Quality Education Across Countries
Allow me start with an anecdote shared with us at the recent Oxford Conference by Lockwood Smith, the Minister of Education of New Zealand. He was asking a small group, "If you had a complex illness, whom would you prefer to have, a doctor trained thirty years ago, or a doctor who has quite recently graduated from medical school?" They clearly preferred the younger doctor because of the more up-to-date training he had received. The same group was then asked, "Whom would you prefer to have for your children, a teacher trained thirty years ago, or one quite recently graduated?" The choice was quite clearly the older teacher.
Distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen,
We are gathered here this week from all over the world to look at innovations and strategies towards quality education for all. As you well know, education for all is now becoming an explicit national priority among more and more countries, thanks to the Jomtien World Conference, the International Literacy Year, and the efforts individuals like you have exerted towards generating the public awareness and political commitment for education for all, or EFA.
But the INNOTECH organizers of this conference have wisely added a fourth letter to EFA in our theme, the letter Q: quality. This is not only reflects the true intent of the Jomtien Declaration, which after all emphasizes learning achievement over mere school participation, but more importantly confronts the dilemma faced by many developing countries: In the scramble to provide as many school places as possible for its growing populations, many nations have witnessed a considerable dilution of quality and standards as budgets prove incapable of sustaining a significant expansion of the school system. To many a government planner, limited resources make it seem like one has to make a choice: will it be quantity, to build more schools and create more places so that education will be for all? Or will it be quality, to produce more textbooks, more teaching aids, and better prepared teachers, so that those already in school will get a useful quality education?
Indeed if one takes an unimaginative and mechanistic view of most educational systems across countries, it does seem like an either/or situation. But most of us know that the goal of quality education for all is still achievable if we do not chain ourselves to just doing more of the same, if we seek what the African ministers of education in their regional conference in Senegal last July called "affordable alternatives." And we know that these affordable alternatives, new modalities or striving for quality, innovative thrusts and strategies, can be found, in fact already exist-in academic institutions, in institutes of educational research, in pilot experiments and success stories of other countries throughout the world.
Why then are our educational systems and policies so slow to pick up on these alternatives? Why does the group that Minister Lockwood spoke to seem so reluctant to acknowledge that today's teachers absorb or use the benefits of the last thirty years of advancement in the educational field, as doctors so obviously do of advances in the medical field?
The reasons are imbedded in the complexities of organizational psychology and behavioural sociology. But one of the more obvious ones is the evident lack of bridges between the depositories of these strategies and innovative policies, and the users of these policies.
On a national level, this refers to the mountain of academic research on academic policy generated by graduate schools of education and institutes of educational research on the one hand, and the mountain of policy and program alternatives needing day-to-day decisions form education ministries on the other hand. Rarely, however, does one find institutionalized channels by which this knowledge supply is tailored and fed regularly into the demand.
On the international level, similar gaps between the research of policy and the practice of policy exist. In particular, more efforts at sharing of experiences-successes as well as failures-among countries, especially among those with similar settings and constraints, should be encouraged. It is in fact the purpose of conferences such as these, the mission of INNOTECH on a regional scale, and of UNESCO on a global scale, to encourage and promote such efforts. We at UNESCO have found for example that many few EFA approaches have emerged and have been disseminated through the regional networks established precisely for this purpose, networks such as APPEAL and APEID in this region, and its sister networks in Africa, Latin American, and the Arab states. Periodic regional conferences of Ministers and focused seminars and workshops by the UNESCO Institutes on specific policy topics also provide a rich venue for such exchange of experiences. For those unable to attend these personally, the bibliography of UNESCO publications and reports of such meetings are generally available.
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To go then directly to the theme assigned to this session, what then does the international exchange of ideas tells us about quality education across countries? Perhaps the best way to discuss this is to follow the analysis suggested by the UNESCO Director General, Mr. Federico Mayor, in his keynote address this morning. He suggested that.
stragegies for the achievement of educational quality must pursue a threefold aim: first, to define an educational content which reflects basic learning needs; second, to establish acceptable levels for the acquisition of this content; and, finally to develop a means of accurately measuring the extent to which these levels are being achieved.
In other words, in looking at quality education across countries, we should look at how countries define it, how they strive for it, and how they measure it.
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Quality education must ultimately be defined, as the Jomtien Declaration and the UNESCO Director General remind us, by how well it meets basic learning needs. And because basic learning needs vary significantly from country to country, that definition therefore also varies, perhaps not as much as it should. Formal schooling, and the curriculum on which it is based, must maintain a balance between addressing learning needs arising from the individual's immediate socio-cultural environment, which are uniquely local, and addressing those needs arising from the imperative to move the individual's society towards progress and development, which are largely universal.
Unfortunately the tradition built up over the decades by curriculum specialists in many developing countries has skewed this balance in favour of the universal, influenced greatly by counterpart curriculum specialists in the North and by the traditional approach of looking at curricula as academic disciplines rather than as modalities to meet learning needs. There are, fortunately, a few exceptions. The latest work by Paolo Freire on a student-driven curriculum for the schools of Sao Paolo in Brazil provide a refreshing alternative. Next February, there will be an exciting conference on curriculum development for specific cultural contexts, to be held in Raratonga in the Pacific the UNESCO Institute of Hamburg is continuing its work on curriculum elements and learning needs that bridge both formal and non-formal systems.
It is therefore dangerous to indiscriminately set up national or, worse, international "standards" for quality. Ultimately, it is the extent of the positive difference that the educational process makes in the life of the learner that accounts, not the end result alone. And because each individual is different and learns differently, and because each socio-cultural context and how it affects learning is likewise different, the learning curriculum, the pedadogy, and the assessment of the educational effort must likewise be different.
In this connection, the lates thinking and policy trend in the field of special education, or more correctly, education for those with special needs, is consistent. For the emerging practice is now to incorporate those with learning or physical disabilities into the regular school (since most of these disabilities are not extreme enough to warrant special schools), provided the teachers and the school setting work on the premise that every individual has different learning needs anyway and is to that extent "special." Teaching to the standardized test and individual competitiveness for class ranking then gives way to a focus on learning, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and team sharing.
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How countries try to achieve educational quality is almost as diverse as the countries themselves. One can however attempt to generalize these attempts into two types of efforts: the first based on a linear "production function" model of the educational system, and the second based on a more systemic approach to the total educational environment.
In the first category, educational policy makers and planners tend to look at quality as the results of an optimum mix of inputs in the educational process: classrooms, laboratories, books and teaching materials, curriculum, hours per week, language of instruction, teacher qualifications, and so on. The effort to achieve quality is translated into increasing or improving the various above inputs, with the hope that these will correspondingly improve outputs. It is an approach that gained currency with Coleman in the US and Plowden in the UK in the sixties, and remains popular with educational economists, lending and donor agencies, and many governments. However, even among countries that subscribe to this approach there remains a gap between actual policy decisions taken and resource allocations made on the one hand, and the research available on which factors more directly affect quality on the other. Let us take a few examples.
A recent UNESCO statistical study that came out only this month presents a comprehensive picture of the number of class hours per week and the number of weeks per school year in different countries. Most countries have about 24 class hours a week and between 36-40 weeks per schoolyear. Africa tends to have more class hours than Asia or America. And yet even among similar countries across continents, more class time does not translate into better quality. Whether this argument can be stretched to the number of years of basic education is now a matter of intense debate in sever Arab, African, and Asian countries, through these debates must include not just quality arguments but also political considerations on the custodial function of schooling and the readiness of the economy to absorb specific age cohorts into their employment/productivity stream.
A parallel UNESCO survey looked at the situation of textbooks around the world. In four out of ten countries throughout the world there are not enough textbooks to meet student's needs. Of these, about one third meet more that 60% of the need, on third meet 30%-60%, and one third meet less than 30% of their requirements. (Parenthetically, textbooks are published exclusively by governments or education ministries in half the cases, and in the other half by either private publishers or by a combination of public and private efforts.) And yet, many research studies on several country settings, such as those conducted by Hyneman and the World Bank, affirm that the availability of textbooks probably ranks among the highest positive determinants of school achievement. There are initiatives around the world that look at the issue of textbook production and distribution regionally, such as the project of SECAB, the Latin American countries along the Andean range, but these remain surprisingly few.
A third input is the language of instruction. Here again research is consistent in telling us that learning and achievement levels during the first years of basic education are most effective in the child's mother tongue. Of course historical, political, and national imperatives lead to different policies on the medium of instruction, especially in Africa; interestingly it is in Asia where local and national tongues most naturally fit into the school systems, with the Philippines as an exception to this rule.
In fact there is generally a lack of congruence between resource allocation patterns for the range of educational inputs and the impact these inputs have on achievement. The greatest spending category, that of school buildings, tends to have the least impact on achievement, though of course impact of access is measurable, especially when school architecture avoids a slavish following of foreign prototypes and uses indigenous materials and designs. Teacher training effectivity studies indicate greater impact on student achievement of in-service over pre-service training, but the lion's share of resources remains with teacher training institutions. Nutrition levels turn out to be a major factor in achievement, but many feeding programs are marginalized as basically non-educational in nature. In general, then, even those who implicitly follow a production function model approach to improving quality often do so with inadequate knowledge of the impact and interrelationships of these inputs.
Valuable as the production function model may be for understanding and improving quality, its built in limitations have led others to look at a more systemic approach to improving quality. The former model may point to the need for more textbooks, for example, but does not examine the extent to which teachers make good or bad use of these. More importantly, it does not examine the relationship between factors, e.g. availability of textbooks as it is affected by reading readiness resulting from nutrition levels. Also it does not examine the environment outside the classroom, and how it affects learning-the general atmosphere in the school as a whole, the extent to which the school head creates a motivated, team spirit among faculty, the involvement of the community. For this reason, the most exciting projects in improvement of school quality tend to a more than a uni-dimensional approach. A few examples might illustrate this:
Th 900 schools project in Chile has taken the 900 schools with the lowest achievement scores in that country and designed a comprehensive program for them, including such features as community-based auxiliary "teachers," a redesigned curriculum to take into account local conditions, and community support. The result of this experiment, after two short years, is that these 900 schools now have achievement results matching those of the country's elite private schools.
The PIPSE project in Portugal was a multi-ministry effort to dramatically improve the outcomes of their basic schooling. An analysis of the problems of school quality and success led to the creation of inter-agency local councils throughout the country that provided students specialized counseling, community organized transportation services where necessary, complementary livelihood opportunities, and a strengthened curriculum. This project in fact became the live laboratory and site for the UNESCO sponsored international symposium (preceded by 8 regional preparatory workshops) on success in schooling. This symposium, attended by 56 countries, served as an excellent exchange of experiences, as the publication on it will testify, and generated twenty regional and sub-regional projects on innovations and strategies for quality education.
Other examples abound, from the Escuela Nueva multi-grade success of Colombia, to the ZINTECH experience in Zimbabwe, to the BRAC success in Bangladesh, lest we forget the non-formal aspects of quality education.
One final word before we leaver our discussion of how countries strive for quality. Beyond both the production function model and the systemic model, there is a growing concern to know more about, not just the inputs to learning, no just the systemic environment of learning, but the learning process itself, what goes on in the "little black box" as a young learner moves from ignorance to knowledge. This year, in an attempt to learn more about this process and its implications for policies and decision makers, UNESCO has commissioned a team from Harvard University to explore this, and preliminary findings point to suggested specific changes in classroom management and school management as they relate to "social interaction" and "rules of participation."
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Now we can consider what countries say and do about measuring quality. This brings to the fore the importance of technically valid, longitudinal, diagnostic educational assessment. The World Bank is closely monitoring the establishment of such a diagnostic instrument in about nine countries which use the results, not to evaluate individual students, but to test the system for relevance, efficiency, and effectiveness. Much can be said about educational assessment, but since I see that it is a main topic later in this conference, I wail refrain from opening this discussion here.
There are two other commonly mentioned measures of educational quality, though they are just as much measures of access: repetition rates and retention rates.
Recent statistics put the average repetition rates at 2% for developed countries, and about 9% for the others. Looking further at clusters of countries with similar repetition rates, one cannot deduce any pattern which justifies that higher repetition rates (higher than 20% in 15 countries), aside from being expensive and inefficient, signify either better or worse quality education. But experiences of automatic progression or, on the other extreme, very selective promotion have taught some countries painful lessons which others should study and thus avoid. Also some regions in the world, such as South Asia and the Arab states, have had much greater success in reducing repetition without sacrificing quality, which other regions with increasing trends in repetition, such as East Asia, Latin American and sub-Saharan Africa, can learn from .
The other significant indicator is retention rates. The most tragic symptom of poor quality or relevance of the education in developing countries is that up to six out of ten children never finish the primary school cycle. Clearly poverty and other socio-cultural factors extraneous to the school system are major determinants. But just as clearly not enough is being done to research in particular settings the controllable causes and remedies for this problem. Community support programs in Gansu China, feeding programs in Mali, pre-school readiness programs in Saudi Arabia, and experiments in diverse countries have shown the way for others who wish to dramatically improve their retention rates. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized; a country that spends one half of its human and financial resources for primary schooling teaching children who drop out of school within the four years and revert to illiteracy have just wasted one half of its resources.
The final assessment of the quality and relevance of basic education is however beyond the reach of psychometricians and statisticians. In the last analysis, repetition rates, retention rates, even academic achievement test scores will not tell us how much the education imparted to the child meet the basic learning needs of the individual and his society. We can easily measure his literacy, but not the utility of what he learns; and between his emerging from basic education and finding or not finding a productive meaningful place in society, there are far too many variables to attribute a direct causal relationship.
But believe we must, that as we continually strive to make better and more relevant the content of what we teach, as we cast about for innovative and effective means for conveying that content, and as we measure as best we can the effectiveness of our efforts, the educational quality we seek can somehow ba attained and strengthened.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the task is enormous, but we must learn to hope for more than we can expect to achieve... The UNESCO General Conference set for itself an ambitious-even unattainable-task when it set out its Plan of Action to Eradicate Illiteracy by the Year 2000. but we in UNESCO and all of us together working for quality education must dare to reach for what is beyond our grasp; the vastness, the urgency and the nobility of our mission demand no less.
The global picture remains dire; the spectres of irrelevance and eroding quality continue to haunt the less developed countries; 100 million of the world's children remain with no access to primary schooling; 950 million of our fellow human beings cannot read or write. And yet, ironically, we have today the global resources to overcome these problems: the cost of one nuclear submarine alone could finance the annual education budget of 23 developing countries and meet the needs of 160 million school children. More importantly, we have today the research findings, the technical expertise, and the experience to really turn the tide towards quality education for all-in fact a lot of that accumulated wisdom can be found within these four walls. It is incumbent upon us therefore to build the bridges, make the links, between this accumulated wisdom and the decision makers who can engineer a transformation-the ministries of budget, planning, and education, the leaders of local communities, non-government organizations and other partners, the parents and the students themselves. If we build these bridges and work together to create the political will where innovations and in some cases fundamental change can take place, we can indeed overcome the odds, turn the tide, develop a literate world, and so change the course of history.
So let us dare to dream, and then work to make our dreams come true.
