Policy Analysis, Development, and Implementation

This is Part 1 of a four-part comprehensive evaluation of the public textbook procurement system in Morocco. It offers recommendations on how to improve textbook quality, how to strengthen the procurement system --including budgeting and financing--, and developing a policy for digital textbooks.

This article in The Economist cites RTI researcher Benjamin Piper, and an article he co-authored with RTI colleague Timothy Slade on summer learning loss in Malawi. "Benjamin Piper, of RTI International, an American research institute, suspects that the scale of summer learning loss may be worse in the developing world, where it has largely gone unnoticed and unstudied. In rural areas in particular, reading material can be hard to come by and some children still spend their holidays helping their families in the fields. A study Mr Piper co-authored in 2017, on Malawian children taking part in an American-funded literacy programme, may be the only one on summer learning loss in sub-Saharan Africa. It found that the loss was almost as big as the gains the literacy programme generated during the school year. Mr Piper says that international donors, who spent $1.4bn on basic education aid in Africa in 2015, risk “losing what they invested”."

This report presents findings of a national survey of parents regarding enrollment in preprimary education (kindergarten) in Jordan. The findings are surprising because they suggest that the real enrollment rate is significantly higher than what government statistics indicate. The discrepancy seems to be due to a high level of kindergarten provision from private sector and civil society actors who are not licensed by the Ministry of Education.

This paper highlights patterns in school enrollment indicators that affect the efficiency and effectiveness of education systems in a set of low-income countries: those that have expanded access quickly in the last decade or two, but have not yet absorbed that expansion efficiently. Although the patterns in these indicators are observable in the first few years of schooling, they could constitute a cause of low learning outcomes at the end of primary school. The data show strong empirical relationships between an early primary enrollment bulge, low levels of pre-primary participation, and poor performance on early grade cognitive skills. This work does not attribute causal precedence to these patterns but instead argues that the indicators are reflections of each other, constituting a ‘‘knot’’ of issues undermining the foundations of the affected education systems. The article presents some of the cost implications and suggests that many countries are already paying for pre-primary education without realizing it.

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Sam Ngaruiya. The Ministry of Education (MoE) with technical support from RTI International are collaborating with four county governments to pilot the Tayari ECDE programme. The objective of Tayari is to develop a cost- effective, scalable, low-cost and quality ECDE model. To maximize the impact of Tayari, the MoE intends to scale-up Tayari. However, the ability to take-up and sustain Tayari rests on the counties’ capacity to ensure a viable ECDE system and meet the critical cost of the model. The ability of the counties to take on a Tayari-type programme requires ample institutional, systemic, organizational and fiscal capacity of the counties to take-up and sustain the model. MoE statistics show that, whereas, access has improved, the quality is affected by non-provision of curriculum-aligned instructional materials in the counties and unclear policy in hiring and continuous professional development of the ECDE officers and teachers. Equally, there are policies at the national level that can be used as guidelines for implementation and management of ECD, but there are still some gaps in policy guidelines for implementation; a study mapping the four Tayari counties and three additional counties found increased investment in ECD infrastructure by the governments This presentation explores how the umbrella policy from the MOE as well as evidence from the Tayari pilot programme’s longitudinal study has informed practice within the four Tayari counties, enabling them to be more responsive to the dynamic policy environment. It also showcases initiatives put in place by the counties to sustain the Tayari implementation in pilot counties.

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Katherine Merseth and Manar Shukri. The Minister of Education has requested that USAID Early Grades Reading and mathematics Project (RAMP) assist the Ministry of Education (MoE) to assess the overall KG situation in Jordan and to develop recommendations for how the Government of Jordan can expand quality kindergarten (specifically, the second year of kindergarten, or KG2) to serve all 5year old children by 2025. In response to the need, RAMP is conducting a study of KG2 with the objective of enabling the MoE to equitably expand and improve KG2.

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Amber Gove and Helen Jang. The Early Grade Reading Barometer offers a wealth of actionable Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) data to help to change the lives of young children. With 40 datasets from 19 places, the Barometer supports data transparency. The Barometer is designed for USAID education officers, policy makers, education staff in host countries, implementation partners, education researchers, and practitioners. It is designed primarily for users who may have limited knowledge about early grade reading, and no or little sophisticated statistical knowledge. This presentation was an interactive demonstration of the Barometer, highlighting the vast amount of data available to the public and how the information can be used to improve learning outcomes.

CIES 2018 presentation, given by Luis Crouch on behalf of Hank Healey. The EGR Sustainability Framework emanates from a) a general understanding of evidence-based EGR programs, b) the notion of a “learning coherent” education system (Pritchett, 2015), c) the notion of a “bare bones” or “core functions” system (Crouch and Destefano, 2015); and effective curriculum implementation. To this end, our proposed EGR sustainability framework maintains that one must a) map the existing education system’s institutional, systemic, cultural, and attitudinal capacity to function as an effective learning coherent core functions curriculum implementation system, b) identify the various gaps and barriers that prevent the system from working in this manner, c) develop a plan to address those gaps and barriers, and d) help the MOE to implement that plan.

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Luis Crouch. Given the prominence of learning and quality in the SDGs, much discussion has gone into how to measure in a manner that is reasonably comparable. Some have argued (or feared) that this would necessitate a single, dominant, global assessment. Aside from the political or ethical acceptability of this kind of imposition, one has to wonder how meaningful this could be, psychometrically or pedagogically. The paper will argue that unless one were to increase the cost of assessment tremendously, or make children sit through lengthy assessments or until highly adaptive computerized assessments can be used, a single or a few dominant assessments are an unlikely approach. Instead, a variety of assessments is a more likely solution. These might have better psychometric “resolution” for poorer countries with greater cognitive inequality than the OECD countries, might be closer to the children’s actual levels, and might be psychometrically more reliable if done properly. The ability to make the results comparable or equitable in some sense need not be lost, however, if some sort of universal learning scale is created, so that countries can peg themselves, with reasonable rigorous, to that scale. A global neutral arbiter can “sponsor” the scale and compile country-based reports using it.

While the SDGs now officially call for global reporting on learning outcomes, many institutions and scholars had noticed, at least since the mid-2000s, that many children were not learning much, and were starting to respond by, as a first step, advocating and developing assessments that, they felt, was perhaps more appropriate to learning at the bottom of the pyramid, or at the left end of the cognitive distribution. The GMR sounded a clarion with their estimate that there are some 250 million children in the world hardly learning. This paper addresses an issue that can be put simply but is extremely hard to answer: “Is the array of assessments emerging helping researchers, policy-makers, and implementers get a more accurate sense of how much or how little the poorest children in the world know, and is it helpful in remediating the situation?” The paper specifically is not addressed at the question of global reporting—although it does touch upon the issue. The problem of interest here is what is most useful for countries to generate movement along the bottom of the pyramid.