World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise

Struggling education systems lack workers end up in jobs that require minimal amounts one or more of four key school-level of reading or math. Lack of skills reduces job quality, ingredients for learning: prepared earnings, and labor mobility.

learners, effective teaching, learning-The skills needed in labor markets are multi-focused inputs, and the skilled mandimensional, so systems need to equip students with agement and governance that pulls far more than just reading, writing, and math—but them all together (figure O.7). The students cannot leapfrog these foundational skills.

next section looks at why these links

Whether as workers or members of society, peobreak down; here the focus is on how ple also need higher-order cognitive skills such as they break down.

problem-solving. In addition, they need socioemoFirst, children often arrive in tional skills—sometimes called soft or noncognitive school unprepared to learn—if they skills—such as conscientiousness. Finally, they need arrive at all. Malnutrition, illness, low parental technical skills to perform a specific job. That said, investments, and the harsh environments associated

Second, teachers often lack the skills or motivation to be effective. Teachers are the most important factor affecting learning in schools. In the United States, students with great teachers advance 1.5 grade levels or more over a single school year, compared with just 0.5 grade levels for those with an ineffective teacher. In developing countries, teacher quality can matter even more than in wealthier countries. But most education systems do not attract applicants with strong backgrounds. For example, 15-year-old students who aspire to be teachers score below the national average on PISA in nearly all countries. Beyond that, weak teacher education results in teachers lacking subject knowledge and pedagogical skills. In 14 Sub-Saharan countries, the average grade 6 teacher performs no better on reading tests than do the highest-performing students from that grade. In Indonesia, 60 percent of the time in a typical mathematics class is spent on lecturing, with limited time remaining for practical work or problem-solving. Meanwhile, in many developing countries substantial amounts of learning time are lost because classroom time is spent on other activities or because teachers are absent. Only a third of total instructional time was used in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Guatemala. Across seven African countries, one in five teachers was absent from school on the day of an unannounced visit by survey teams, with another fifth absent from the classroom even though they were at school with poverty undermine early childhood learning.

(figure O.9). The problems are even more severe in

Severe deprivations—whether in terms of nutriremote communities, amplifying the disadvantages tion, unhealthy environments, or lack of nurture by already facing rural students. Such diagnostics are caregivers—have long-lasting effects because they not intended to blame teachers. Rather, they call impair infants’ brain development. Thirty percent attention to how systems undermine learning by of children under 5 in developing countries are failing to support them.

physically stunted, meaning they have low height

Third, inputs often fail to reach classrooms or to for their age, typically due to chronic malnutrition.

affect learning when they do. Public discourse often

The poor developmental foundations and lower levels equates problems of education quality with input of preschool skills resulting from deprivation mean gaps. Devoting enough resources to education is crumany children arrive at school unprepared to benefit cial, and in some countries resources have not kept fully from it (figure O.8). So even in a good school, pace with the rapid jumps in enrollment. For several deprived children learn less. Moreover, breaking reasons, however, input shortages explain only a small out of lower learning trajectories becomes harder as part of the learning crisis. First, looking across systems these children age because the brain becomes less and schools, similar levels of resources are often assomalleable. Thus education systems tend to amplify ciated with vast differences in learning outcomes.

initial differences. Moreover, many disadvantaged

Second, increasing inputs in a given setting often has youth are not in school. Fees and opportunity costs small effects on learning outcomes. Part of the reaare still major financial barriers to schooling, and son is that inputs often fail to make it to the front lines.

social dimensions of exclusion—for example, those

A decade ago in Sierra Leone, for example, textbooks associated with gender or disability—exacerbate the were distributed to schools, but follow-up inspecproblem. These inequalities in school participation tions found most of them locked away in cupboards, further widen gaps in learning outcomes.

unused. Similarly, many technological interventions fail before they reach classrooms, and even when they do make it to classrooms, they often do not enhance teaching or learning. In Brazil, a One Laptop Per Child initiative in several states faced years of delays. Then, even a year after the laptops finally made it to classrooms, more than 40 percent of teachers reported never or rarely using them in classroom activities.

Fourth, poor management and governance often undermine schooling quality. Although effective school leadership does not raise student learning directly, it does so indirectly by improving teaching quality and ensuring effective use of resources. Across eight countries that have been studied, a 1.00 standard deviation increase in an index of management capacity—based on the adoption of 20 management practices—is associated with a 0.23–0.43 standard deviation increase in student outcomes. But school management capacity tends to be lowest in those countries with the lowest income levels, and management capacity is substantially lower in schools than in manufacturing (figure O.10). Ineffective school leadership means school principals are not actively involved in helping teachers solve problems, do not provide instructional advice, and do not set goals that prioritize learning. School governance—particularly the decision-making autonomy of schools, along with the oversight provided by autonomy, and community engagement fails to affect parents and communities—serves as the framework what happens in classrooms.

for seeking local solutions and being accountable for

Because these quality problems are concentrated them. In many settings, schools lack any meaningful among disadvantaged children, they amplify social typically disadvantage marginalized communities, but also that resources are used less effectively there, exacerbating the problem. Public policy thus has the effect of widening social gaps rather than offering all children an opportunity to learn.

Viewed from a systems perspective, the low level of learning and skills should come as no surprise. Technical complexities and political forces constantly pull education systems out of alignment with learning (figure O.11).

Complex systems and limited management capacity are obstacles to orienting all parts of an education system toward learning. First, the various parts of the system need to be aligned toward learning. But actors in the system have other goals—some stated, some not. Promoting learning is only one of these, and not necessarily the most important one. At times, these other goals can be harmful, such as when construction firms and bureaucrats collude to provide substandard school buildings for their financial gain. At other times, these goals may be laudable, such as nurturing shared national values. But if system elements are aligned toward these other goals, they will sometimes be at cross-purposes with learning.

Even when countries want to prioritize learning, they often lack the metrics to do so. Every system assesses student learning in some way, but many systems lack the reliable, timely assessments needed to provide feedback on innovations. For example, is a new teacher training program actually making teachers more effective? If the system lacks reliable information on the quality of teaching and the learning of primary students—comparable across time or classrooms—there is no way to answer that question.

To be truly aligned, parts of the education system also have to be coherent with one another. Imagine that a country has set student learning as a top priorinequalities. In low-income countries, on average, ity and that it has in place reasonable learning metrics.

stunting rates among children under 5 are almost

It still needs to leap a major technical hurdle, howthree times higher in the poorest quintile than in ever: ensuring that system elements work together.

the richest. In schools, problems with teacher

If a country adopts a new curriculum that increases absenteeism, lack of inputs, and weak management emphasis on active learning and creative thinking, are typically severest in communities that serve the that alone will not change much. Teachers need to poorest students. It’s not just that spending patterns be trained so that they can use more active learning methods, and they need to care enough to make the change because teaching the new curriculum may be much more demanding than the old rote learning methods. Even if teachers are on board with curriculum reform, students could weaken its effects if an unreformed examination system creates misaligned incentives. In Korea, the high-stakes exam system for university entrance has weakened efforts to reorient secondary school learning. The curriculum has changed to build students’ creativity and socioemotional skills, but many parents still send their children to private “cram schools” for test preparation.

The need for coherence makes it risky to borrow system elements from other countries. Education policy makers and other experts often scrutinize systems that have better learning outcomes to identify what they could borrow. Indeed, in the 2000s the search for the secret behind Finland’s admirable record of learning with equity led to a swarm of visiting delegations in what the Finns dubbed “PISA tourism.” Finland’s system gives considerable autonomy to its well-educated teachers, who can tailor their teaching to the needs of their students. But lower-performing systems that import Finland’s teacher autonomy into their own contexts are likely to be disappointed: if teachers are poorly educated, unmotivated, and loosely managed, giving them even more autonomy will likely make matters worse. South Africa discovered this in the 1990s and 2000s when it adopted a curriculum approach that set goals but left implementation up to teachers. The approach failed because it proved to be a poor fit for the capacity of teachers and the resources at their disposal. Home-grown, context-specific solutions are important.

Successful systems combine both alignment and coherence. Alignment means that learning is the goal of the various components of the system. Coherence means that the components reinforce each other in achieving whatever goals the system has set for them. When systems achieve both, they are much more likely to promote student learning. Too much misalignment or incoherence leads to failure to achieve learning, though the system might achieve other goals (table O.1).

Political challenges compound technical ones. Many education actors have different interests, again beyond learning. Politicians act to preserve their positions in power, which may lead them to target particular groups (geographic, ethnic, or economic) for benefits. Bureaucrats may focus more on keeping politicians and teachers happy than on promoting student learning, or they may simply try to protect their own positions. Some private suppliers of education services—whether textbooks, construction, or schooling—may, in the pursuit of profit, advocate policy choices not in the interest of students. Teachers and other education professionals, even when motivated by a sense of mission, also may fight to maintain secure employment and to protect their incomes. None of this is to say that education actors don’t care about learning. Rather, especially in poorly managed systems, competing interests may loom larger than the learning-aligned interests (table O.2).

Misalignments aren’t random. Because of these competing interests, the choice of a particular policy is rarely determined by whether it improves learning. More often, the choice is made by the more powerful actors in the policy arena. Agents are accountable to one another for different reasons, not just learning. Given these interests, it should come as no surprise that little learning often results.

One problem is that activities to promote learning are difficult to manage. Teaching and learning in the classroom involve significant discretion by teachers, at simple, easily collected enrollment data. Similarly, as well as regular and repeated interactions between school construction, cash transfer programs, teacher students and teachers. These characteristics, couhiring, and school grant programs intended to pled with a dearth of reliable information on learnexpand access are all highly visible, easily monitored ing, make managing learning more difficult than investments.

pursuing other goals. For example, improvements

The potential beneficiaries of better foundational in access to education can be monitored by looking learning—such as students, parents, and employers— often lack the organization, information, or short-term incentive to press for change. Parents are usually not organized to participate in debates at the system level, and they may lack knowledge of the potential gains from different policies to improve learning. They also may worry about the potential ramifications for their children or themselves of opposing interests such as teachers, bureaucrats, or politicians. Students have even less power—except sometimes in higher education, where they can threaten demonstrations—and, like parents, they may be unaware of how little they are learning until they start looking for work. Finally, the business community, even if it suffers from a shortage of skilled graduates to hire, often fails to advocate for quality education, instead lobbying for lower taxes and spending. By contrast to these potential beneficiaries of reform, the potential losers tend to be more aware of what is at stake for them and, in many cases, better organized to act collectively.

As a result, many systems are stuck in low-learning traps, characterized by low accountability and high inequality. These traps bind together key stakeholders through informal contracts that prioritize other goals such as civil service employment, corporate profits, or reelection, perpetuating the low-accountability equilibrium. In better-run systems, actors such as bureaucrats and teachers can devote much of their energy to improving outcomes for students. But in low-learning traps those same actors lack either the incentives or the support needed to focus on learning. Instead, they are constantly pressured to deliver other services for more powerful players. As actors juggle multiple objectives, relying on each other in an environment of uncertainty, low social trust, and risk aversion, it is often in the interest of each to maintain the status quo—even if society, and many of these actors, would be better offif they could shift to a higher-quality equilibrium.

This diagnosis has concentrated on the shortfalls in foundational learning, as will the priorities for action discussed in the next section. However, this focus should not be interpreted as a statement that other areas are unimportant. Education systems and their enabling environment are broader and more complex than this Report can cover, so our priority here is to highlight what can be done most immediately to strengthen the foundations of learning on which all successful systems are built. But both the diagnosis and the priorities for action are relevant for other parts of the system, such as higher education or lifelong learning. In these areas, too, many countries suffer from a lack of attention to outcomes, wide gaps in opportunity, and systemic barriers to resolving these problems.

Even in countries that seem stuck in low-learning traps, some teachers and schools manage to strengthen learning. These examples may not be sustainable—and they are not likely to spread systemwide without efforts to reorient the system toward learning—but systems willing to learn from these outliers can benefit. On a larger scale, some regions within countries are more successful in promoting learning, as are some countries at each income level.

These examples reveal that higher-level system equilibriums exist. But is it possible for a whole system to escape the low-learning trap, moving to a better one? There are at least two reasons for optimism. First, as countries innovate to improve learning, they can draw on more systematic knowledge than ever available before about what can work at the micro level—the level of learners, classrooms, and schools. A number of interventions, innovations, and approaches have resulted in substantial gains in learning. These promising approaches come in many flavors—new pedagogical methods, ways to ensure that students and teachers are motivated, approaches to school management, technologies to enhance teaching learning—and they may not pay offin all contexts, but the fact that it is possible to improve learning outcomes should give hope. These interventions can provide substantial improvements in learning: almost one or two grade-equivalents for some students. Even though successful interventions cannot be imported wholesale into new contexts, countries can use them as starting points for their own innovations.

Second, some countries have implemented reforms that have led to sustained systemwide improvements in learning. Finland’s major education reform in the 1970s famously improved the equity of outcomes while also increasing quality, so that by the time of the first PISA in 2000, Finland topped the assessment. More recently, Chile, Peru, Poland, and the United Kingdom have made serious, sustained commitments to reforming the quality of their education systems. In all these countries, learning has improved over time—not always steadily, but enough to show that system-level reforms can pay off.

The education systems in Shanghai (China) and Vietnam today—and Korea decades ago—show that it is possible to perform far better than income levels would predict, thanks to a sustained focus on learning with equity. Brazil and Indonesia have made considerable progress, despite the challenges of reforming large, decentralized systems.