Education: Quality and Equity: MDG progress
Sixth East Asia and the Pacific Victor Ordonez
Ministerial Consultation on Children East-West Center
Bali, Indonesia May 6, 2003
On this occasion of assessing progress towards the education goals of the UN Millennium Summit and the World Fit for Children, it would be well to begin with a brief review of the progress and problems of the Education for All initiative in the last decade.
A statistical overview shows that for this region, much indeed has been done, but much remains to do. At the Dakar World Education Forum, the East Asia Pacific region emerged as having registered the most dramatic progress over several decades. Whereas in 1970, this region had about 300 million illiterates, about the same number as sub-Saharan Africa and a third of the number in Latin America, today that number has reduced to about 100 million. By contrast the numbers in Africa have risen to 400 million and those in Latin America have remained at about 100 million. This is because of tremendous strides achieved in increasing the number of primary school places, especially in the two large countries of this region, China and Indonesia.
But the dramatic gains mask persistent obstacles that remain incompletely addressed. Primary attendance rates in several countries in this region hover at about 80%. More alarming, in many countries, out of every 10 children who go to primary school, only 7 or less complete the first five grades of schooling, often returning to illiteracy in later years. A major finding resulting from the data analysis leading to the Dakar conference pointed to something else hitherto yet unmasked: the disparity of indicators (gender equity, enrollment, achievement), not between countries, but within countries. Even those countries with impressive progress and statistics have within them large areas or sectors severely underserved by education.
Reflecting on the experience of the EFA decade, one can notice that the initial emphasis was one of advocacy. The feeling in the beginning was that the fundamental importance of basic education and its place in national and budgetary priority needed to be emphasized. As a result of the 1990 Jomtien EFA Conference, there was heightened public awareness: media coverage of this issue was found to have increase seven-fold, according to a 47-country study. Development banks shifted resources significantly from supporting higher education to supporting basic education, and the decline of national budgetary support for primary schooling in many countries was halted.
When the world community met in Amman, Jordan, in 1996 to assess mid-decade EFA progress, many countries and agencies proudly reported an increase in resources, activities and projects. But while overall progress was significant, there were some countries that remained mired in a host of obstacles. Subsequent studies also showed that progress was not significant in the rural or neglected areas of most countries. And in further studies in the preparation of the 2000 Dakar World Education Forum, it became apparent that the increased level of activity and programs did not necessarily lead to the expected improvements in gender equity, enrollment participation, and achievement levels. In other words, results did not match efforts. The regional preparatory meeting for the World Education Forum held in Asia, for example, concluded that it was time to reflect on and analyze the activities of the decade, to evaluate which ones were more effective in achieving desired EFA goals, and which ones were not. As a result, the worldwide call for renewed advocacy that came forth from Dakar was accompanied by a caution to establish goals more specifically, and to carefully analyze which programs were most effective in achieving these goals. The World Fit for Children and Millennium goals, and this very conference today, are specific steps in that direction.
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To assist in the particular task of accelerating progress towards these goals, therefore, the following six specific guiding policy considerations would be useful:
1. In prioritizing budgets and programs, there is no necessary conflict between quality considerations and access considerations. A few countries, in their drive to achieve universal primary education, have given priority to building more schools and hiring more teachers, to the neglect of quality. Results of these efforts have been disappointing; even when enrolments increased, retention remained static or even dropped, resulting in wastage of resources for short-time students who return to illiteracy. Conversely, improving teacher preparation, pre-school programs, and so forth have proven much less costly and more productive in terms of increasing the numbers of those who finish school successfully (much more important than the numbers of those who merely start school).
2. In order to reach those still unreached or underserved, there is a need for different paradigms and greater effort and resources. Often the reason that specific groups such as ethnic minorities, those with special needs, street children, remote populations, migrant groups, etc. remain unserved is because they are expected to adjust to the school system, instead of the school system being adjusted to them, their lifestyles and rhythms. Not only is greater flexibility of the existing school system required, sometimes an entirely new education paradigm suited to a specific group is required. And in countries where there is near universal primary education, it must be remembered that reaching the final few is an obligation, even if it requires greater per capita effort, just as caring for the disabled child in a large family is an obligation requiring greater effort, just as helping countries far from their EFA goals is an global obligation requiring greater effort.
3. There is a need to improve significantly the extent to which ministries gather, analyze, and use for policy decisions available information, not just on statistical data, but on new paradigms or experimental innovations. In the assessment process preparing for the Dakar forum, many Asia-Pacific countries have already significantly upgraded their data gathering and analyzing capabilities, most interestingly at the sub-national levels. It is instructive to see how many of the Ministers of these countries have actually used this recently disaggregated data to guide budgetary allocation and other policy decisions relative to specific regions within their own countries, and subsequently to effective decentralization. On another dimension of data gathering, and this is related to the previous policy consideration, the development of more flexible or alternative paradigms for primary education of greater equity is often hampered by the rigidity of a bureaucracy. Distance education modes, flexible academic calendars, double shifts are some examples. What is needed is an active encouragement and interest at the ministerial level in new approaches, pedagogies, structures and even content that meets the varied learning needs of vastly different sectors of a society, from those living in the post-industrial age to those living in way unchanged for centuries. Unfortunately most ministries have far more structures to foster conformity than to foster creative flexibility.
4. The enrolment pressures and fast changing demands of secondary education must be addressed to avert a major crisis. Enrollment trends in secondary education in most countries are clear: Demand (and ironically the success in this region of EFA) is producing growth in student numbers that will far exceed the growth in the national budgetary capacity to meet this demand. Unless there is a quantum leap in budgetary allocations, or unless the private or corporate sector shares this load, or unless a new paradigm to deliver secondary education with equivalent quality at lower cost is found, this could well be the next educational crisis. And the other half of the problem is just as severe: The pedagogy and academic content of traditional secondary schooling has been far outpaced by today’s fast changing world and made largely inappropriate to meet demands of a workplace requiring different sets of skills, of national security and harmony requiring new inter-personal and inter-cultural skills, and of the youth themselves demanding a pedagogy that suits their new way of thinking and learning, so vastly influenced by media and the post-industrial technical age. Student violence, disillusionment, and rebellion against schooling are merely symptoms of this deeper problem.
5. There is a need to fundamentally re-articulate, and measure, educational quality and relevance. Unfortunately, enrollment increases is sometimes used to justify improved education equity, as if attendance is a good proxy for schooling. Similarly, achievement tests are used to measure quality, as if good scores are a good proxy for meeting genuine learning needs. It is true that there is a basic set of universal minimum learning competencies—the ability to communicate orally and in writing, the capacity to deal with and use numbers, basic reasoning and social skills—and to that extent achievement tests are valuable indicators of progress in learning. But beyond that minimum set, different communities of learners have different learning needs, whether they are adult illiterates, or urban yuppies, or retail salespersons, or disoriented adolescents. And yet most educational systems impose the same academic program and the same pedagogy on everyone. In an increasingly diverse and fast changing world, this leads to an education that becomes increasingly irrelevant to all but a few in stasis. This may not be the place or the time to rethink what today’s youth need to meet the demands of the future, but this imposing task needs to be done. Those who excel in school are not always those who excel in life; conversely, those considered most successful have become so because of traits, skills, and competencies acquired often outside the classroom. If education means meeting the learning needs of the future, it is the real and anticipated problems and outstanding societal and individual issues facing us today that must form the core of our teaching programs and curricula, not just the standard academic subjects of chemistry, biology, history, literature, etc. as they are presently constituted, often without direct reference to societal problems of economic inequity, racial intolerance, HIV/AIDS, environmental degradation, and so on. It is not that traditional subjects should be abandoned altogether, but it is time to reconfigure and recast them in the light of the aforementioned societal agenda. And just as new paradigms for the content of education should be sought, so also new paradigms for the pedagogy of education should be sought. Today’s youth think, learn and are motivated (because of technology and media) in ways substantially different from the way in which yesterday’s youth--today’s educators-- thought, learned, and motivated when they were young. Consequently, teachers have to realize that they have to teach, and students will learn, in different ways.
6. Financial and social support for education benefits all sectors. Education ministers in quest of greater resources are constantly reminded by national planners and budget makers that all social and economic sectors must live with correspondingly similar minor increments, as if to increase the education slice of the pie will correspondingly decrease health, agriculture, and other slices of the total pie. The point that must be stressed in rebuttal is that education is not just a slice in the national well-being or development pie, it is in a way not just a slice, but also the crust surrounding the entire pie, the foundation upon which the other slices must rest. Research has shown that a farmer with 5 years or more of basic education is at least 7% more productive than others. The greatest environmental problems are not technical problems, but human ones, solved by better education and orientation. Research in at least one country shows that women with no education have an average of six births a year, while those with four or more years have an average of two or three births. Literacy programs coupled with training in entrepreneurship dramatically improve income streams in communities. And the list goes on. So the concern for education is too important to be left to education ministries alone. It is a concern of all ministries, of legislation, of media, indeed of society as a whole. In an increasingly complex world, just as it is not enough for Ministers of Commerce to be merely Ministers of Stores, so also it is not enough for Ministers of Education to be merely Ministers of Schools. They must develop a concern and a vision for all avenues of education, beyond schooling, in a total learning community. In turn, those heading other government ministries must realize that they too are in a sense “Ministers of Education”, not only in so far as they support the Education Minister, but more significantly because they have a responsibility within their ministries to enhance the education and learning opportunities within their sectors for total human development.
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This conference is a valuable opportunity to take stock of past efforts in achieving goals for our region’s children set by the WFFC and the Millennium. It is an occasion to take these universal goals and their timetables, and then to translate them into national goals and timetables, and indeed where possible to set goals and timetables for different regions within each country, especially those in greater need. It is an opportunity to reflect on key policy considerations and see which of those can translate into specific policy and program changes, to accelerate progress.
All too often developing countries decry the lack of financial resources as the main cause for slow progress. For this reason a fast-track initiative spearheaded by the World Bank tries to ensure that no country will fail to reach goals because of a lack of resources. But a second reason for lack of progress is the inadequate technical capacity and experience on the ground to accelerate progress. Money without know-how is ultimately sterile. But the history of EFA points to a third necessary ingredient: political will. Even with money and expertise, unless the citizenry, often fueled by media, and the leaders of that citizenry--parliaments, local governments, and national leadership—take on the cause of basic education with great dedication and urgency, progress will be far too slow. It is for this reason that the potential for change represented by those gathered here cannot be overestimated.
Our reflections since the Jomtien World Conference have convinced us that these goals are necessary and of supreme importance. Our conferences and meetings in Amman and Dakar, and our progress since then, have shown us that these goals are indeed reachable. But today, as time waits for no one and the target dates approach, we must remind ourselves that these goals are not only important, not only doable, but are indeed urgent.
