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

Working at scale is not just “scaling up.” The concept of scaling up in education implies taking interventions that have been shown to be effective on a pilot or experimental scale and replicating them across hundreds or thousands of schools. However, this approach often fails because the key actors are human beings, operating with human aspirations and limitations in a politically charged arena. Real-world complications can undermine well-designed programs, especially when new, systemwide forces come into play. When the Cambodian government tried to scale up early child development centers and preschools—programs that had worked in some parts of the country when implemented by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—low demand from parents and low-quality services led to no impacts on child development, and even slowed it for some. When the Kenyan government tried to lower student-teacher ratios by hiring contract teachers—an intervention that had improved student outcomes when implemented by an NGO—the results were negligible because of both implementation constraints and political economy factors. And when the Indonesian government tried to increase teacher capacity by nearly doubling the salaries of certified teachers, political pressures watered down the certification process and left only the pay increase in place. The result was much larger budget outlays on salaries, but no increase in teachers’ skills or student learning.

The lesson, then, is that better interventions at the school and student levels will sustainably improve learning only if countries tackle the stubborn system-level technical and political barriers to change. Technical barriers include the complexity of the system, the large number of actors, the interdependence of reforms, and the slow pace of change in education systems. Political barriers include the competing interests of different players and the difficulty of moving out of a low-quality equilibrium, especially in low-trust environments where risks predominate. All of these barriers pull actors away from learning, as discussed earlier. Systems that surmount these barriers and align actors toward learning can achieve remarkable learning outcomes. Shanghai provided proof when it topped the 2012 PISA rankings, in part thanks to policies that ensured that every classroom had a prepared, supported, and motivated teacher.

To shift the system toward learning, technically and politically, reformers can use three sets of tools:

• Information and metrics. Better information and metrics can promote learning in two ways: by catalyzing reforms and by serving as indicators of whether reforms are working to improve learning with equity. Thus they can improve both the political and technical alignment of the system. • Coalitions and incentives. Good information will have a payoffonly if there is enough support for prioritizing learning. Politics is often the problem, and politics must be part of the solution. This requires forming coalitions to advocate for broad-based learning and skills and to rebalance the political incentives. • Innovation and agility. Schools and societies have achieved high levels of equitable learning in a variety of ways. Figuring out what approaches will work in a given context requires innovation and adaptation. This means using evidence to identify where to start and then using metrics to iterate with feedback loops.

All of these tools will be most effective when supported by strong implementation capacity within government.

Better information and measurement—starting with learning metrics—are critical to creating political space for innovation and then using that space to achieve continuous improvement. As emphasized, the absence of good information on learning prevents stakeholders from judging system performance, designing the appropriate policies, and holding politicians and bureaucrats to account. Thus improving learning metrics is crucial for drawing attention to problems and building the will for action. In Tanzania in the early 2010s, poor results on school-leaving examinations—along with well-publicized results from citizen-led learning assessments and surveys showing poor service delivery in schools—motivated policy makers to launch ambitious reforms. In Germany, the shock of mediocre results on the first PISA in 2000 led to reforms that improved both learning and equity.

Efforts in this area need to go beyond just measuring learning; they should track its determinants as well. Understanding these determinants can enable reforms to grapple with the deeper causes, if there is a systemwide commitment to improving learning. Take the issue of learner preparedness. When indicators reveal that poorer children already lag far behind by the time they start primary school, this finding can build political will not only to expand preschool education in low-income areas, but also to combat stunting and educate parents about early stimulation of children. When indicators show that many teachers lack a strong command of what their students are meant to learn, this finding can spark efforts to improve the quality of teacher education.

Of course, information and metrics can also be misleading, irrelevant, or politically unsustainable, so they need to be designed and used wisely. Metrics may fail to capture important dimensions of the outcomes the education system is trying to promote. For example, the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015 embodied a crucial goal—equitable access—but it did not represent what many assumed it did: universal acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy, let alone other life skills. Another risk is of distorting good metrics by putting high stakes on them, if potential beneficiaries can game the indicators. Thus systems will need different measures for different purposes. Even if they are technically sound, metrics may prove politically unsustainable if they highlight too many problems and do not provide any reason for hope. One way to address this problem is to focus not on levels of learning, which may be very low, but on progress over time.

Mobilizing everyone who has a stake in learning has been an important strategy in efforts to improve learning. Many countries have used wide-ranging consultations that have tried to bring in all interest groups to build support for proposed changes in education policy. Malaysia used a “lab” model to bring together coalitions of stakeholders and involve them in all stages of reform, from design to implementation. Mobilizing citizens through regular information and communication campaigns can also be an important strategy. In Peru, reformers in the government used information on poor learning outcomes and performance of the education system to mobilize public support for reforms to strengthen teacher accountability. That information also catalyzed action by the business community, which funded a campaign highlighting the importance of quality education for economic growth. In parts of Peru, parents used this entry point to protest teacher strikes that had disrupted schooling. Another tool for building coalitions is to bundle reforms, so that each actor achieves one of its top priorities. For example, a commitment to modernize vocational training—a reform that could help employers immediately—could buy their support for broader education reforms.

Where feasible, a negotiated and gradual approach to reform can provide a more promising alternative to direct confrontation. When system actors agree to collaborate and build trust around shared goals, the chances of successful reform are likely to be higher. In Chile, successive negotiations between the government and the teachers’ union built broad support for a series of reforms that adjusted the working conditions of teachers to improve their overall welfare, while linking pay and career development more closely to performance. One approach used by several countries has been to compensate actors who might lose out from reforms. In other cases, dual-track reforms have been introduced to phase in changes in a way that protects incumbent actors from their effects—for example, in Peru and the District of Columbia in the United States, pay-for-performance schemes were initially voluntary.

Building strong partnerships between schools and their communities is also important for sustaining reforms. Where political and bureaucratic incentives for reform are weak, action at the local level can act as a substitute. In South Africa, the political and economic context constrains efforts to improve education performance. Yet progress was made in improving outcomes at the local level through strong partnerships between parents and schools. Even where broader incentives exist to improve learning, community engagement at the local level is important and can complement national or subnational change efforts.

To develop effective learning approaches that fit their contexts, education systems need to encourage innovation and adaptation. In many education systems, schools and other education institutions regularly adapt to changing circumstances. Through these adaptations, innovative solutions to education challenges often emerge. Exploring the well-performing parts of any education system can reveal technically and politically feasible approaches to the problems systems face in improving learning. For example, in Misiones province in Argentina high student dropout rates were widespread, but some schools seemed to buck the trend. A closer look at these “positive deviants” revealed very different relationships between teachers and parents. When other schools adopted the more constructive approach to parent-teacher relations used by the successful schools, their dropout rates fell significantly. Burundi, while recovering from a civil war, used an adaptive approach to find the right way to get textbooks to schools. It reduced delivery times from over a year to 60 days—then replicated that approach in other areas.

Incentives are important in determining whether systems innovate and adopt emerging solutions at scale. Systems that are closed, that limit the autonomy of teachers and schools, and that judge performance by the extent of compliance with rules governing resource use often provide little room for innovation. By contrast, more open systems that pay more attention to overall outcomes and reward progress in raising outcomes are more likely to see greater innovation and the diffusion of new approaches across the education system.

To make a difference at the system level, such innovations needs to be packaged with good metrics and with system-level coalitions for learning. Without both, any improvements from innovation are likely to prove short-lived or limited to local areas. But with such support, a virtuous cycle becomes possible as systems follow these steps:

• Set learning as a clearly articulated goal and measure it. • Build a coalition for learning that gives the political space for innovation and experimentation. • Innovate and test approaches that seem the most promising for the given context, drawing inspiration from the evidence base and focusing on areas that promise the biggest improvements over current practice. • Use the measure of learning, along with the other metrics of delivery, as a gauge of whether the approach is working.

• Build on what works, and scale back what doesn’t, teaching-learning relationship, or because the system to deliver short-term results that strengthen the doesn’t prioritize learning for disadvantaged children long-term resolve of the coalition for learning.

and youth. More financing for business as usual will

• Repeat.

therefore just lead to the usual outcomes. But where countries seriously tackle the barriers to learning for

The payoffto doing what needs to be done is a all, spending on education is a critical investment for system in which the elements are coherent with each development, especially for those countries where other and everything aligns with learning (figure O.15).

overall spending is currently low, as recent major

Increased financing can support this learning-studies of global education have emphasized. More for-all equilibrium, if the various key actors behave children staying in school longer and learning while in ways that show learning matters to them. This is there will undoubtedly require more public financing a big “if” because higher levels of public spending are for education. An injection of financing—either from not associated statistically with higher completion or domestic or international sources—can help couneven enrollment rates in countries with weak govertries escape the low-learning trap, if they are willing nance. Ensuring that students learn is even more to take the other necessary steps laid out here.

challenging, and so there is little correlation between spending and learning after accounting for national income. It is easy to see the reason for this because

External actors can reinforce these strategies for of the many ways in which financing can leak out— opening the political and technical space for learnwhether because money never reaches the school, ing. In the realm of information and metrics, for or because it pays for inputs that don’t affect the example, international actors can fund participation in regional learning assessments (such as PASEC in West Africa or LLECE in Latin America) or global learning assessments (such as PISA or TIMSS) to spotlight challenges and catalyze domestic efforts for reform. External actors can also develop tools for tracking the proximate determinants of learning to aid in feedback loops. Domestic financing usually makes up the bulk of education financing, so a high-leverage entry point for international actors is to fund better information that will make domestic spending more effective. In the realm of innovation and experimentation, external funders such as the World Bank can provide results-based financing that gives countries more room to innovate and iterate their way to achieving better outcomes.