The Problem of Education Quality in Developing Countries - Chuyên Trang Chia Sẻ Kiến Thức Thời Trang Mới Nhất

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Introduction

Universal basic education was set to be one of the great development successes of the twentieth century, as countries all around the world enthusiastically expanded provision, enrolling ever more of their young in primary and secondary schools. Yet by the early 2000s, it was already evident that not only were millions still out of school, but that a majority dropped out early, attended sporadically, or learned little while there (UNESCO 2014). As one observer summarized it, ‘schooling ain’t learning’ (Pritchett 2013): there is more to learning than placing children in schools. The ‘learning crisis’ is acknowledged in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 to ‘ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning’,1 an emphasis on quality and equality in contrast to the focus on access in Millennium Development Goal 2. This learning crisis is widely yet unevenly spread, varying between countries, classes, genders, and social groups (World Bank 2017). But whereas expanding primary schooling was a comparatively popular and measurably successful policy goal, addressing poor quality teaching and low levels of learning has so far proven less so (Bruns and Schneider 2016). A few countries have managed to expand their education systems while enhancing learning. But it is easier to build schools, abolish fees, recruit more teachers, and instruct parents to send their children, than it is to ensure that schools, teachers, and students are equipped and motivated for teaching and learning once there.

This book contributes to making sense of this global learning crisis, by exploring the conditions under which reforms likely to shift education provisioning onto a higher-quality pathway are undertaken and enacted. It takes as its starting point the view that politics is likely to matter in explaining why this is the case. As a recent review put it, education reform is:

a highly charged and politicized process; what gets implemented—and its impact—depends as much or more on the politics of the reform process as the technical design of the reform.

, 5)

(Bruns and Schneider 2016 , 5)

There are good reasons to believe that variations in how countries adopt and implement reforms necessary to promote learning relate to differences in their political economies. These differences may play out in the design of reforms that are attempted and adopted, and in what gets implemented—including that it is more politically popular and less taxing of often weak state capacities to expand school provision than to improve learning outcomes. Yet, barring some notable exceptions (e.g. Grindle 2004), there has been little political analysis of education in general (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011; Gift and Wibbels 2014), and still less on the political economy of education quality in developing countries—a gap that has been noted and bemoaned in several recent reviews (Kingdon et al. 2014; Nicolai et al. 2014; Wales, Magee, and Nicolai 2016; Bruns and Schneider 2016). As a contribution to filling this critical gap, this book sets out and tests hypotheses about how different types of political context interact with the education policy domain in ways that shape the uptake and implementation of reforms designed to improve learning outcomes.

The book features comparative analysis of the politics of education quality reforms across six low- to middle-income countries—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda—all of which were relatively successful at rapidly expanding access to primary schooling, but which have all found it much harder to improve learning outcomes, in part (we suggest) because of the variable levels of political commitment that exist in each context for reforms aimed at improving the quality of education. In this volume, we understand political commitment to reflect the incentives and ideas that predominate amongst political elites, and which are shaped by the underlying character of politics and power in specific contexts. The concept we use to describe ‘the balance or distribution of power between contending social groups and social classes, on which any state is based’ (di John and Putzel 2009, 4) is a ‘political settlement’, and we have chosen our cases to represent different types of these settlements.

The comparison explores how different distributions of power shaped incentives and ideas around education quality reforms and the institutions and processes of implementation, tracing the politics of reform from the political centre down through different levels of governance to the school, taking into account the impact of the external environment (for example, aid) and the policy legacies and challenges in each context. What we want to examine here is less the broad question of ‘how politics shapes educational outcomes’ per se, than the ways in which politics shapes the commitment and capacity of elites and governments in developing countries to promote reforms that are aimed at improving learning outcomes. In particular, and following several systematic reviews of what works to improve learning outcomes in developing countries (e.g. Glewwe et al. 2011; Tikly and Barrett 2013), we focus on efforts to improve the level and management of resourcing accorded to schools, and the quality and presence of teachers through training, incentives, and oversight mechanisms.

What we know about quality reforms is that they are inherently more difficult to design and to ‘sell’ to the public: there is less certainty about ‘what works’ and results are harder to measure (Nelson 2007). It is easier to design and implement top-down command-and-control responses to build more schools and recruit more teachers and children than to devise workable solutions to the ‘craft’ challenge of the interpersonal, transactional nature of effective teaching and learning (Pritchett 2013). Strengthening local accountability is difficult. Teachers, the group whose interests are most likely to suffer from reforms to enhance their performance accountability, tend to be well-organized, influential, and equipped to resist them (Corrales 1999, 2006; Moe and Wiborg 2017; Kingdon et al. 2014; Béteille, Kingdon, and Muzammil 2016). Parents and communities, particularly in developing countries, are often less well-equipped and informed to articulate demand for quality improvements from their political leaders or frontline providers (Dunne et al. 2007; Mani and Mukand 2007). This means that for parents and communities, both the ‘long route’ (via the process of political representation) and the ‘short route’ (via relationships with frontline providers, teachers, and schools) to accountability for the delivery of high quality education, may be obstructed or subverted (World Bank 2003). A recent review concluded that three features of the politics of education are particularly relevant in analysing the prospects for reform: (i) the strength of teacher unions compared with other education stakeholders or labour unions; (ii) the ‘opacity of the classroom’—the need for reforms to shape teacher behaviour in the classroom, over which direct control is impossible; and (iii) the slow or lagged nature of the results of quality reforms (compared, for example, with the abolition of fees, learning reforms will yield no instant or obvious political return) (Bruns and Schneider 2016).

The World Bank identifies children’s unreadiness to learn, along with teacher and school management skills, and inadequate school inputs, as the proximate determinants of the learning crisis (World Bank 2017). It argues that the intractability of education quality reforms is not inherently a matter of inadequate resources, although many failing systems are also under-resourced (UNESCO 2014; World Bank 2017). Instead, it is a problem of ‘misalignment’ between learning goals, policies, and practices, in which the dominant role of teacher unions and other forms of ‘unhealthy politics’ plays an important and persistent role (World Bank 2017). It concludes that ‘healthier’ forms of politics—in particular the use of information to increase ‘the political incentives for learning’ and broad-based pro-reform coalitions—are critical to align goals, policies, and practices around improved learning. While highlighting the significance of the politics of teacher and school management on the frontline of the learning crisis, the emphasis on ‘alignment’ sidelines the significance of contention in education reform, and fails to address the questions to which it gives rise: under what conditions do broad-based, pro-reform coalitions come about? In which political contexts does information about education performance become embedded in functioning mechanisms of accountability? Why do some states visibly devote more capacity to learning and more political resources to quality reforms than others?

This book seeks to pick up the analysis at the point where the World Development Report (WDR) 2018 leaves off, pursuing a political explanation of the misalignments and contentions that shape the uptake of learning reforms. The analysis seeks to test assumptions that political settlements where elites have shorter time-horizons (competitive and clientelistic settlements, such as those in Ghana and Bangladesh) are less likely to take up the politically intractable task of redistributing power in the education system than those (the dominant settlements of Cambodia and Rwanda) where elites are better insulated, can adopt longer-term horizons and might be more likely to take up developmentally important projects. It also seeks to explore how different political settlements interact with systems of governance within the domain of education, ranged from traditional hierarchically organized bureaucracies to multi-stakeholder models, to create a range of different outcomes in ‘the many layers within a specific sector in between the top levels of policymaking and the service provision frontline’ (Levy and Walton 2013, 4).

Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 sets out the intellectual rationale for a political settlement-based approach to the analysis of education quality reforms, and establishes the theoretical framework and methodological approach used to research the politics in the cases presented here. Chapters 3 through 8 comprise the set of six country cases, each of which gives an account of the quality of basic education and its development in that country; of the political settlement and its influences on education policy and the reform agenda; and of the implementation of policies aimed at improving learning from the national level downwards through sub-national levels of governance and, in most cases, through to schools themselves. Chapter 9draws together the theoretical, methodological, and empirical findings from the comparative analysis, and points towards areas for further conceptual development and empirical research. The book concludes with two commentaries from leading authorities in the field on the arguments and cases presented in the book.

The Global Learning Crisis

From an access point of view, progress towards universal primary education in low-income countries accelerated markedly in the past two decades (see Figure 1.1). Globally, 93 per cent of children now attend primary school at the appropriate age, up from 84 per cent in 1999. By 2015, 20 million more developing country children had completed primary school than would have done so had the rate of school expansion before 2000 continued. In seventeen countries, age-correct enrolment rates increased by more than 20 per cent between 1999 and 2012, implying a remarkably rapid expansion. And gains were concentrated in the poorest world regions of Sub-Saharan Africa (where the net enrolment ratio [NER] rose from 59 per cent in 1999 to 79 per cent in 2012) and South and West Asia (where it went from 78 to 94 per cent over the same period). Between 2000 and 2010, NER increased from 27 to almost 64 per cent in Niger, from 42 to 76 per cent in Guinea, and in Burundi, from less than 41 to 94 per cent in 2010. The proportion of children who had never attended school dropped in Ethiopia from 67 per cent in 2000 to 28 per cent in 2011, and in Tanzania from 47 per cent in 1999 to 12 per cent in 2010. Globally, gender parity in enrolment was achieved at primary level and almost achieved at secondary level over the period, in part due to the push on girls’ education from MDG3 on gender equality; of countries with data, 69 per cent were set to achieve gender parity at primary level, but only less than half at secondary level by 2015.2

Figure 1.1

Primary enrolment rates worldwide, 1970–2015 Open in new tabDownload slide

Primary enrolment rates worldwide, 1970–2015

Source: World Development Indicators (accessed 12 July 2017).

However, the idea that mass education was ‘one of the successes of the MDGs’ has been tempered by ‘more sobering trends’ (Unterhalter 2014, 181). Large numbers of children remain excluded from school, with 58 million children aged six to eleven unenrolled in 2012, many in conflict-affected regions. At least one-fifth of all children were likely to drop out before completing primary in 32 countries, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNESCO 2015). And rural–urban location, socio-economic class, and marginalization and social exclusion continued to determine which children enrolled and stayed on in school. Despite gains in gender parity on literacy in many places, progress towards adult literacy has been slow; in fact, almost all gains have been due to the transition of schooled youth into adulthood, rather than programmes of learning for adults. About half a billion women still lacked basic literacy in 2015 (UNESCO 2015). And while most children in most countries can now attend school, in a great many, a minority learn as much as their governments expect them to. By their own standards, a large number of developing country school systems are failing to endow their students with even minimum competencies of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Globally, some 125 million children do not attain functional literacy or numeracy even after four years of school, while the majority—in some cases the vast majority—of primary school students in many education systems do not attain even the basic competencies in reading or arithmetic needed to continue their learning (World Bank 2017).

The poor quality of the education received by the majority in developing countries is of particular concern because of the potential role of good quality education in reversing—or reinforcing—economic and related inequalities. The quality of education is increasingly understood to be a more powerful driver of economic growth than the size of an education system, and higher-quality basic education is associated with more inclusive and equitable forms of growth (Hanushek 2009; Hanushek and Woessmann 2007). However, the learning crisis aggravates, and is aggravated by, social and economic inequalities of all kinds. Differences in learning attainments between lower- and higher-income regions and countries are substantial, as a comparison of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test scores shows: the average student in a low-income country performs worse than 95 per cent of students in OECD countries—that is, would require remedial lessons in any developed country school system. Differences within a region can also be significant: Colombian students attain basic literacy six years earlier than their Bolivian counterparts, while only 19 per cent of young Nigerian primary school completers can read, compared with 80 per cent in Tanzania (World Bank 2017). Girls, rural students, and children from minority or other socially marginalized groups generally learn less, compared with boys, city children, and other advantaged groups (World Bank 2017). This reflects how gender and class disadvantage, remote geography, and membership of marginalized social groups amplify unequal learning outcomes; these then accumulate as children transition through the education system and on into the labour market (UNESCO 2012, 2014). Nonetheless, some countries outperform others on learning indicators: Vietnam, for instance, performs much better than predicted by its per capita income; students in Latvia and Albania similarly learn more than expected from their other social and economic indicators (World Bank 2017). This again reinforces the sense that the drivers of educational quality are not simply related to economic or cultural factors, and that political factors are likely to play a significant role here.

Roots of the Learning Crisis: Lessons from Efforts at Reform

Why is the learning crisis so pervasive and apparently stubborn, when policies of educational expansion were so rapidly and enthusiastically adopted across the developing world? Improving quality is recognized to be more expensive and more difficult than increasing school places, and there is a perceived trade-off between keeping unit costs low and maximizing learning achievement (Nicolai et al. 2014, 2). Enabling high quality learning is particularly challenging amongst low-income populations because of: institutional or personal biases against children from poor or marginalized groups (UNESCO 2010); challenges in the home environment (Smith and Barrett 2011); the adverse cognitive effects of early and chronic malnourishment (Crookston et al. 2010, 2013; World Bank 2017); and dropout, poor attendance, child labour, and other characteristic features of childhoods lived in extreme poverty (Rose and Dyer 2008). School meals tend to raise participation and attendance rates, for instance, but evidence that school meals improve learning outcomes is more mixed (Adelman, Gilligan, and Lehrer 2008; Snilstveit et al. 2015). Poverty and inequality may be the biggest obstacles to education quality (Tikly and Barrett 2013), but while good quality education may be the surest pathway out of poverty and towards more equitable societies, there are few simple solutions to raising education standards in such settings. There is, in any case, limited consensus about what works to improve learning, as a recent ‘review of reviews’ found (Evans and Popova 2016).

Under-resourced and poorly managed systems lead to persistently poor quality basic education, but more finance is not necessarily the answer. Low- and middle-income countries typically spend too little on education: only 41 of 150 countries for which data is available spend the recommended 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education, and 25 countries spend less than half that. Globally, the average proportion of public spending on education was only 15 per cent (against a recommended 20 per cent), a proportion that has barely changed since 1999; in some low- and middle-income countries, the share of education in public spending dropped below 5 per cent of GDP during the MDG period (UNESCO 2014). Under-resourcing does not explain all of the problems of education quality, but it helps to explain why fewer than 5 per cent of Tanzanian students have their own reading textbook, why 130 Malawian students cram into the average first-year classroom, and why only one in four Chad schools has a toilet (UNESCO 2014).

Yet the extent to which resources shape education quality is known to be highly variable, depending on how they are governed and managed at the different levels of education systems. The resources that do reach schools are often poorly deployed, usually because of over-centralized control, so that the meagre resources are inefficiently and ineffectively used, and the evidence on how more resources contribute to better learning via lower pupil–teacher ratios and more qualified teachers is mixed and context-specific (Glewwe et al. 2011). In their review of seventy-nine studies in developing countries, Glewwe et al. (2011, 41) concluded that a reasonably functional physical classroom tended to matter, but so did teachers with more subject knowledge, longer school days, and the provision of tuition; by contrast, teacher absence had a ‘clear negative effect’. Many teachers freelance as private tutors or find other ways to supplement their income (Bray 2006). Leakage is common, particularly through loss of public sector employee time (Chaudhury et al. 2004).

Where teachers do show up, they are often themselves too poorly educated to impart high quality learning: most new teachers in The Gambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Chad, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, and Cameroon did not even meet secondary school minimum qualifications for teachers in the 1990s (UNESCO 2004). And, despite massive investments in teacher training in the 2000s, in one-third of countries less than 75 per cent of teachers are trained even up to (often quite low) national standards (UNESCO 2014). Tikly and Barrett (2013, 4) found that while low reading and mathematics attainments were closely linked to poverty and inequality, ‘schools can make a difference’, even more so in lower-income countries than in richer countries, particularly through effective school leadership and teacher management. As the World Bank (2017) summarized it, the four determinants of the learning crisis are: (i) children do not arrive ready to learn; (ii) teachers often lack the needed skills and motivation; (iii) school management skills are low; and (iv) school inputs have failed to keep pace with expansion. A critical lesson is that learning crises are systemic, not merely errors at the margin: entire education systems generally fail to deliver adequate levels of learning. This reflects the ‘misalignment’ of the goals and practices of the education system with the learning outcomes it needs to generate, notably on matters such as setting learning objectives and responsibilities, monitoring learning, financing, and the motivations and incentives of key actors within the system (World Bank 2017).

What causes these misalignments? The World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People, undertook a political analysis of service delivery failures, linking them to weak or dysfunctional relationships of accountability between citizens and service-users (with respect to education, parents, and students) and service providers (teachers, officials, politicians) (World Bank 2003). Four dimensions of accountability most needed strengthening in relation to education performance: (i) voice, or how well citizens could hold the state—politicians and policymakers—accountable for performance in discharging its responsibility for education; (ii) compacts, or how well and how clearly the responsibilities and objectives of public engagement were communicated to the public, and to private organizations that provide services (Ministries of Education, school districts); (iii) management, or the actions that created effective frontline providers (teachers, administrators) within organizations; and (iv) client power, or how well citizen-clients could increase the accountability of schools and school systems (World Bank 2003, 113). Central insights included that accountability for public service provision could be exercised via the ‘long route to accountability’, whereby citizens and civil society mandate political actors to provide education services, politicians then direct state actors to design such services, and the central state then tasks local governments and frontline service to deliver the services (and they are potentially punished electorally for failures at education service delivery); or via the ‘short route’, through which service-users hold frontline providers directly to account, through the use of their powers as consumers or rights-bearing citizens to demand services and sanction failures (World Bank 2003).

Recognizing the central importance of accountability, efforts to strengthen the ‘short route’ to accountable education provision took the form of interventions and experiments to promote community participation in school-based management; induce community monitoring of school quality indicators, such as enrolment, attendance, and performance; introduce vouchers and other ‘school choice’ initiatives; and efforts to monitor teacher performance, amongst others. It seems clear that teachers perform best when motivated and monitored to do so (Bruns, Filmer, and Patrinos 2011; Bruns and Luque 2014), yet efforts to enhance learning by strengthening ‘client power’ have yielded mixed results (Bruns et al. 2011; Carr-Hill et al. 2015; Snilstveit et al. 2015; World Bank 2017). Carr-Hill et al. (2015) found that community participation in school management yielded positive and large effects in middle-income countries, but smaller and more uneven results in poorer countries, where, amongst other things, community members lacked the capacities or incentives to engage with school performance (see also Dunne et al. 2007).

Some of these interventions, particularly the quasi-experimental efforts at information and monitoring, were introduced with limited reference to the political contexts within which they needed to operate, something which recent reviews of social accountability have found to be critical (Devarajan, Khemani, and Walton 2011; Hickey and King 2016). These ‘widgets’—pared-down tools for project intervention that failed to engage with the deeper and wider politics of school provision—had little prospect of strengthening accountability for public service delivery (Joshi and Houtzager 2012). Citizen power involves a transformation of political relationships, not merely the ‘teeth’ or consumer power to make choices at the frontline, but the ‘voice’ to mandate public action, and to demand accountability (Fox 2015). In the terms of the WDR 2004, the short route to accountability needs the ‘voice’ of political claims- and policymaking for it to be effective, while at the local level, education service delivery only has ‘teeth’—the ability to punish failures—when citizens and service-users have the capacities to demand, and receive, improved performance on the frontline (see also Westhorp et al. 2014).

These bottom-up pressures also need to be backed up by top-down pressure from within the political and bureaucratic system (Booth 2012), often through combined forms of diagonal accountability that join up oversight mechanisms in pursuit of more responsive and effective performance (Goetz and Jenkins 2005; Joshi and Houtzager 2012). The nature of the ‘craft’ in the interpersonal activity of teaching and learning means that effective school systems need to be organized like starfish—independently functional and responsive to differences in environment, yet connected to the whole—rather than, as most are, like spiders, directly controlled from the centre (Pritchett 2013). Yet central control remains an important political objective in many school systems, whether under democratic or authoritarian rule, and whether state capacity can be judged strong or weak.

These lessons have renewed attention to the politics of the ‘long route’ to accountability in education provision. In the first World Development Report on education (World Bank 2017) the roots of the learning crisis are framed as both technical and political. In one important example, national learning assessments are seen as vital to create ‘measures for learning [to] guide action’ as well as ‘measures of learning [to] spur action’, by increasing public participation and awareness of school performance; providing parents with evidence needed to make better choices; and raising voice via ‘the long route of accountability, where learning metrics may help citizens use the political process to hold politicians accountable for learning’ (World Bank 2017, 94). Yet, while ‘political impetus’ has been critical to the adoption and implementation of learning reforms, powerful political incentives, including ‘unhealthy’ relationships between teacher unions and political and bureaucratic interests, can also ensure the goals and practices of the system remain misaligned with those of children’s learning (World Bank 2017).

Understanding the Political Economy of Education Quality Reforms

It may be true that ‘education systems are what they are, and indeed, the schools are what they are—everywhere in the world, regardless of the nation—because politics makes them that way’ (Moe and Wiborg 2017). Yet political science has paid little attention to education, for reasons that include lack of data and the specific disciplinary challenge (for political science) of accessing household dynamics and decision-making processes at multiple levels (Gift and Wibbels 2014; Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011; Ansell 2010). There has been some interest in the comparative politics of education, including in developing countries (for instance, Baum and Lake 2003; Brown and Hunter 2004), but it remains a new thematic area for the discipline, and one in which theorizing is in its infancy. The next section briefly discusses existing political science theories of education provision in light of the distinct challenges and concerns of developing countries, before moving on to the literature on the politics of education quality in developing country settings. This includes a discussion of the need to maintain a distinction between the politics of education in advanced, industrialized societies with long-established systems of mass education, and the politics of education in societies whose population includes many first-generation learners, where mass education is still a novelty and where transnational influences may be stronger.

Gift and Wibbels (2014) argue that the basis for a political science theory of education is as a function of the interaction between demand and supply: how much education a society receives is a function of: (a) the demand for skills emanating from the labour market and the economy; and (b) how, and the extent to which, those skills are supplied through the education system. Parents are assumed to ‘naturally prefer’ schools that are good for their children, and, to a greater or lesser extent, to mandate politicians to deliver them. How successfully they organize to assert their demands will determine what states provide. Ansell (2010) similarly notes that a political theory of education must rest on insights (a) that education is essentially redistributive and, depending on how resources are spent, can be progressive or otherwise; and (b) that ‘public education policy is heavily affected by the nature of the global market for educated labor’ (Ansell 2010, 3).

Not all the assumptions made by Gift and Wibbels (2014) hold in contexts where mass formal schooling is still new. Gift and Wibbels view the outcome as a matter of magnitude, with the dependent variable being public spending on education. But if the heart of the problem is that schools and teachers are unaccountable to the parents and pupils they are supposed to serve, this implies a change in the relative political power of these groups, and not—or not only—more resources. In fact, more resources may exacerbate the problem, entrenching public sector interests in the existing system, making teacher unions stronger, expanding poorly managed services to an even wider population. Parents may know neither what to expect nor what to demand (for instance, Martínez 2012; Dunne et al. 2007; Mani and Mukand 2007). The capacity of citizens to demand and achieve improved levels of service provision is in general closely shaped by issues of poverty, exclusion, and inequality (Hickey and King 2016).

In developing countries with limited state capacity, the strongest demand for an educated population may come from the state itself. Many developing countries lack the human resources to staff the state; as we have already seen, many low-income countries cannot recruit enough educated teachers. Education provision may thus be insulated against state weaknesses and/or the problems of personalized as opposed to programmatic policy regimes, but with limited implications for quality: ‘in an environment of weak state capacity, democracy may prompt governments to increase education access, but not education inputs’ (Harding and Stasavage 2014, 230). The likely absence of programmatic education agendas in developing countries may also be related to the general absence of programmatic class-based parties; the political history of education in developed countries indicates that parties and coalitions on the left and centre are more likely to promote wider access to education, and are associated with higher public spending on education (Busemeyer 2014).

Demand for educated labour from employers may be weak in low-income developing countries with large ‘reserve army’ populations, or because low-capital enterprises generally need little skilled labour. It seems clear that the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach to understanding differences in education policy on the basis of ‘a functional complementarity between skill formation and welfare state policies’ (Busemeyer 2014, 35) offers limited insights into situations where the relationship between labour, capital, and the state is informal, paternalistic, and unorganized. Corrales argues that it is possible that ‘more exposure to capitalism prompts governments and constituents to protect education expenditures’, but that how domestic politics interacts with opportunities and constraints in the global economy shapes the politics of investment in education (Corrales 2006, 240). Doner and Schneider (2016, 635) note that informality, inequality, and a reliance on foreign direct investment can fragment business and labour, and ‘undercut the potential demand for upgrading institutions’.

Of the available scholarship that does focus on the political economy of education in developing countries,3 it is possible to differentiate between those studies which focus on how national-level politics shapes educational policies in broad terms (e.g. Stasavage 2005; Kosack 2009; Kosack 2012) and those that look more specifically at how politics (e.g. Grindle 2004) and governance arrangements (Pritchett 2013) play out within education systems. Within each of these literatures, there is a further distinction between a focus on formal institutional arrangements (e.g. Ansell 2008 and Stasavage 2005 on democracy; Pritchett 2013 on education sector governance; World Bank 2003 on formal accountability structures) and those that focus on informal power and politics (e.g. Kosack 2012 on political coalitions; Grindle 2004 on policy coalitions; also, Wales et al. 2016).

Analysis of the relationship between democracy and education tends to find that democracy exerts a positive influence on governments’ financial commitments to education (Stasavage 2005; Ansell 2008). But this may not advance understanding of reforms aimed at learning, as opposed to access. Nelson (2007) argues that competitive elections may create pressures to increase but not to improve or reallocate provision, because the political incentives to do so are so weak and non-urgent. Kosack (2012) also goes beyond regime-type explanations in search of a less formal and institutional analysis, arguing that none of the three most common political–economic explanations (relating to regime type, education cultures, and governmental commitment to economic performance) predict the realities of education policies. In his analysis of Taiwan, Ghana, and Brazil, Kosack concludes that answers to two questions can explain patterns of education investment: whose support does a government need to stay in power? What sort of education do those citizens want? Kosack identifies situations in which political entrepreneurs help disorganized groups to organize around common interests on education, as through the formation of coalitions between populist leaders and rural constituencies (Kosack 2012; also Corrales 1999). By extension of the same logic regarding the role of coalitions in shaping policy preferences, it may well be that developing countries lack the kinds of organized groups that might constitute a coalition in favour of a better trained citizenry and labour force (e.g. middle-class parents, organized capitalists).

This focus on informal forms of politics seems to characterize the most insightful comparative work to date on education politics. Merilee Grindle’s (2004) seminal work on education sector reform in Latin America notes that whereas access reforms were ‘“easy” from a political economy perspective’ (Grindle 2004, 6), reforms aimed at improving quality in the 1990s:

involved the potential for lost jobs, and lost control over budgets, people, and decisions. They exposed students, teachers, and supervisors to new pressures and expectations. Teachers’ unions charged that they destroyed long existing rights and career tracks.

, 6)

(Grindle 2004 , 6)

The wider literature supports the presumption that teachers are typically the best organized and most vocal group empowered to influence education policy and reforms, and that influence is not always benign (Moe and Wiborg 2017; Bruns and Schneider 2016; Kingdon et al. 2014; Rosser and Fahmi 2018; Béteille et al. 2016). Nevertheless, Grindle’s cases of education quality reforms in Latin America show that reforms could succeed, depending on how they were introduced, designed, approved, and implemented. Reform-oriented coalitions within the education sector were particularly important in her cases. Corrales (1999) similarly suggests that policy entrepreneurs tend to emerge in response to high-level government commitment to reforms. But a recent review of the politics of education quality in developing countries found that the visibility and ‘political returns’ of educational investments, information asymmetries, particularly around performance assessment, and patterns of demand and accountability, including capacities for collective action, tended to limit commitment to quality reforms (Nicolai et al. 2014, 5).

In terms of studies on the significance of formal governance arrangements within the education sector, there has been a focus on both the national- and local-level systems, and within each of these on the appropriate balance between top-down and bottom-up forms of accountability mechanisms. Pritchett (2013) argues that school systems are often highly centralized, which can work well to deliver expanded provision quickly, but which may exclude local parents and teachers from influence, and so deliver schooling without learning. A similar point is made by Tikly and Barrett (2013, 20), who conclude that ‘weighting accountability towards top-down control … can constrain the space for teacher autonomy, reducing responsive inclusion and curricula relevance at the classroom level’.

However, formal governance arrangements rarely play out according to design in developing countries (Andrews 2013). Kingdon et al. (2014, 2) note that the supposed benefits of decentralization ‘do not accrue in practice because in poor rural areas the local elite closes up the spaces for wider community representation and participation in school affairs’. They suggest the effects of decentralization are ‘especially problematic when accountability systems are weak, and there is little parental information or awareness of how to hold schools responsible’ (Kingdon et al. 2014, 28). A good deal of work has been undertaken at the level of schools themselves, particularly in terms of the type of oversight and accountability measures associated with improved levels of performance. Westhorp et al.’s (2014) systematic review of the circumstances under which decentralization, school-based management, accountability initiatives, and community schools influence education outcomes, particularly for the poor, found that a wide range of approaches had achieved some degree of success. These include the introduction of rewards in conjunction with sanctions; performance monitoring by the community members, including traditional authorities and politicians; and the introduction of direct accountability relationships, including the power to hire and fire between school management committees and staff. However, school-level interventions are rarely enough on their own: to work, they depend on a supportive political context, an adequately-resourced education sector with a strong national system for assessment, and high-capacity local actors, including school management committees, head teachers, and local community actors.

Some research into the politics of education in developing countries has focused more on the ideas (rather than only the incentives) that shape elite behaviour. A good deal of work on elite perceptions and commitment has identified education as being an area that attracts a high level of consensus from ruling elites, as compared with other aspects of social policy (e.g. Hossain 2005; Hossain and Moore 2002). Contemporary developing countries are part of a world system in which mass education is, or is becoming, the norm, so that integration into that world system depends on the provision of mass education, and provision of mass education legitimates state authority (Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer 1985; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992; see also Corrales 2006; Tikly 2001). Policy and political elites may ‘demand’ education as part of a developmentalist agenda of nation building or economic development, or as an instrument for achieving other social policy goals (e.g. fertility control: Colclough 2012; Ansell 2010).

Finally, international actors have played a significant role in driving up the levels of investment in education in developing countries, and in ensuring that a significant effort is made to target this provision at poorer groups. This is in part through the transnational advocacy coalition that comprised the Global Campaign for Education (Gaventa and Mayo 2009), as well as the strong pressures that international aid agencies have often exerted over education policy within countries that rely on overseas development finance. The Millennium Development Goals helped to provide further impetus here. However, the influence of aid agencies within the global South is declining, and there is little evidence to date that donors or international agencies have succeeded in promoting reforms targeted at improving the quality of education, despite efforts in this direction (Wales et al. 2016), including through the Sustainable Development Goals.

Overall, then, there have been some important studies of the politics of educational quality in developing countries, even if these are few in nature. Of these, the ones that most closely address our concern with the politics of promoting difficult reforms aimed at tackling the learning crisis have tended to emphasize the role of informal as well as formal institutional processes, ideas as well as incentives, and actors operating at multiple scales, from the global through to the local, and often in the form of coalitions. Given that none have presented a conceptual framework that can help capture these multiple factors, we try to address this failing in the next chapter, where we set out an approach that helped guide the studies reported on here and which we hope can be of some use in guiding further work in the field.

Conclusion: Understanding Education Quality Reform Demands a Political Approach

The global learning crisis manifests itself in low learning attainments in each of the six countries studied here. Their experiences are reflected across the struggles faced by low- and middle-income countries to grow their education systems in an increasingly competitive global economy dependent on skills. This book helps to make sense of the global learning crisis by exploring the proposition that politics matters, centrally, in explaining why some countries are doing better at raising the quality of education than others. But how might politics matter? Political analysis of education is limited, both empirically and theoretically, and both in developed and in developing countries. While there are good reasons to believe that the difference in the uptake of quality reforms and their implementation relates to differences of a political nature, there is little conceptual work with which to build a theoretical framework for analysing how that works, or evidence to test it. This book contributes both evidence of how politics influences reforms in developing countries, and to the construction of theory about how this comes about. It does this by setting out and testing hypotheses about how the political settlement and its relationship to the domain of education have shaped the uptake, success, or failure of recent efforts to bring about education quality reform.

Education quality reforms tend to be less politically tractable than programmes of expansion. The nature and distribution of power over the vital resource involved in education quality—teaching—are necessarily at the centre of this analysis. Quality reforms are difficult to design and difficult to deliver: less is known about ‘what works’ and achievement is hard to measure. Weak state capacity has not prevented children from attending school, but it is very likely to shape what happens once they get there. Yet strong state capacity in relation to education may not necessarily or only mean centralized power; effective education systems must be responsive and adaptive to local needs, granting enough autonomy for schools to be accountable to the local communities they seek to educate. The governance and institutional reforms needed to build effective schools are intensely political and involve struggles over power, whether in terms of the authority to define the content and direction of nation building, the power to deploy the vast national teaching force, or the resources to spend on school buildings and teachers’ pay.

The following chapters look at how politics is shaping the level of capacity and commitment of elites to improving the quality of public education and its governance in developing countries. These chapters explore variations in the extent to which countries have adopted and implemented reforms aimed at improving learning outcomes, and in how those reforms have played out in terms of improved learning. Next, Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for understanding the politics of education in developing countries within which such analysis can be conducted.

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