at fault’

The 2017/8 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report was released today at global events in Maputo, Mozambique, Brasilia, Brazil and in London, UK. It stresses that accountability is indispensable in achieving SDG 4. The Report highlights the responsibility of governments to provide universal education of good quality. But it warns that disproportionate blame on teachers or schools for systemic educational problems can have serious negative side effects, widening inequality and damaging learning.

The second report in the GEM Report series, Accountability in education: meeting our commitments, shows that achieving SDG 4 is a shared responsibility between us all – governments, schools, teachers, parents, students, private actors and the international community. But the type of accountability countries choose to set up for these responsibilities must be designed carefully. Accountability must be used as a mean to education ends, such as equity and quality, it cautions, and not seen as an end in itself.

Let teachers teach: The dangers of expanding teacher workloads

Today, on World Teachers’ Day, we look at one of the findings in the 2017/8 GEM Report on accountability in education due out later this month. The Report celebrates the undeniably critical role that teachers play in any education system: they hold the primary responsibility for educating the students in their care. In recent years, however, the next GEM Report shows that, particularly in high-income countries, pressure on teachers appears to be piling on as more and more responsibilities are placed within their remit. This is often due to the increasing focus on accountability by governments and schools. How can this be avoided?

Accountability and teacher workload

The spectrum of responsibilities falling on teachers’ shoulders often include having to design curriculum, undertake administrative tasks, participate in internal evaluations, help with extracurricular activities, support students’ wellbeing and assist in the hiring process of other teachers. Our next Report shows, for instance, that teachers participating in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) spent about two hours a week on extracurricular activities, on average, ranging from about half an hour in Sweden and Finland to nearly eight hours in Japan.

In addition to these extra-curricular activities, the 2017/8 GEM Report shows that teachers also have far more requests to account and report, often due to decentralisation and greater school autonomy. About 75% of teachers in Finland and 95% of their peers in Sweden reported that their documentation responsibilities had increased. The issue is when these reporting requests appear to be unreasonable, and when teachers’ ability to teach is being impinged upon. For example, in England, 56% of teachers argued that data collection and management caused unnecessary workload for them, and 93% of teachers and some school leaders viewed workload as a ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ serious problem.

Education at a Glance 2017: How is the OECD engaging with SDG 4?

The OECD flagship publication, Education at a Glance, has turned its attention to Sustainable Development Goal 4. This is important for confirming the universality of the agenda. But it also carries implications about how the OECD, as an organization representing rich countries, engages in global processes.

Adjusting Education at a Glance to the SDG era

Few organizations can match the innovative contributions of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to international education over the past 20 years. While the spotlight tends to fall on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), its work on issues ranging from school resources to teacher motivation to early childhood education quality helps generate interesting debates on education policy, monitoring and evaluation. The Global Education Monitoring Report team has referred increasingly to OECD research, as a recent bibliometric analysis has shown.

A common thread links OECD innovations, going back to the Indicators of Education Systems programme in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which resulted in its flagship publication, Education at a Glance. Last month saw the release of the latest in the series, Education at a Glance 2017. The report has set high standards for clarity and attention to detail – and this edition is no exception.

The Education at a Glance series has been built on four pillars of indicators: education system output; financial and human resources; access and participation; and learning environments. As of 2016, the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and in particular SDG 4 on education has been superimposed as a second, parallel framework. Last year, Education at a Glance included a special introduction on SDG 4. We welcomed it as “one of the clearest signs that this is a universal agenda, not one dictated by rich countries to poor countries” given that until then OECD member states had dismissed international agendas, such as the MDGs and EFA, as irrelevant to their national education needs.

The Rohingya Children of Karachi

By Baela Raza Jamil, CEO Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA)

“Oh Allah I seek Refuge from Being Unlettered, Undocumented and Vulnerable- please protect and enable me to reach my potential.”

Areeba is a Rohingya belonging to a migrant family from Myanmar. Her ancestors escaped from their land when it was Burma. They ran for their lives during the vicious recurrent cycles of purges against them as a minority group. Areeba was born in Karachi, near a vast wetland, by the sea and close to a huge garbage dumping ground; it was in this sprawl of Pakistan’s mega city where her family sought refuge.

Until age 11 she was unable to enroll in any school, not because there were not any schools nearby, but because what they had to offer was not what her family wanted and they remained fearful of her ‘undocumented’ status as a migrant. Instead, she was enrolled in a nearby madrassa to learn the Quran, something all Muslims must do, especially girls prior to being married off early, as per family customs. Her cousin, barely 20, is mother to six children and expecting a seventh.

Areeba’s story is captured in a book called “Mapping Migrations”, which is a co-creation by children of her neighbourhood, Bachon Say Tabdeli (Transforming through Children), Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) and the Children’s Literature Festival (CLF), a social movement for learning and critical thinking. And taking part in this book was transformative: within a year Areeba managed to leapfrog her years of neglect and silence about her identity and aspirations, and to escape child marriage, unlike her sad cousin.  How did that happen? 

Learning to realize education’s promise – a look at the 2018 WDR

For the first time in forty years, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR), released on Tuesday, focuses exclusively on education. We are pleased to see its core messages resonating so well with our past reports, especially the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report on teaching and learning. The WDR is a welcome addition to the Bank’s flagship series. It shows that many changes have happened in the past 40 years in education, not least in the Bank’s thinking about it.

With its crisp presentation and clear threads of argument, the report is aligned with the Bank’s 2020 Education Strategy, which marked a strategic shift to learning over schooling when it was published in 2011. The WDR reiterates that the benefits of education are poorly linked to years spent in school and urges countries to engage in system-wide commitment to improve learning outcomes. Its main messages are to assess learning, as the key to re-align education systems; to act on evidence; and to align actors so they work in the direction of improved learning outcomes.