The Politics of Education in Developing Countries

• In Event: New insights on the Politics of Social Policy

Abstract

This paper explains how poverty and politics can interact in ways that make it difficult for developing countries to provide their children with a decent education. As the rest of the world embarks on a new phase of globalization oriented around knowledge-based information economies--and as PISA test results in many developing countries continue to disappoint--calls for education reform have taken on greater urgency. On this, the pressing need for reform, there is universal agreement. But as to how that reform process actually works, here there is little agreement, or frankly much disagreement either. For questions about the process of education reform are ultimately questions about politics, and while we know a great deal about the economics of education, we know surprisingly little education politics, particularly in developing countries. Why do most of the education reform initiatives get nowhere even when the reformers pursuing them have the best of intentions and their proposals are backed up by solid evidence? As for the exceptions--the reform ideas that do see the light of day--why do so many end up being rolled back before they generate any real or lasting impact on basic literacy and learning? If a country’s dysfunctional education system keeps reasserting itself, it isn’t a fluke. It is because the opponents of reform are politically powerful. This paper explains who these opponents are and how they came to be (and stay) so powerful.

In moving this theoretical agenda forward, the paper will also be moving it outward, to parts of the developing world whose education systems have yet to receive the attention they deserve. The politics surrounding democratic Liberia’s recent experiment with charter schools is one example. Teachers employed in Liberia’s regular, non-charter schools have not exactly welcomed this new initiative; nor have the local politicians who appointed those teachers and, by doing so, won their political support. Although it is just one pilot project in just one country--and it is hardly a shining success--Liberia’s experience turns out to reveal larger political-institutional dynamics that cut across many of the developing world’s new democracies and apply to school reform politics in general. My paper’s emphasis on these larger forces is another way in which it departs from previous scholarship.

The paper concludes by calling for new leadership: developing countries will not get better schools until they get a better class of politicians. But better politicians--leaders less enmeshed in their countries’ current educational establishments--do not fall from the sky. From where, then, do they emerge? It is tempting to think that the leaders of top-down, centralized systems would be the most passionate reformers. And yet the defining feature of centralized systems is precisely their unaccountability. What we have here is a political Catch 22: root-and-branch reform requires sustained leadership, but the politicians most likely to exercise “sustained leadership” in developing countries are rarely reformers. They are anti-reformers. As leaders, they want to keep things as they are--and why wouldn’t they? Their country’s institutional arrangements enabled them to win power in the past and are empowering them in the present. The system fits them comfortably. So do the schools and universities produced by that system. These institutions may not be delivering academic excellence, but as long as the people they employ—the teachers, the administrators, the contractors, the textbook publishers, the security officers, the uniform suppliers--keep supporting their country’s current leaders, those leaders are unlikely to see a pressing need for change. Why mess with success?

This is a serious dilemma, but the path to education reform does not always have to end at a brick wall. If reformers are powerful enough--a big if, to be sure--the paper suggests a range of strategies they can employ to increase their odds of success. Of these, the most important is what I call the Great Work-Around. Navigating political-economies as diverse as South Korea’s, Pakistan’s, and Liberia’s, the effective reformers identified in the paper hired their own people, recruiting outsiders less accustomed to the old clientelistic ways of doing business. New to the game, these novices did not know how long they would survive in office, but rather than discouraging innovation, their short time horizons gave them less reason to fear retaliation by the old guard. Ending on a note of optimism, the paper thus raises the possibility that the corruption scandals currently sweeping across the developing world, by sweeping out the old guard (and clearing the path for yet more novices), will precipitate a new wave of quality-focused reform, brightening the future for millions of under-educated children, their families, their countries, and, ultimately, for us all.

Author

• Lloyd Gruber, London School of Economics