The Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015 will be met in nearly all countries. This book, however, documents a deeply disturbing reality behind that fact: for hundreds of millions of children in the developing world, schooling is not producing “education” in any real sense. As the book subtitle says: schooling ain't learning.
It is “education,” of course, not sitting in school, that is included in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and that is viewed universally as both an end of the development process and one of the most powerful means for achieving development. Since the early days of the Center for Global Development in late 2001, we have been concerned with education, and in particular how the actions of the rich and powerful countries can most effectively and quickly support developing countries in making education a reality for all of their citizens—from our contribution to the education MDG prepared for the Millennium Development Project a decade ago, to efforts in the last several years to promote and study the effects of Cash on Delivery Aid pilot projects in improving education outcomes for children in low-income countries, to evaluation of the impact of particular interventions on the performance of schooling systems, to the recent report Schooling Is Not Education! Using Assessment to Change the Politics of Non-Learning, which relies heavily on the evidence presented in this book.
Much of my own work, before the Center opened its doors, was focused on education and its consequences for individual income, women's labor-force participation, and countries’ long-run growth and distribution of income—indeed for development itself broadly conceived. That work also included a study of the link between the quality of schools children attend and the number of years they complete.
Despite all of that personal and institutional history, this book by CGD senior fellow Lant Pritchett surprises and worries me. Indeed it stuns me on two counts: first, the almost numbing but thoroughly convincing completeness of evidence on the learning problem in so much of the developing world; and second, Pritchett's adamant refusal to set out any single better (spider) “model” for school systems to produce learning. He instead promotes fostering the conditions for new, undiscovered, context-specific (starfish) approaches.
The evidence, from recent assessments, that something needs to be done to improve education is overwhelming. Here is just a sampling:
— In India less than half of children surveyed in grade 5 could read a story for second graders (and over 1 in 4 could not read a simple sentence), and only slightly more than half could do subtraction. Results over several years were getting worse, not better.
— In Tanzania over 65 percent of students who sat the 2012 examination for secondary school (Form IV) completers failed, with the worst possible results. In re-scored results using an earlier, more lax standard, more than 40 percent failed.
— In Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Oman, Thailand, and Tunisia, scores on an internationally comparable mathematics and science test in 2011 declined overall compared to earlier years. (Chile's and Korea's scores were up and Iran's were roughly constant.)
Pritchett's idea for a “rebirth” of education has little to do with organizational systems and much to do with breaking schools free of their century-old roots in an entirely different and far less interconnected and interdependent global economy. That will be difficult. The success of the last several decades in getting to near-universal primary school enrollment has built in patterns of thought, advocacy, and action that are hard to alter—even when it is clear that “more of the same” won't do.
Like Pritchett's earlier CGD book on migration, Let Their People Come, this one presents a challenge of the first order. Easy answers, he argues, even if they will do some good, will not be enough. It is a bold and controversial challenge, but one that we at CGD are committed to promoting.
Nancy Birdsall
President
Center for Global Development