How smart are teachers in developing countries?

Eric Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik, and Simon Wiederhold published some fascinating analysis in a 2014 NBER working paper (link) comparing the literacy and numeracy of teachers to the overall population (with a university degree) in a range of OECD countries. In the figures below, the grey bars show the gap between the 25th and 75th percentile of skill for all university-educated adults in each country, and the red marker in the middle shows the median skill level of teachers in that country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, teachers in Finland are the highest skilled internationally, but also within Finland they are drawn from relatively high in the distribution of adults. This fits with common narratives about teaching being a particularly well-regarded, and selective, profession in Finland.
 

As far as I'm aware, no such comparison exists for low- and lower-middle-income countries. Tessa Bold and coauthors present results on the tragically low absolute level of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa (link), and similarly Justin Sandefur presents data comparing the skill level of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa to students in OECD countries (link). But neither compare the level of skill of teachers in Africa to teachers in high-income countries, and to the skill of other adults in Africa.

So I made one*. The World Bank's STEP Skills surveys use the same literacy assessment as the OECD PIAAC survey that Hanushek et al used, so I replicated and extended their graph, adding on the countries from the STEP data in which it was possible to identify teachers and their literacy level - specifically Vietnam, Colombia, Armenia, Georgia, Ghana, Kenya, and Bolivia. 

The first point to note is how low the overall distribution in lower income countries is. The majority of adults (in urban areas) who have graduated from university fall into the Level 2 category, whereas in high income countries most fall into Level 3. The PIAAC guide (copied below) explains what these levels mean: Level 2 tasks “may require low-level inferences” whereas Level 3 tasks require “navigating complex texts”.

The second point to note from the figure is the remarkable regularity of average (median) teacher performance in each national distribution. There is some variation, but most teachers in high-income countries are roughly in the middle of the distribution of university educated adults. Teaching in lower-income countries tends to be more selective - the median teacher is much closer to the 75th percentile of adults in Colombia, Ghana, and Kenya.

These two facts, the low overall level of literacy skill amongst graduates in the lower middle income countries, and the position of teachers within the distribution, imply an upper bound on the ability of a more selective recruitment process to improve the average quality of teachers. If for example Ghana and Kenya managed to increase the selectivity of the teaching profession enough to raise average teacher skills to above the 75th percentile (something no other country has done), this level could still be well below Level 3 on the PIAAC scale.

Getting better teaching is critical for improving education in developing countries. This data highlights the scale of one aspect of the challenge. Education systems are going to have to figure out how to deliver for children with teachers who may be able to make "low-level inferences" but are unable to "navigate complex texts."

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*Thanks to Laura Moscoviz at the Education Partnerships Group for assistance with the graph!

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Why Kenya should partner with private schools to achieve Universal Secondary School

Op-ed for the Daily Nation.

Open Data for Education

There’s a global crisis in learning, and we need to learn more about how to address it. Whilst data collection is costly, developing countries have millions of dollars worth of data about learning just sitting around unused on paper and spreadsheets in government offices. It’s time for an Open Data Revolution for Education.

The 2018 World Development Report makes clear the scale of the global learning crisis. Fewer than 1 in 5 primary school students in low income countries can pass a minimum proficiency threshold. The report concludes by listing 3 ideas on what external actors can do about it;

1. Support the creation of objective, politically salient information
2. Encourage flexibility and support reform coalitions
3. Link financing more closely to results that lead to learning

The first of these, generating new information about learning, can be expensive. Travelling up and down countries to sit and test kids for a survey can cost a lot of money. The average RCT costs in the range of $0.5m. Statistician Morten Jerven added up the costs of establishing the basic census and national surveys necessary to measure the SDGs — coming to a total of $27 billion per year, far more than is currently spent on statistics.

And as expensive as they can be, surveys have limited value to policymakers as they focus on a limited sample and can only provide data about trends and averages, not individual schools. As my colleague Justin Sandefur has written; “International comparability be damned. Governments need disaggregated, high frequency data linked to sub-national units of administrative accountability.”

Even for research, much of the cutting edge education literature in advanced countries makes use of administrative not survey data. Professor Tom Kane (Harvard) has argued persuasively that education researchers in the US should abandon expensive and slow data collection for RCTs, and instead focus on using existing administrative testing and data infrastructure, linked to data on school inputs, for quasi-experimental analyses than can be done quickly and cheaply.

Can this work in developing countries?
My first PhD chapter (published in the Journal of African Economies) uses administrative test score data from Uganda, made available by the Uganda National Exams Board at no cost, saving data collection that would have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and probably been prohibitively expensive. We’ve also analysed the same data to estimate the quality of all schools across the country, so policymakers can look up the effectiveness of any school they like, not just the handful that might have been in a survey (announced last week in the Daily Monitor).

Another paper I’m working on is looking at the Public School Support Programme (PSSP) in Punjab province, Pakistan. The staged roll-out of the program provides a neat quasi-experimental design that lasted only for the 2016-17 school year (the control group have since been treated). It would be impossible to go in now and collect retrospective test score data on how students would have performed at the end of the last school year. Fortunately, Punjab has a great administrative data infrastructure (though not quite as open as the website makes out), and I’m able to look at trends in enrolment and test scores over several years, and how these trends change with treatment by the program. And all at next to no cost.

For sure there are problems associated with using administrative data rather than independently collected data. As Justin Sandefur and Amanda Glassman point out in their paper, official data doesn’t always line up with independently collected survey data, likely because officials may have a strong incentive to report that everything is going well. Further, researchers don’t have the same level of control or even understanding about what questions are asked, and how data is generated. Our colleagues at Peas have tried to useofficial test data in Uganda but found the granularity of the test is not sufficient for their needs. In India there is not one but several test boards, who end up competing with each other and driving grade inflation. But not all administrative data is that bad. To the extent that there is measurement error, this only matters for research if it is systematically associated with specific students or schools. If the low quality and poor psychometric properties of an official test are just noisy estimates of true learning, this isn’t such a huge problem.

Why isn’t there more research done using official test score data? Data quality is one issue, but another big part is the limited accessibility of data. Education writer Matt Barnum wrote recently about “data wars” between researchers fighting to get access to public data in Louisiana and Arizona. When data is made easily available it gets used; a google scholar search for the UK “National Pupil Database” finds 2,040 studies.

How do we get more Open Data for Education?
Open data is not a new concept. There is an Open Data Charter defining what open means (Open by default, timely and comprehensive, accessible and usable, comparable and interoperable). The Web Foundation ranks countries on how open their data is across a range of domains in their Open Data Barometer, and there is also an Open Data Index and an Open Data Inventory.

Developing countries are increasingly signing up to transparency initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership, attending the Africa Open Data conference, or signing up to the African data consensus.

But whilst the high-level political backing is often there, the technical requirements for putting together a National Pupil Database are not trivial, and there are costs associated with cleaning and labelling data, hosting data, and regulating access to ensure privacy is preserved.

There is a gap here for a set of standards to be established in how governments should organise their existing test score data, and a gap for financing to help establish systems. A good example of what could be useful for education is the Agriculture Open Data Package: a collaboratively developed “roadmap for governments to publish data as open data to empowering farmers, optimising agricultural practice, stimulating rural finance, facilitating the agri value chain, enforcing policies, and promoting government transparency and efficiency.” The roadmap outlines what data governments should make available, how to think about organising the infrastructure of data collection and publication, and further practical considerations for implementing open data.

Information wants to be free. It’s time to make it happen.

Why don’t parents value school effectiveness? (because they think LeBron’s coach is a genius)

A new NBER study exploits the NYC centralised school admissions database to understand how parents choose which schools to apply for, and finds (shock!) parents choose schools based on easily observable things (test scores) rather than very difficult to observe things (actual school quality as estimated (noisily!) by value-added).

Value-added models are great — they’re a much fairer way of judging schools than just looking at test scores. Whilst test scores conflate what the student’s home background does with what the school does, value-added models (attempt to) control for a student’s starting level (and therefore all the home inputs up that point), and just looking at the progress that students make whilst at a school.

David Leonhardt put in well;

“For the most part, though, identifying a good school is hard for parents. Conventional wisdom usually defines a good school as one attended by high-achieving students, which is easy to measure. But that’s akin to concluding that all of LeBron James’s coaches have been geniuses.”

Whilst value-added models are fairer on average, they’re typically pretty noisy for any individual school, with large and overlapping confidence intervals. Here’s the distribution of school value-added estimates for Uganda (below). There are some schools at the top and bottom that are clearly a lot better or worse than average (0), but there are also a lot of schools around the middle that are pretty hard to distinguish from each other, and that is using an econometric model to analyse hundreds of thousands of data points. A researcher or policymaker who can observe the test score of every student in the country can’t distinguish between the actual quality of many pairs of schools, and we expect parents to be able to do so on the basis of just a handful of datapoints and some kind of econometric model in their head??




Making school quality visible

If parents don’t value school effectiveness when it is invisible, what happens if we make it visible by publishing data on value-added? There are now several studies looking at the effect of providing information to parents on test score levels, finding that parents do indeed change their behaviour, but there are far fewer studies directly comparing the provision of value-added information with test score levels.

One study from LA did do this, looking at the effect of releasing value-added data compared to just test score levels on local house prices, finding no additional effect of providing the value-added data. But this might just be because not enough of the right people accessed the online database (indeed, another study from North Carolina found that providing parents with a 1-page sheet with information that had already been online for ages already still caused a change in school choice).

It is still possible that publishing and properly targeting information on school effectiveness might change parent behaviour.

Ultimately though, we’re going to keep working on generating value-added data with our partners because even if parents don’t end up valuing the value-added data, there are two other important actors who perhaps might — the government when it is considering how to manage school performance, and the school themselves.

The key to better education systems is accountability. So how on earth do we do that?

And what do we even actually mean when we talk about accountability?

Perhaps the key theme emerging from research on reforming education systems is accountability. But accountability means different things to different people. To start with, many think first of bottom-up (‘citizen’ or ‘social’) accountability. But increasingly in development economics, enthusiasm is waning for bottom-up social accountability as studies show limited impacts on outcomes. The implicit conclusion then is to revisit top-down (state) accountability. As Rachel Glennerster (Executive Director of J-PAL) wrote recently: 

"For years the Bank and other international agencies have sought to give the poor a voice in health, education, and infrastructure decisions through channels unrelated to politics. They have set up school committees, clinic committees, water and sanitation committees on which sit members of the local community. These members are then asked to “oversee” the work of teachers, health workers, and others. But a body of research suggests that this approach has produced disappointing results."

One striking example of this kind of research is Ben Olken’s work on infrastructure in Indonesia, which directly compared the effect of a top-down audit (which was effective) with bottom-up community monitoring (ineffective).

So what do we mean by top-down accountability for schools?

Within top-down accountability there are a range of methods by which schools and teachers could be held accountable for their performance. Three broad types stand out:

• Student test scores (whether simple averages or more sophisticated value-added models)
• Professional judgement (e.g. based on lesson observations)
• Student feedback

The Gates Foundation published a major report in 2013 on how to “Measure Effective Teaching”, concluding that each of these three types of measurement has strengths and weaknesses, and that the best teacher evaluation system should therefore combine all three: test scores, lesson observations, and student feedback.

By contrast, when it comes to holding head teachers accountable for school performance, the focus in both US policy reform and research is almost entirely on test scores. There are good reasons for this - education in the US has developed as a fundamentally local activity built on bottom up accountability, often with small and relatively autonomous school districts, with little tradition of supervision by higher levels of government. Nevertheless, as Helen Ladd, a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University and an expert in school accountability, wrote on the Brookings blog last year:

"The current test based approach to accountability is far too narrow … has led to many unintended and negative consequences. It has narrowed the curriculum, induced schools and teachers to focus on what is being tested, led to teaching to the test, induced schools to manipulate the testing pool, and in some well-publicized cases induced some school teachers and administrators to cheat. 

Now is the time to experiment with inspections for school accountability … 

Such systems have been used extensively in other countries … provide useful information to schools … disseminate information on best practices … draw attention to school activities that have the potential to generate a broader range of educational outcomes than just performance on test scores … [and] treats schools fairly by holding them accountable only for the practices under their control … 

The few studies that have focused on the single narrow measure of student test scores have found small positive effects."

A report by the US think tank “Education Sector” also highlights the value of feedback provided through inspection systems to schools.

"Like many of its American counterparts, Peterhouse Primary School in Norfolk County, England, received some bad news early in 2010. Peterhouse had failed to pass muster under its government’s school accountability scheme, and it would need to take special measures to improve. But that is where the similarity ended. As Peterhouse’s leaders worked to develop an action plan for improving, they benefited from a resource few, if any, American schools enjoy. Bundled right along with the school’s accountability rating came a 14-page narrative report on the school’s specific strengths and weaknesses in key areas, such as leadership and classroom teaching, along with a list of top-priority recommendations for tackling problems. With the report in hand, Peterhouse improved rapidly, taking only 14 months to boost its rating substantially."

In the UK, ‘Ofsted’ reports are based on a composite of several different dimensions, including test scores, but also as importantly, independent assessments of school leadership, teaching practices and support for vulnerable students.

There is a huge lack of evidence on school accountability

This blind spot on school inspections isn’t just a problem for education in the US, though. The US is also home to most of the leading researchers on education in developing countries, and that research agenda is skewed by the US policy and research context. The leading education economists don’t study inspections because there aren’t any in the places they live.

The best literature reviews in economics can often be found in the “Handbook of Economics” series and the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP). The Handbook article on "School Accountability" from 2011 exclusively discusses the kind of test-based accountability that is common in the US, with no mention of the kind of inspections common in Europe and other countries at all. A recent JEP symposium on Schools and Accountability includes a great article by Isaac Mbiti, a Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) researcher, on ’The Need for Accountability in Education in Developing Countries” which includes; however, only one paragraph on school inspections. Another great resource on this topic is the 2011 World Bank book, "Making Schools Work: New Evidence on Accountability Reforms”. This 'must-read' 250-page book has only two paragraphs on school inspections.

This is in part a disciplinary point - it is mostly a blind-spot of economists. School inspections have been studied in more detail by education researchers. But economists have genuinely raised the bar in terms of using rigorous quantitative methods to study education. In total, I count 7 causal studies of the effects of inspections on learning outcomes - 3 by economists and 4 by education researchers.

Putting aside learning outcomes for a moment, one study from leading RISE researchers, Karthik Muralidharan and Jishnu Das (with Alaka Holla and Aakash Mohpal), in rural India finds that “increases in the frequency of inspections are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence”, which could be expected to lead to more learning as a result. However, no such correlation was found for other countries in a companion study (Bangladesh, Ecuador, Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda).

There is also fascinating qualitative work by fellow RISE researcher, Yamini Aiyar (Director of the ‘Accountability Initiative’ and collaborator of RISE researchers Rukmini Banerji, Karthik Muralidharan, and Lant Pritchett) and co-authors, that looks into how local level education administrators view their role in the Indian state of Bihar. The most frequently used term by local officials to describe their role was a “Post Officer” - someone who simply passes messages up and down the bureaucratic chain - “a powerless cog in a large machine with little authority to take decisions." A survey of their time use found that on average a school visit lasts around one hour, with 15 minutes of that time spent in a classroom, with the rest spent “checking attendance registers, examining the mid-day meal scheme and engaging in casual conversations with headmasters and teacher colleagues … the process of school visits was reduced to a mechanical exercise of ticking boxes and collecting relevant data. Academic 'mentoring' of teachers was not part of the agenda.”

At the Education Partnerships Group (EPG) and RISE we’re hoping to help fill this policy and research gap, through nascent school evaluation reforms supported by EPG in Madhya Pradesh, India, that will be studied by the RISE India research team, and an ongoing reform project working with the government of the Western Cape in South Africa. Everything we know about education systems in developing countries suggests that they are in crisis, and that a key part of the solution is around accountability. Yet we know little about how school inspections - the main component of school accountability in most developed countries - might be more effective in poor countries. It’s time we changed that.

This post appeared first on the RISE website. 

Introducing... the Global Schools Forum

There’s nothing like sitting in a room full of people who build and run schools in the developing world to make you feel pretty inadequate. At least I did, last week at the Global Schools Forum. It can feel like a pretty long and abstract chain from the kind of policy research and evaluation that I do through to better policies and better outcomes, and I envy being able to see directly a tangible difference for real people.

You may have heard of the emergence of some international low-cost private school chains such as Bridge International Academies, but the movement is growing quickly, and there are many new organisations trying to do similar things that you probably haven’t heard of - some profit-making, some non-profit, some that charge fees, some that don’t, international, local, big, small, and everything in between. The biggest school operator you don’t hear that much about is the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC, who run thousands and thousands of fee-free schools.

Last week a whole range of school operators and the donors who support them gathered at the 2nd Annual Meeting of the “Global Schools Forum” (GSF); a new membership organisation of 26 school networks (of which 14 for profit and 12 non-profit) operating in 25 countries, and 17 donors and financing organisations, with networks ranging from 1 to 48,000 schools. Running one school is hard enough; trying to disrupt a dysfunctional system by growing a chain of schools is harder. One of the goals of the GSF is to help create a community of practice for school operators, and a “How-to Guide” for scale, sharing information about the best IT and finance systems, the best assessments for tracking performance, or the best training consultants. It’s a place to connect operators with new people and new ideas.

This year we heard more about public-private partnerships than last year, in part because of the presence of several of the operators in the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) pilot. Government schools (with government teachers) will be managed by a range of local and international providers, including the Liberian Stella Maris Polytechnic and LIYONET, international NGOs (Street Child, BRAC, More Than Me) and school chains (Bridge International Academies, Rising Academies, Omega Schools). Other operators at the forum came from India (Gyanshala, Seed Schools, Sodha Schools), South Africa (SPARK, Streetlight Schools, African School for Excellence, Nova Pioneer), and East Africa (Peas, Silverleaf Academies, Kidogo, Scholé), to name just a few.

So what?

The number of non-state school operators planning for scale is rapidly increasing, but even at dramatic rates of growth, it would take a long time to reach any kind of significant proportion of schools. There are two possible routes to scale - either growing chains and networks to scale themselves, and/or acting as demonstration projects for government, to prove what is possible. This second route was highlighted by a number of speakers. Anecdotally at least, many exciting school reforms seem to come from the personal experience of government Ministers actually seeing something better in practice with their own eyes. More rigorously, Roland Fryer has demonstrated in the US with a randomized experiment that it is possible to “inject charter school best practices into public schools” and achieve positive gains in learning.

To find out more about the Global Schools Forum keep an eye on the website (coming soon) globalschoolsforum.org and follow @GSF_talks on twitter.

The Global Schools Forum is supported by The Education Partnerships Group (EPG) @EPG_Edu, UBS Optimus Foundation @UBSOptimus, Pearson Affordable Learning Fund @AffordableLearn, and Omidyar Network @OmidyarNetwork.

How to spend aid in fragile countries

The classic dilemma in figuring out how to spend aid money is the trade-off between:

     a) achieving scale and sustainability by supporting national government systems (but losing control), and

     b) keeping more direct control by working through NGOs, but sacrificing scale and sustainability.

This trade-off is less acute when the recipient government is an effective service provider and respects human rights. Often however the countries that most need external assistance do so in large part precisely because they aren’t blessed with well qualified governments.

One possible solution to this dilemma is providing mass cash transfers - a route to supporting poor individuals whilst side-stepping their government. Another (neglected?) route is supporting local service providers directly. An example of this is the Girl’s Education South Sudan provision of ‘capitation' grants to schools (full disclosure, I was hired to do some analysis). This pipe provides both government and donor (currently DFID) finance direct to the school bank account (held by the school’s governing/managing committee).

Here is a ring-fenced pipe, separate from the main government treasury, at scale, that can send money direct to every school (whether public or private) in a country, with receipts, full government engagement in delivery, in-person monthly reporting, and disaggregated real-time data. All of which potentially an exciting opportunity for donors if they want to fund education in emergencies.

What does the money do? Overall measured enrolment has been trending upwards over the last few years. My analysis suggests that at least some of this aggregate enrolment growth can be attributed to the grants. First, looking at the individual school level, schools tend to report higher levels of enrolment and attendance the year after receiving a grant, after allowing for school fixed effects by conditioning on past attendance or attendance. Second, I exploit a natural experiment whereby the government-financed component of the grants (not the donor-financed component) was arbitrarily held up by state governments for a set of (~control) schools that had gone through all the same hoops as some other (~treatment) schools that did receive the grants. The estimated effect of receiving grants on enrolment and attendance levels remains similar. Similar gains are found for schools that qualified to receive cash transfers for girls. The results are robust to measuring enrolment using the national remote SMS reporting system (sssams.org), or the smaller in-person sample survey.

What about learning outcomes? The focus of the cutting edge in global education research is rightly on what kids actually learn at school rather than just getting bums on seats. But there are still a few countries, including South Sudan, where access and enrolment in school is still a major issue. You should probably take most statistics on South Sudan with a grain of salt, but one estimate of the Net primary enrolment rate is just 43%, which is really pretty low.

However, one of things that does seem to really matter for student learning outcomes is how teachers are motivated and held accountable. Private schools tend to get more effort out of their teachers, largely because they are paid directly by the school and not by a remote government office. For example in Uganda, teachers in private schools spend more time in the classroom teaching than their counterparts in public schools. But this isn’t an inherent feature of the ownership and management of public versus private schools. In principle all public teachers could be hired and paid directly by schools, financed by a single central government school grant, rather than all teachers being put directly onto a single national payroll. This might inadvertently be happening in South Sudan anyway, as recent rapid inflation is reducing the value of local currency denominated teacher salaries, whilst the donor (hard currency) -financed school grants maintain more of their absolute value (and increase in value relative to teacher central payroll salaries). Shifting more funding directly to schools and allowing the list of eligible schools to include non-state providers could open the door to quality-focused international NGO chains such as Peas.

Table: Uganda Primary School Service Delivery Indicators

It’s very easy to just be incredibly depressed by news coming out of South Sudan, including warnings of a potential new genocide, but as ever, sanity lies in the stoic serenity prayer - we should focus on what we can change (and on the evidence needed to enable the distinction be made between what we can and can’t change).

The best teachers usually don’t know who they are

"Nobody tells me that I'm a strong teacher”.

That’s what the best teacher in Los Angeles, Zinaida Tan, said in 2010 after the LA Times published the first ranking of teachers based on student progress. As the Guardian reports:

"Tan taught at Morningside Elementary, a decent if unremarkable school with an intake of mainly poor students, many of whom struggled with English. Year after year, students were entering Tan’s class with below-average ability in maths and English, and leaving it with above-average scores. You might imagine that before the Los Angeles Times published its rankings, Tan would have already been celebrated for her ability by her peers - that her brilliance would be well-known to fellow teachers eager to learn her secrets. You would be wrong on all counts.

When the Los Angeles Times sent a correspondent to interview Tan, they found her quietly carrying out her work, unheralded except by those who had taken her class and knew what a difference it had made to their lives. “Nobody tells me that I’m a strong teacher,” Tan told the reporter. She guessed that her colleagues thought her “strict, even mean”. On a recent evaluation, her headmaster noted she had been late to pick up her students from recess three times. It was as if Lionel Messi’s teammates considered him a useful midfielder who needed to work on his tackling."

We just found the exact same thing in Uganda. Ark Education Partnerships Group came up with the idea of doing a ranking of Secondary Schools based on value-added (adjusting for student’s starting point) rather than the current system of just looking at test scores at the end of school, which tends to reward schools that are able to select the best students, rather than necessarily teach them the most.

The Daily Monitor reports:

"Some of the 200 schools ranked best in the country yesterday, reacted to the news with shock and awe"

One of these surprise top-performing headteachers seems to have almost accidentally stumbled across a fundamental principle of modern education thinking, that all students can make progress if you teach to their level instead of focusing on just the brightest kids in the class.

"Mr Rajab Nsubuga, the head teacher of Hope Boarding Secondary School Lutembe, off Entebbe Road, the best Secondary School in the country, also said the ranking shocked him, adding that the school works on a philosophy that every student is a learner only that they accommodate slow, average and fast learners at their school."

Phil Elks and I wrote up a paper with the methodology here. One thing in particular we note is that from a quick count we found at least 24 other countries that have official national primary and secondary exams that could be used for similar analysis. And for all the technical flaws of value-added models, they’re a pretty clear improvement on what currently happens, which is rankings of schools based on raw test scores.

Reaching universal secondary school won’t solve the learning crisis

Secondary school graduates in Jakarta, urban Ghana, and urban Kenya, have worse literacy skills than primary school graduates in rich countries. More here on the RISE blog.

A rare non-ideological argument against for-profit schools

To [Samuel] Abrams, the problem with for-profit operation of schools is not that businessmen are making money off the provision of a public service such as education. Textbook publishers, software developers, and bus operators all make money from schools and should, he said, but they are all providing a discrete good or service that can be easily evaluated. “School management, on the other hand, is a complex service that does not afford the transparency necessary for proper contract enforcement,” he said. “Without such transparency, there’s client distrust: parents, taxpayers, and legislators can never be sure the provider is doing what was promised; and the child as the immediate consumer cannot be in a position to judge the quality of service. Regular testing has been promoted as a check on quality. But teachers can teach to the test. And worse, as we know from cheating scandals in Atlanta and many other cities, teachers can change wrong answers to right answers on bubble sheets once students are done.”

From the International Education News blog at Teacher’s College, Columbia.

The trouble with the argument is that it rests on the empirical question of whether student test-based accountability systems for schools can work, and though the question is not conclusively settled, my reading is that the evidence seems to be leaning in the direction of roughly “yes".

The right to education is a right to learning

Kishore Singh, the "UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education” is totally freaking out that apparently the government of Liberia is planning to outsource all of its primary schooling to Bridge International Academies.

“education is an essential public service and instead of supporting business in education, governments should increase the money they spend on public educational services to make them better.”

Kishore is of course commiting Mike Munger’s unicorn fallacy. The public primary school system in Liberia was frankly pretty rubbish, even before the Ebola crisis hit, and there is no evidence that just spending more money is likely to improve things.

RTI did a baseline for their early grade reading intervention project in 2008. They found that children in Grade 3 in Liberia could read 28 words per minute. To put this in perspective, in the US children are considered to be at risk if they can read fewer than 70 words per minute at the end of Grade 2. Clearly there is nothing inherently wrong with Liberian children, the schools just aren’t working (I should also be clear that I’m not beating on Liberian teachers either, it is the system that is not functioning - don’t hate the player, hate the game). The children attending free public primary schools in Liberia might be exercising a right to schooling, but they certainly aren’t exercising a right to learning or any meaningful definition of the word education.

It should be in this context that we note that AllAfrica reports that "The deal will see the Government of Liberia paying over $65 million over a five-year period.” That is $13 million per year then, to cover a full population aged 5-14 of 920,000, or roughly $14 per student per year. That’s an absolute bargain. That’s an absolute bargain, even if Bridge are only actually covering a small fraction of that full population (Normally Liberia spends around 2.5% of GDP on education, which is around $47.5 million).

Clearly the jury is still officially out on whether independent estimates will show better learning outcomes from Bridge schools, but there is a hell of a lot of research which backs up elements of their theory of change, from how teacher qualifications and experience matter so much less than the type of contract a teacher is on, to the importance of feedback for teachers on student learning.

Meanwhile over at Kishore Singh’s website, he highlights 8 key priorities, none of which include the global learning crisis, in which there are 250 million children without basic skills, the majority of whom have already sat through 4 years of school. I’m frankly baffled by the inordinate amount of hostility shown by campaigners to social entrepreneurs who are still educating absolutely tiny proportions of the global poor, and how little attention is paid to the totally failing free public systems of schooling that millions of children are enduring.

Calling Education Researchers…

I just got back from the fourth of seven events being held around the world drumming up interest in bidding for the RISE “Research on Systems of Education” project. There is £21 million of DFID money to be split between 5 country research teams (with a preference for bids from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, or other DFID focus countries) to study reforms that are happening to education systems that might credibly have a big impact of student learning. EOIs due 23rd August. 

strong turnout for Abuja @riseprogramme meeting and #educationsystems reform discussion! @LeeCrawfurd pic.twitter.com/GV3gsNQQvX

— Mari Oye (@marimoye) July 13, 2025

There is plenty more information on the CGD website and the new RISE website,  but to make things really easy, here are a few key links about the project and how to bid (very helpfully put together by Mari).

• RISE Research Director Lant Pritchett and Justin Sandefur presenting the research agenda (Video)
• Slides (PDF)
• Expression of Interest scoring criteria  (PDF)
• Full RISE Terms of Reference (needed for proposal due November) (PDF) 
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Online form for submitting any additional queries
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The learning crisis in Sierra Leone

"Mohammed’s father is an illiterate petty trader. Although he never got any school himself, he has always been determined that Mohammed [13] should get a good education. When Mohammed joined us, we asked him, as we ask all our students, to complete a word reading assessment. The assessment, which we administer one-to-one in the child’s home, involves reading out a list of 90 words that increase in complexity and difficulty, and from the number and difficulty of the words read correctly an inference can be drawn about the student’s reading age based on UK norms. 

Mohammed got stuck straight away. He barely made it past the first line or two - words like ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘cup’, ‘said’. Mohammed’s father couldn’t read but he could see that his son was struggling and did his best to encourage him. “Try your best Mohammed”, he said. And Mohammed did. He kept trying. But no matter how long he took he couldn’t recognise the words, and eventually we had to call time on the test. Mohammed’s father was heartbroken. “I’ve paid all this money for school,” he said, “but his head is empty.” 

Unfortunately, Mohammed’s story is far from unique."

From an essay by Paul Skidmore, CEO of the Rising Academy Network

What can be done about India’s failing primary schools?

This is a guest post by Abhijeet Singh, Research Officer at the University of Oxford

It’s that time of the year again. As India’s Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) was released last week (15th Jan), we are reminded of how abysmal learning levels in the country are. Most children are in school, but very few are learning. Less than half the children in Grade 5 can read a Grade 3 text, and only about a quarter can divide a three-digit number by a one-digit number. And the learning levels seem to be going down every year.

Remedies that won’t work

The real question is what can be done to improve learning outcomes. And the first lesson is that most of what is being proposed is not promising:

Inputs alone won’t improve learning: School reform in India seems to consist mostly of getting kids in school and then improving the inputs they get. But this ‘business-as-usual’ approach doesn’t work. The decline in achievement levels in government schools has coincided with major improvements in inputs. Across developing countries, the link between increasing school resources and student achievement is surprisingly weak: building libraries, providing more money to schools, teaching aids like flipcharts or providing a laptop to every child all don’t seem to improve learning by much, if at all. Upgrading school inputs won’t solve this mess.

Private schooling won’t do too much either: ASER documents, as do a number of studies, that students in private schools do better on average than students in government schools. But these students come from better-off households, with more educated parents - so it is hard to tell whether the schools caused this difference in test scores. 

Two recent studies - one study tracking the same children for 7 years that I recently authored, and another based on a randomized evaluation of school vouchers, both find that private school students do better in a number of dimensions, (English, Science and Hindi) even after background factors are accounted for. But even here the ‘private school effect’ is only a small part of the gap between students’ actual achievement and any objective standards of quality we expect a functioning school system to deliver. And in some key areas, such as Maths, we don’t see any private school effect at all. 

The key constraint is service delivery (but reform is hard!): A quarter of government school teachers seem to not come to school on a given day. And when in school nearly half of the teachers are not teaching. Researchers have looked for solutions: for example, giving teachers performance bonuses, monitoring attendance with cameras, and even giving them detailed information about their students’ learning needs. But even when these interventions seem to have an impact, it is hard to see how these can be scaled up. 

So what might work?

Better pre-school preparation: One new pattern highlighted in ASER this year is that children in government schools seem to start earlier than children in private schools and are less ‘school ready’. A recent paper of mine, published this month in the Oxford Review of Education, finds the same pattern but goes further: gaps between children in the private and government sectors arise before school entry and aren’t just a reflection of household incomes and parental education: at least part of the failure probably comes from the failure of government pre-schools. Investing in early childhood education could be the best investment to make, including in developing countries, but most of India’s anganwadis (pre-school centres) aren’t geared towards education at all.

Supplementary teaching: Karthik Muralidharan, one of the most prominent researchers into primary schooling in India, had a different proposal for India’s Five-Year plan. He suggested supplementing class teachers with more teaching assistants who can provide individual learning support (which has been shown to improve test scores in India). And then to facilitate a system that allows the best of these teaching assistants to become regular teachers and receive preference in hiring. This will not be a cure-all, but it could improve matters significantly. And it could be sustainable not just economically but also politically.

Rethink what is taught and how: A more far-reaching reform, proposed both by the ASER team and by Lant Pritchett, is to rethink what we expect students to learn in primary school. The system focuses on a grade-specific curriculum that requires teachers to complete a list of topics per year, regardless of what students need. The curriculum is targeted at the top 10% of children, the other 90% gain nothing because they are already too far behind. And in a setting where children from many grades sit in the same class, a grade-specific syllabus might not be something to aspire to anyway. Much better to focus on the skills we expect children to acquire, rather than the textbook chapters a teacher can tick off whether or not the children have really understood.

Reforming a situation so dire will not be easy. But the first step, in all of this, is to acknowledge the problem. Perhaps the saddest thing of all about the latest ASER report is the government’s refusal to accept that a problem exists and that it is getting worse. This is not the first time such denials have occurred. India cannot progress without assessing whether children are learning at school and without evaluating what works in the school system and what doesn’t. As reactions to the ASER report demonstrate, India’s researchers and civil society have made that leap. It is time the government does so too.

Problems with private schools

There were a few good comments on my Guardian piece the other week that are worth highlighting.

One of the most most important points is that when private schools get the same results as public schools for a fraction of the cost, they are still getting woefully bad, unacceptably poor learning outcomes.

Suvojit and Heather raise the issue that results are only going to be comparable when teacher effort can substitute for training - this is possible at lower grades but likely to get more difficult at higher grades with older children and more difficult material.

But neither of these for me damage the case for directly supporting private primary schools if they are still doing the same job substantially cheaper.

A criticism that might do this is one that Anurag Behar (CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, a leading organisation on education research) makes in a Mint column, which strikes at the heart of the private school business model. His argument is that private school teachers only accept such low wages because they are "queueing" for a government teacher job.

It’s clear that the salaries of teachers in most such private schools are very low, bordering on the exploitative. The reasons why they get teachers at these salaries are fairly simple. Most of those who join private schools as teachers are those who are waiting and trying to join government schools. Since recruitment of government teachers has its own pace and scale (though it has become “cleaner” in many states), many keep waiting and trying for years, and it’s this lot that largely feeds the private schools. Eventually of those who don’t make it to the government system, many leave teaching to do other things, which is not surprising, given their salaries.

One reason to doubt this story is that if those private school teachers are unqualified then they aren't eligible for a government teacher job. But I'm open to persuasion if there is any data here?

Some of my best friends are knee-jerk leftists

I wrote a thing for the Guardian blog defending aid in support of private schools in developing countries. Which is very exciting because I've been reading the Guardian every day since I was 16. Some of the comments are a bit colourful, so for the record I feel I should burnish my lefty credentials (even though this feels really lame as it's exactly the kind of thing that annoys me when the likes of Goodhart and Collier do it before they go on to support mainstream Conservative party opinion).  

But for what it's worth, I started my lefty career when I was 6, when my "Dennis the Menace fan club says no Gulf war" poster made it to the local news. I went campaigning door-to-door for the Labour party when I was 8. I wrote to the Green party asking for a copy of their manifesto when I was 10. When I was 15 I vandalised the Conservative party billboard in my neighbourhood, and volunteered for a local Labour MP when I was 17.

I'm proud of having attended my local comprehensive school in Leeds. I'm proud that my fiercely liberal granddad sent my mum to the local comprehensive school on principle, instead of the more conveniently located selective school. I'm proud of my mum who was a school teacher for 20 years, and my aunt and uncle and grandparents, who all work or worked for the NHS (which yes, I'm also proud of).

I worry a lot about private schools in the UK, and the consequences for social mobility and segregation. 

So I'm not a natural supporter of private schools. But I care about evidence - and my reading of it is that there is a great potential to do good by experimenting with private sector service provision in education in developing countries. (Many other intelligent people, including several colleagues - none of whom are knee-jerk leftists - disagree with me, but thankfully none of them have yet accused me of "plain bullshit", "neo-con mantra", being a Mugabe-apologist, or a "twat.")

Do iPhones increase gender inequality?

DFID have just published a new "topic guide" (quick evidence review?) on low cost private schools by Claire Mcloughlin of the University of Birmingham.

This isn't a criticism necessarily of Claire, but I am struck by how strange it is that the focus of the debate leads with how private schools affect equity. We are talking about countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan with net primary enrolment rates of less than 75%. I struggle to see how it could be a bad thing in such a context if some parents choose to spend their own money on private schools for their kids, even if no poor parents could afford it and all girls were totally excluded. Doesn't that just mean fewer kids for the state sector to fund? Of course in reality the data suggests that private schools in many countries have roughly similar gender access as public schools, and many poor people (though perhaps not the very poorest) also access private schools. 

Of course when we are talking about aid or government-funded places at private schools then equity should be a key concern, but for privately funded places, who cares? Isn't this totally missing the point? Do we worry about the equity implications of the new iPhone 5s for access to smartphones in the UK (actually I shouldn't be so hasty, soon being smart-phone-less probably will be the official definition of relative poverty). And when did I become so conservative?