Education development, goals, incentives, ivory towers, and everything else

Recently, for work I’m summarizing and synthesizing many scholarly articles on what factors actually improve educational outcomes, mostly targeted at the context of developing countries. Firstly it’s amazing to be paid to read quality articles and books (on my reading list is also Poor Economics – a book I’ve been trying to settle down and read for so long!) on topics in development I’m very interested in. Second, there are just a few lessons that really strike me reading these articles:

1. Past efforts in development in education have mostly targeted indicators as proxies to real learning. What I mean is that we’ve looked at class sizes, at number of text books, at teacher attendance, at school meals, and hundreds of other factors rather than the actual learning outcome of the students being able to read basic texts and calculate simple math. We’ve focused on the indicators, the most famous example is probably the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals), where increasing the number of schools and enrollment is paramount. While these factors are important, their successes pales when we find out, for example, that 80% of grade 3 children do not have grade 2 literacy or numeracy (and this is quite an average percentage – surprisingly and sadly). Now we are realizing that these proxy indicators actually do not tell us much except numbers to be checked on a checklist. It’s important to note that it is not that these inputs or changes aren’t important, but that they may not necessarily lead to the outcomes we were hoping for – i.e. more children learning.
2. From the above, we need to set our goals correct. Numerous people have said this again and again, but we need to actually focus on our ultimate goals rather than our proxy indicators. The first example that comes to mind is what do we actually want out of life? Is happiness, and dependent on which kind of happiness, an indicator or is it a goal?
3. Development may be failing. Aid may not work. But we cannot discount all the lessons we have learnt over the past few decades on what does work. Like in education, we have tried, with best intents, and can only continue to try with our best intents. In whichever field, private or public or non-governmental, we always learn by trial and error. We often forget that the current complex globalized world we are forging together is a completely new one, with no historical lessons learnt. Universal human rights are also a relatively very new concept. We have actually progressed a lot in the last few hundreds of years. While we can have the best experts (and I use that word to mean not just academically trained scholars), we are still going to have to continually fix our models to better fit such a complex world.
4. In general I have a feeling that while many of the criticisms of development/aid is sound, and welcomed, the proposed alternative solution of private entrepreneurship in solving the worlds problem is at best naïve and at worst destructive. If private enterprise really could provide all of humanity with an acceptable standard of living, education, and work, then it would have “naturally” occurred over the centuries of ancient civilization. We are often too harsh on development/aid because the failure of private enterprises are not publicized, whereas aid’s failures are headline news. Also, current private enterprises often focus on very specific, narrow goals with the financial bottomline at the forefront. The problems that private enterprises target are usually the ones that are the easiest to solve, and therefore most profitable. The bigger, more complex, and more vaguely defined (development as freedom, anybody?) problems are often left to the public/NGO sector. If you have to compare “failure” rates, then it’s almost expected that the public/NGO sector would “fail” more.
5. There needs to be a much larger bridge between academic research and theories and development work. Translating theories and lessons learnt into implementable, tangible solutions to real world problems is paramount. Ivory towers are only useful in providing a protective environment for ruminating “radical” new ideas and paradigms. They are useless when you actually want to see those theories for a better (more equitable, more sustainable, more ‘harmonious’) world function in the current real world. While I completely understand the self-protective tendencies to stay in an encouraging, comfortable environment to shield attacks about our progressive theories, it greatly frustrates me also. How are we ever going to actually improve the world? How are we actually going to help provide a better life for all? If we cannot be vulnerable and be willing to stand in the fighting arena without being bullet proof we are only ever going to huddle, defeated in a dark corner in our ivory towers.

Anyways, brain still jumbling from all this recent reading. Now that I’ve written down part of the jumble, I’ll go back to jumbling it some more.