Understanding the functioning of education systems: perspectives from the RISE Programme

• In Event: Innovations in research methods to study education systems

Proposal

Despite laudable progress on schooling, much of the world faces a learning crisis. The rapid expansion of schooling is one of international development’s most remarkable achievements. In nearly every country the average child can expect to complete basic schooling. At the same time, in many low and middle income countries, more than half of children complete primary school without mastering basic reading and math skills. Large-scale efforts to address the symptoms of this crisis often take the form of “more” – pushing children to spend more years in school, providing more inputs, and spending more money – and have failed to produce significant learning gains. More of the same isn’t working, highlighting the need for systemic change.

The Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Programme is a long term multi-country research endeavor studying systems of education and aiming to understand how they can be transformed to deliver for all children. Instigating systems change will require moving beyond identifying symptoms of the learning crisis, i.e. the proximate determinants of low learning, towards articulating a diagnostic characterization of its underlying causes. The first step of a diagnostic is to ask why outcomes are poor in this school, district or country. A systems perspective encourages us to go one step further and ask how and why the multiple interactions of multiple agents in the system produced the conditions the produced those poor outcomes, i.e. the determinants of the proximate determinants of low learning.

RISE research is rooted in an accountability framework to provide structure to understand these interactions. Just as we can describe the economy as interactions between producers and consumers, we can describe an education system as a series of interactions between among organizations (ministries, school chains, political parties) people (politicians, bureaucrats, administrators, teachers, parents, and students) and things (curricula, books, school infrastructure). It identifies key actors in an education system and conceptualizes the system as set of interconnected accountability relationships, called Politics, Compact, Management, and Voice & Choice between the key actors (Pritchett, 2015; see also World Development Report, 2004), and characterizes the relationships between them.

We draw on examples from several of the research projects in the programme to show how the disparate scholarship (both in terms of areas of inquiry and methods) can be used to elucidate different components of these relationships and show how their interactions produce system outcomes. This points to how and why the conditions that produce poor learning outcomes exist, and helps identify priority areas for reform and principals for effective intervention on those priorities.

Authors

• Lant Pritchett, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

• Marla Spivack, RISE Programme