NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
EDUCATING AND TRAINING OUT OF POVERTY? A REVIEW OF THE ISSUES
By Kenneth King, Hong Kong (and Edinburgh)
We all know that there are large differences between, and within, countries in terms of how much is spent per student (A). We also know that these differences are correlated with the socio-economic status of students (B): more is spent on rich and urban students than on poor and rural students. Given that rich and urban students generally perform better in school (C), many draw the conclusion that by equalizing spending, we can equalize performance (and hence reduce the income gap). The conclusion is true if A is the direct cause of C, which causes B. An alternative explanation is that B is the cause of both A, and of C, in which case increased spending will have no effect on the income gap.The lesson of economic development over the past 50 years is that once education has contributed to conditions favourable for growth, the nature of its contribution changes. In the case of the Asian Tigers, for example, the education that made possible the takeoffs contributed principally to the formation of social capital. It was based on traditional endogenous values and practices rather than the modern "best practices" proposed from the outside by the gurus of the time. Education in the ?miracle? countries supported an equitable redistribution of land and income, and reinforcement of traditional values of vertical authority, rather than recognition of individual excellence and creative thinking. Once the takeoff occurred, however, education was changed to accommodate the requirements of the emerging new industries. This education favoured human capital formation, giving more time to mathematics and science and less to moral and civic education. Those countries that attained and sustained mass education in common schools (i.e. low rates of private education) were most successful. McGinn, NN36
These paragraphs from Noel McGinn in the previous issue of NORRAG NEWS, No 36 are at the heart of our concerns and questions in this present issue.
? What can be learnt from countries where education appears to have played a critical role in leveraging their current economic success?
? Will the increased donor spending associated with the pursuit of the MDGs and targeted at giving educational access and improved outcomes for the poor bring results? And can it be sustained?
? If school and skill systems reflect huge and growing inequalities between rich and poor provinces, urban and rural areas, private and public provision, and different ethnicities, what are the lessons about undoing the current systematisation of inequalities?
? What sense can the discourse about the ?returns to education? make of the return to being a poor pupil in a very poor school, with absentee teachers?
? Is it possible to provide basic-education-for-poverty-reduction without paying attention to the other levels of the education system, and can there be effective and sustainable interventions in the education system without there being parallel investments in the agricultural, industrial, employment ? or larger macroeconomic environment?
Learning from success? Not so easy.
McGinn?s lessons from the Tigers (above) suggests that lesson-learning may not be straightforward. If the initial success was based on an education that reflected indigenous values and attitudes, then there may be no ready systems thinking or model that can be easily transferred. If the crucial explanations are embedded in the culture, and involve such key attitudes as family beliefs in the efficacy of individual effort and application, or attitudes towards saving at all costs for education (and health), then explanations for the success, for example, of China, after the decade of the cultural revolution, may prove difficult. This is one reason why we have made analysis of China a key part of this NN37 discussion on educating out of poverty. There seems little doubt that there is more than one China, just as there is more than one India; thus the role of education in the majority Han culture may well be different from that in other ethnicities. Where teacher, family and pupil attitudes towards effort and hard work reinforce each other, there is a hugely important foundation on which educational planning and implementation can be built. Equally, however, China does point to the critical importance of central and local authorities taking seriously the obligation to deliver on legal educational commitments, for example on nine-year compulsory education. By contrast, top-down educational ?reform? in Mexico would appear to have been drowned or subverted in bureaucratisation (Martin NN37).
It may be a truism but any experiences coming from outside must suit the recipient countries? own history, culture and other national conditions (cf He NN37).
Donor additionality in targeting the poor ? how sustainable?
External donors have been responsible in large part for the poverty focus of the world?s current development agenda, in the International Development Targets and then the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). They have also sought to organize national planning around poverty reduction, as an aid conditionality, through the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRSP) process. This external architecture of planning poverty reduction for the developing world derives from donor countries some of whom continue to have very large inequalities between the rich and the poor in their own societies. Be that as it may, there is an important research question about the circumstances in which donor money may effectively make national policy-makers more poverty conscious. Read the following from a donor document of May 2006:
To ensure that our MDG work is properly targeted at the poor, we will work to help decision makers understand more clearly who the poor are and the nature of their poverty. Our programmes will include the perspectives of poor people themselves.
Donor money can certainly be targeted at improving pro-poor enrolments in basic education, despite the growing popularity amongst agencies of the sector-wide approach. But access alone is an insufficient condition for poverty reduction. If the children of the rural poor get access to a world of more than 350,000 substitute teachers in China who teach in the most poor and remote areas, or to the 3.5 million para-teachers in India?s poorer states (Santosh NN37), then they enter a very different environment from the privately subsidized urban and rural schools. The curriculum and learning environment of the schools attended by the poorest children whether in Asia, Africa or Latin America, in cities or in villages, are often appalling. Donor money can encourage access, especially if this allows education to be genuinely free, but no amount of donor money will retain children in useless schools: ?One of the undoubted reasons why poor people do not participate in education is that either they, or their parents, see little value in it. It fails to provide them with the skills or expertise that they think can make a significant difference to their lives? (Unwin NN37).
So the question for donor interventions in basic education must be: what leverage can they have beyond access? The other factors affecting school quality and effective outcomes require much deeper and more intrusive interventions than donors can probably implement, especially if they are true to the current rhetoric about the country being in the driver?s seat.
Education-for-poverty-reduction vs. the systematisation of inequalities
There is still a great deal of optimism about the impact of education, especially in poor communities. We certainly need to acknowledge the power and potential of education. It continues to allow talented individual children to escape from poverty. But the idea that education ? or skills training ? can somehow break the cycle of deprivation for whole communities of poor people needs to be examined carefully and critically. Too often it would appear that education is part of the problem of poverty rather than its solution. Here is what the Millennium Task Force on Education and Gender Equality argued:
The evidence from too many countries is that without a concerted policy to the contrary, current education systems reinforce rather than compensate for existing inequalities: the children of the rich acquire more education than the children of the poor?.Education systems can be part of a vicious cycle, locking out generations of the poor. (UN Millennium Project 2005: 24)
Campaigns for free education may help on the margin, but where the social composition of education and training appears to reflect systematised inequality of opportunity, it would be naïve to expect the education system alone to be the engine of economic, political and social change.
There is a danger of what can be termed ?edu-centricity? in some of this thinking about education ? the idea that education can play a more determining role in pro-poor change than it possibly can. The reality is that the poor are frequently in the poorest schools, with the poorest teachers. Why is this? Martin (NN37) argues that ?To a great extent factors outside the school system are to blame, principally, poverty, inequality, discrimination against the poor and ethnic minorities. These factors are reflected in the deficient quality of services that reach such populations?.
The ?returns? to being in a poor school with absentee teachers?
Although there has been an enormous amount written about the ?returns? to various levels of education (usually primary, secondary and higher), very little of this contentious and shifting debate about which level had the highest ?returns? has been disaggregated by the range of school quality. If this were done, it would confirm what any poor family knows: that the odds are stacked against poor children, in the poorer schools, in what is effectively an educational poverty trap. The discourse about primary education having the best return becomes suddenly meaningless in a educational setting where ?primary education is not enough to lift individuals out of poverty through employment and yet the poor have very little access to post-primary education of any quality. Costs, including fees and other expenses, constitute a major direct barrier? (CAS 2006).
Poverty reduction? Primary schools or indeed the education system cannot do it alone!
Our last point about the education-poverty relationship should by now be obvious. First, that primary schools ? even good ones, let alone ordinary ones ? need the presence of accessible post-primary institutions if the foundation skills of basic education are to come to fruition. Four years of education in a poor school is just that ? four years of education in a poor school. If a child from a poor family, however bright they are, is to make up for this disadvantage, they need the opportunity to compete, on merit, for good quality secondary, and then higher education.
But, second, it is not sufficient for universal primary schooling to be supported by positive opportunities within the education sector, at the post-basic levels; but there needs also to be outside the education system ?a progressive political environment and sound economic and social policies on the other? (UN Millennium Project 2005. 30).
This is the challenge to donors and national governments. Their policies cannot be restricted to the Education Sector or training sector alone, but they need to be intra-sectoral. This was the message of the Commission for Africa, the Millennium Project, and of the recently published World Bank Education Sector Strategy Update.
The ?End of Poverty?? No End to Poverty - The debate on Sachs continues!
In the last issue, NN36, we carried two pieces that were critical of Sachs, and his work on The End of Poverty. We had mentioned that there was a piece being written by Thandika Mkandawire on Sachs. It is now available under the title the ?Intellectual Itinerary of Jeffrey Sachs? and it appears in Vol 2, No 1 of 2006 of the Africa Review of Books.
Click here to access the web site for this CODESRIA publication.
There is a further piece on Sachs by Tim Unwin who also writes in this volume. This is called ?No End to Poverty Illustrated?
References
CAS 2006 Educating out of poverty. A status report for Ghana, India, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania, CAS, Edinburgh.
UN Millennium Project 2005 Toward universal primary education: investments, incentives and institutions, Report of the Task Force on Education and Gender Equality, Earthscan, London and New York.