Policy, Systems, and Governance

This presentation delivered at the CIES 2024 conference describes key implementation strategies used in USAID/MOE Government to Government Component of RELIT Program.

Education being recognized as a fundamental right plays a vital role in fostering better societies and ensuring fair access to quality education. In this panel, we will explore the significance of education protests concerning pedagogy, curriculum, and theories. The Philippines Department of Education (DepEd), with support from USAIDs project Advancing Basic education in the Philippines (ABC+), has taken innovative steps to improve learning outcomes and reach marginalized communicates beyond traditional methods. The 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) revealed that Filipino 15-year-old students scored low in reading comprehension and ranked near the bottom in math and science among 79 countries. This raised concern about curriculum, teaching practice, the learning environments of Philippines schools, and in general the quality of education in the Philippines. It is important to note that over 90% of the students in the Philippines reported speaking a language at home different from the language used in instruction and the PISA test (English). Such language disparity significantly impacts PISA scores, and the Philippines’ linguistic diversity adds to the complexity. The Philippines is one of 44 nations where no single language group exceeds 50% of the total population. Estimates of the number of native Philippine languages range from 110 to 185. The adoption of Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) in 2009 recognized this and explicitly emphasized the socio-cultural value of children learning in their maternal languages and put a focus on the importance of language to expanding access to education and improving learning outcomes. This panel highlights the importance of utilizing data to advocate for Early Grade Learning (EGL) and exploring alternative investment pathways beyond traditional sources.

This success story outlines the co-creation process for the Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program in From February 2020. RTI held a collaborative, interactive Co-Development Workshop to 1) affirm the shared vision for the Program, 2) clarify the Program’s overall mandate and scope, and 3) produce outlines of planned activities with associated implementation strategies, resource needs, and roles and responsibilities.

The theme of CIES asks our society of academics and practitioners to confront the ways in which education is a space of debate and contestation, and how stakeholders both internal and external to education systems seek to effect change (or maintain the status quo). The behavioral science perspective is not new to international education. It has often been presented from different research perspectives, including teacher mental models of teacher beliefs (Saberwal et. al., 2018), and the social aspects of educational change (Fullan, 2015). However, recent interest has shifted focus on the understanding of education systems change using a behavioral science lens (Ajani 2022). This perspective is important as education systems programming is frequently designed without a true understanding of how individuals will respond to change (Jeevan and Hwa, 2022). The presentations present studies which examine teachers, caregivers, and instructional practice and change within an education system. What new insights do we have and how might they influence policy and implementation for education systems change? This deck includes the following presentations and authors: From access to learning to nudging: Why behavioral science might be the next new best thing in education improvement programs (Amber Gove, RTI International), More of this and less of that: How a behavioral science lens suggests alternative approaches to education program design & implementation (Simon King, Creative Associates), Peer-to-Peer Learning: The Power of Social Networks in Adoption of New Pedagogies (Elizabeth Marsden, RTI International), and Supporting Caregivers of Young Children in South Africa to Engage in Play (Carolina Better, Ideas42).

We are indeed dealing with a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. The Philippines suffers natural and man-made vulnerabilities such as typhoons that occur throughout the year, earthquakes, and more recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. These challenges necessitated the establishment of the Education Futures Program. While the Philippines Basic Education Continuity Plan in response to the pandemic, DepEd recognized at that time the urgent need to “future proof” education. Nationwide education in futures thinking and foresight planning was needed to address the future learning needs of all children and building education resilience in times of crisis. This presentation provides an overview of the "Co-creating Learning Spaces for Improved Early Language Literacy and Numeracy in the Philippines" activity, under the USAID funded All Children Reading (ACR) - Philippines. Following a brief introduction to futures thinking and foresight planning, this presentation describes how school-level teams in the Philippines developed prototypes of learning spaces for the future that addressed anticipated needs of learners. We present the prototyping process centered on human centered design thinking, the way that school teams collected feedback on their innovations from teachers in the region, parents, and learners themselves, and a snapshot of the prototypes developed, and the benefit of the prototyping process to school teams and the relative success they had in realizing their future learning spaces innovations after two years.

The presentation summarizes findings from the Rapid Education Risk Analysis for Lebanon

As economies in the global-South mature and calls for decolonizing international assistance become louder, it becomes increasingly important to reimagine the design, planning and implementation of international assistance. This paper will explore the evolution of the relationship between an international funding agency and partner Ministry over a decade of program implementation. USAID has implemented three consecutive education projects in Tanzania since 2011 that focus on improving the quality of teaching to enhance learning outcomes, starting with the USAID Tanzania 21st Century activity. Over time, these programs have shifted the nature of implementation and engagement with Government with the goal of institutionalizing program activities within the administrative structure of the Tanzanian education system. This paper discusses the strategies used under the two most recent activities (Tusome Pamoja and Jifunze Uelewe) and the associated outcomes, providing options for future collaborative engagement. Education service delivery for basic education in Tanzania is a shared responsibility on the mainland, with Ministry of Education and Sports (MoEST) providing policy direction and quality assurance and the President’s Office – Regional Administration and Local Governance (PO-RALG) managing curriculum delivery through the schools. USAID has supported the provision of teaching and learning materials, teacher professional development, sub-national management and community engagement. In this paper we discuss the evolution of four strategies for collaboration: (i) alignment with Government policies; (ii) collaborative work planning; (iii) exploiting opportunities; (iv) consistent communication strategies. Projects, by nature, are perceived as short-term interventions independent of broader system administration. They are frequently perceived as an additional administrative burden but bringing the advantage of substitutive financing. This presentation discusses how Tusome Pamoja addressed these perceptions and expectations, by recognizing the need to demonstrate the alignment between Government initiatives and activity support. We further discuss how consistent and flexible communication led to significant achievement of Government approval of new national guidelines for school quality assurance, parent engagement, and teacher continuous professional development. We will highlight how the most recent activity (Jifunze Uelewe) made significant adjustments to its annual work planning process to address the mismatch between the work planning and budget cycles of the governments of US and Tanzania. We also discuss how clarity and coherence of communication internally between project management and USAID ensured a unified and consistent messaging strategy, with USAID communicating at the political level while project staff engaging at the technical level. This ensured that when important shifts in service delivery implementation were elevated from technical to political approval, the context and concept was already well understood. The presentation will conclude by highlighting that the path to successful collaboration rests upon several critical factors. These include a deep understanding of the political context, the relative power of personalities and positions with the extant institutional structures, consistent communication and an understanding of vested interests. Flexibility and coordination between funder and implementer is key to success.

On mainland Tanzania, most resource allocation decisions are centralized. The President’s Office - Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG) recruits and assigns teachers, supplies teaching and learning materials and funds capital construction projects. Local Governments are provided limited funds for training support or redeployment of teachers among schools. Their main resource, therefore, is to provide management attention and support to schools. With an average of 140 schools in a District and a staff of 5 individuals, only a few schools can be supported. In 2016, The Ministry of Education and Sports developed a School Quality Assurance Framework to guide local administrators on key areas of focus and guidance for school support. The framework focuses on six areas: school inputs, teacher practice, student learning outcomes, school environment, school leadership and community engagement. To facilitate the monitoring of these areas, USAID Tusome Pamoja project piloted a data collection tool that allowed measurement of progress through indicators. Of particular interest was the use of a group administered learning assessment that established benchmarks for success for grade 2 learners across six sub-tasks for reading, writing and mathematics. Due to limited resources, this assessment was only applied to a sample of schools in each district. Districts could assess their overall performance against these indicators and as a result developed somewhat generic district level support plans.. This presentation will explore how initial challenges of vague district plans were overcome through the critical data collection process leading to the establishment of benchmarks for success. o Under a subsequent activity, USAID Jifunze Uelewe, software was developed that allowed districts to capture group administered learning data for every grade 2 student and to aggregate this information at the school level. Districts were then able to rank order all schools in the district by scores on learning sub-tasks and then select the lowest performing schools for additional management attention. At the same time, districts were able to pair high-performing and low performing schools. The result of the access to school specific data was to allow districts to direct their attention to the development of plans at the school level to address low learning performance, and the ability to track progress of these schools over time. Schools enter data on Government provided tablets and the data can be synched when headteachers have access to Government provided wifi. Decentralized administrators have long been seen as critical for translating national policy into local action. However, they are frequently hampered by a combination of distracted management attention and unclear targets or benchmarks for key inputs, which encourages a laissez-faire status quo. In Tanzania, local governments in four regions have been able to contextualize data to meet their needs and use simple technology to prioritize their attention and decision-making. Our presentation showcases the significance of data driven decision making and continuous improvement of the system. We further highlight the important of simple and meaningful change and fostering proactive decision making at the local level.

Jordan community mobilization toolkit.

The conventional ways that new pedagogies are taught and supported in low- and middle-income countries rarely leverage the social networks and relationships that are paramount for individuals to shift their beliefs and make positive decisions about adopting new methodologies, and for them to sustain these behavior changes in the long run. The purpose of this study was to apply social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative inquiry to understand the composition and structure of primary school teacher social networks to inform policy basic education programming about how to improve the diffusion and support for implementation of new pedagogies through these social networks. This study used a mixed model design to study the compositional and structural properties of teacher social networks in sub-district administrative areas or “wards” in Tanzania. Using data from completed socio-metric inventories, separate teacher social networks were generated for Mbawala, Madimba, Milangominne, and Nitekela wards in the Mtwara Region of Tanzania. Researchers used SNA to calculate quantitative measurements and generate teacher sociograms (i.e., network graphs) for each of the ward-level teacher social networks. We combined these data with data from teacher informant interviews that described the content, context, and benefit of educators’ interactions in the different wards and to help explain the SNA findings.