The New York Times
The world has made dramatic gains in getting children — even very, very poor children — into school. But are they learning? The discomfiting conclusion from Lant Pritchett, a senior fellow at the Center on Global Development and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is, in many cases, no.
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“The vast majority of countries will meet the Millennium Development Goal target for universal primary school completion, and very few countries will miss it by much,” he writes in his new book, “The Rebirth of Education: From 19th Century Schooling to 21st Century Learning.”
The change has been so rapid that the average Haitian or Bangladeshi in 2010 had more years of schooling than the average French or Italian person did in 1960. (That data looks at average years of schooling for people 15 and older, by the way.) Even repressive and nondemocratic countries have seen tremendous gains. “Good governments do schooling, but nearly all bad governments do it, too,” Mr. Pritchett writes.
But that does not mean that all that schooling has translated into much education, he says. For instance, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, less than half of surveyed children in fifth grade could read a story intended for second graders. About one in six students in fifth grade recognized letters but could not read words.
What can schools and countries do to make sure students are learning while they are in school? What are the consequences of this schooling-education gap? Mr. Pritchett and I discussed those issues in a recent interview. A lightly edited transcript follows.
Q.
What’s the best evidence that we have that schooling is not translating into learning?
A.
There are three main sources of evidence. First, increasingly, people are going out and testing children in their houses, not in the school environment. That’s important, because it means we can track the learning of kids in school and the kids who are not. The organization Pratham tests kids on some very simple metrics and reports that data openly. And that same method has spread to Pakistan, some countries in Africa and elsewhere.
It also collects data in different grades, so that we are not just comparing fifth graders to other fifth graders. We can look at the “learning profile,” or trajectory. And it’s shocking how flat the curve is.
Q.
That means how little they’re learning in school?
A.
Let’s say you’re in fourth grade in a South Asian country. You’re supposed to learn to do some basic reading. After a year in school, four in five kids would have sat through an entire year of schooling and not mastered that basic skill. For division, a simple division problem, only one in eight would learn to do that in a year of school. Seven out of eight wouldn’t, after a whole year in school.
The second thing is that more and more developing countries are participating in international exams, like PISA and TIMSS. There, we get a very different take — we see shocking differentials between countries. A lot of people think that schools are pretty bad in America. But, the answer is: No, they’re really not. The average kid gets a score of about 500. The average kid in a good state in India gets a 320. That’s light years behind. It’s night and day. The average kid in an Indian eighth-grade classroom would be in the first or second grade in the United States.
And finally, a lot of school systems are carrying out their own tests.
Q.
I know that schools carry out a lot of functions, including a basic custodial function, letting adults work. Perhaps there’s some argument that school is good, even if you’re not learning much. But what do we know about how education affects outcome, versus schooling?
A.
We have a lot of evidence, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, lots of wage regressions, showing how years of schooling has a major impact on earnings and other metrics. But what we don’t always have is a parsing of what’s coming from sitting in school and what’s coming from education.
I look at it from a different standpoint to begin with, though. Let’s say you have a kid. They’re sitting in school, and they are not really learning to read or to do basic mathematics. Maybe that’s not so important. But look, if you’re going to have that kid in school for five or six years, you should probably teach him to read and some basic math! I take that as a given.
But if we aren’t taking that as a given, there are sources of evidence to your point. One comes from the economists Erik Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann. It asks the question: What makes countries grow faster, more schooling or more knowledge, cognitive skills? It turns out that knowing more has a bigger impact at a macro level than more schooling.
We also have microlevel studies, including some onsheepskin effects, that ask: What matters, having a degree or knowing something? Those show that it does do you some good to just stay in school, but it also does you good if you’re learning something in school.
Q.
The book goes through a lot of things that won’t really fix this problem. There’s an argument that a lot of capital-intensive investments — more teachers, more books, more training, electrification — probably won’t make kids learn more. Why not?
A.
Well, for one, a lot of those things are very productive, but only with a limited scope. There’s literally thousands of studies on this. Let’s say you’re attending a school with no roof. You learn less, and once you have a roof, you might learn more, but it’s done. That’s it. If someone gives you a better roof, or a thicker roof, or two roofs, you’re not better off — those inputs don’t add up.
Second, a lot of teachers don’t know what to teach or how to teach it, and a lot of those teachers are not embedded in performance-oriented schools. So, two of those teachers aren’t going to make a difference. That’s why we have really good experimental evidence that smaller class sizes work really well in places like Israel and Tennessee. But we also have really good experimental evidence that smaller class sizes, or an additional teacher, don’t make a difference in India and Kenya. That’s not that surprising, actually: The system isn’t committed to learning anyway. You’re just pouring more water into leaking bucket. That’s not going to fill the bucket.
So, we’ve seen massive improvement in what we can think of as the “input” side of education in the last decade. Class size is coming down, the number of schools is going up. But in India in the past six years, for instance, the inputs are getting better but the outputs are not. And in some places, the trend is actually zero or negative. That’s not to say I have anything against inputs!
Q.
So what are the changes that schools and donors and governments need to make instead?
A.
We need to think about systems. It’s like an automobile. You have a car. And the engine hooks to the transmission hooks to the wheels. Tinkering with one component might get you somewhat better results, but there’s going to be a limit to the improvement — you can’t just put a Ferrari engine in a Mini Cooper and expect it to act like a Ferrari. It’s similar: We have to have a lot of pieces that have to move together.
One big one is to start with a reasonable performance-learning orientation. Now, people think No Child Left Behind, and can have a kind of allergic reaction to the idea, because they immediately think you’re talking about high-stakes testing, and teaching to the test, and so on. But we’re not talking about that. That’s really important to underscore. What we’re talking about is a low-stakes metric — understanding what teachers are trying to teach, what kids are trying to learn, how they’re performing. And most countries still don’t have anything like it: Here’s what we want kids to know in eighth grade, so let’s measure and track that, and make it clear what our minimal and maximal set of objectives are. That’s going to help you better use those inputs we were talking about. It’s giving you an input orientation.
A second thing is more local control — local, context-driven solutions. We know that if you impose a top-down educational system, often it breaks down — you get a bureaucracy that doesn’t work, and the outcomes get worse than if you allow local control. The nice thing about the increase in randomized-control trials in development economics is that we have lots of microexamples of this. You can get local control by increasing the number of private schools — I’m not advocating privatization as a solution, but those private schools are freed from being in a top-down bureaucracy, and in India and Pakistan, they do better with less resources.
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