Political Economy Research to Improve Systems of Education: A Conceptual Framework for the RISE Program

• In Event: Political economy research to improve systems of education: perspectives from the RISE program

Proposal

This paper develops a conceptual framework for Political Economy Analysis (PEA) of education reform with a particular focus on the “politics of learning”, or the politics of educational strategies, policy design, and implementation processes and how they affect the long-term potential for developing countries to improve education quality and cognitive skill development at (in many cases) drastically improved rates. A core question at the heart of this effort is “Why do some countries adopt and successfully implement policies that improve learning, but most do not?”

Following Pritchett (2018) we argue that understanding how educational change happens requires a political economy model that describes the motivations and behavior of governments and policymakers. Such a model must begin (but not end) by adequately addressing at least three key facts about basic education policies over the course of, roughly, the past 75 years:

1. Why did enrolments and attainment expand so much and so uniformly across so many countries?

2. Why do nearly all governments provide most education directly through building their own schools and employing their own teachers, and why do they do so through the modality of large Weberian bureaucracies?

3. Why was there a politics of near-uniform schooling expansion but, concomitantly, a politics accepting very poor learning outcomes in so many countries, and what is different about the exceptions where the politics supported much improved learning?

There is no shortage of models and theories of the political economy of education reform. We review many of the leading efforts and show how – while they may lend many important insights on the politics of education reform – none to date can adequately answer these three questions let alone the larger driving question of why and when countries adopt and successfully implement quality-enhancing, learning-oriented reforms. Some lines of thought, such as the “political settlements” literature are excellent at examining the deep, underlying contextual forces that drive and more importantly constrain the policies a government might pursue (See for instance Levy [2018], Hickey and Hossein [2018], or Kelsall [2016] among others). But the “political settlements” literature is often better at lending insights on the possible (and impossible or unwise) rather than on what and why governments might actually adopt specifically to improve learning in a particular country context. Nor does the political settlements literature adequately address the three motivating facts above.

Other strategies focus on stakeholder analysis, which is of course a critical component but often either takes as its starting point what the government wants to adopt –rather than why it wants to adopt it – or ignores the deeper cultural, political and societal contexts and divisions. Such approaches are common in the large international development organizations. (See for example Kingdon et al [2014] or Bruns, Harbaugh & Schneider [2018]).

We build a conceptual framework for PEA that seeks the “sweet spot” between these literatures and will work for the seven RISE country programs already underway, while providing insights for how to undertake similar work in other country contexts, and also facilitate cross-country insights.

Author

• Alec Ian Gershberg, University of Pennsylvania