Equity and Educational Improvement in Ghana and Pakistan

• In Event: Equity and Educational Transformation in a Cross-National Perspective

Abstract

Approximately 258 million children are out of school, 17% of the global total of school-age adolescents (UNESCO, 2020). The Global Education Monitoring Report 2020 highlights that in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), adolescents from the wealthiest 20% households are three times more likely to complete lower-secondary school than those from the poorest households. This is, however, just one dimension of inequity facing the students of the Global South. Gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, religion, migration or displacement status, disability, have all been the basis for discrimination for those participating in the education system. This paper attempts to unpack what inequities are the focus of educational systems in LMICs and why? And to address certain inequities, which groups are left behind?

Specifically, this paper will draw from studies in Ghana and Pakistan that investigate two dimensions of education policy – how system-level management and leadership reforms lead to school improvement, and how specific programs and interventions improve outcomes for the most disadvantaged students.

In Ghana, the project explores the ways in which subnational actors i.e., regional and district directors make decisions about planning and implementation of education reform, grounded in theoretical paradigms of accountability, capacity, and networks in education systems (Honig, 2022; Prichett, 2015). We learnt that goals and priorities are driven by the National Education Sector Plan, which includes a wide range of equity targets. However, subnational actors focus on narrowly defined targets because of the accountability-driven administrative structure. Specifically, subnational actors, in practice, overwhelmingly focus on improving the average pass rates on the national examination for their respective districts, instead of more disaggregated targets by gender, disability status, or socio-economic disadvantage. We explore the implications of this at the school level.

In Pakistan, our project investigates the role of communicating teacher’s expectations about math performance on academic achievement (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968). We designed the study with private schools with a gender component (i.e., matching students of the opposite sex to work together to achieve their teachers’ expectations) given the disparities in teacher’s expectations between boys and girls, low performance of girls in math, and the potential of peer effects (Bursztyn et al., 2019). However, the project faced resistance by the schools because of the cultural norms of gender segregation and we matched students of the same sex for the project. Since the private, donor, and NGO sector overwhelmingly focuses on girl’s education in Pakistan (e.g., the World Bank and Malala Fund), we explore how cultural norms shaped the development of the project and the achievement of equity goals.

Together, these two projects provide a steppingstone to understand how the equity focus is demonstrated in practice in both the public and private education sectors, what shapes these policy priorities and who is left behind, and what are the implications of these inequities across different organizational and cultural contexts.

Author

• Minahil Assim, University of Ottawa