Inequality in learning outcomes in developing countries: Four (and a half) hard lessons from PISA-D

• In Event: Mind the gap: understanding education inequality in developing countries

Proposal

That there is a learning crisis is increasingly acknowledged, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have set goals for achieving not just schooling targets of expanding enrolment but also learning goals. The PISA for Development exercise contributed to this by modifying the PISA instrument and carrying out PISA in a number of countries less developed than those that have typically participated. We use the available student level results for seven countries (Cambodia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Senegal, Zambia) to examine inequalities in PISA learning outcomes at the global, country, and student level for students enrolled in public schools and how addressing these inequalities might contribute to achievement of the SDGs for learning. We come away with four important, hard to hear, lessons. First, far and away the most important inequality is global, in the sense that nearly every child in these countries has weak learning outcomes. The performance on mathematics of the advantaged (male, urban, native, speakers of the assessment language) children of the socio-economic elite (in the top decile on the PISA Economic, Social and Cultural Status (ESCS) index) is typically very weak. With the exception of Ecuador, less than a third of the advantaged SES elite children enrolled in public schools reach the SDG target of PISA level 2 or higher. The obvious implication is that even if all within country inequalities in enrolment and learning along the usual dimensions of structural disadvantage—sex, rurality, language, SES—were totally eliminated, the vast majority of children in these countries would not reach the SDG education targets. Second, inequality in learning outcomes of the assessed children by the ESCS measure of SES is mostly smaller in these countries than in high performing OECD or high performing non-OECD countries. If the PISA-D countries had the same relationship of learning to ESCS as Denmark (as an example of a well-performing OECD country) the learning of their SES disadvantaged (read: poor) children would be worse. Third, there are in each of these countries, substantial disadvantages in learning outcomes in mathematics along several dimensions: sex, rurality, language, and being born in the country but these differences are modest compared to the gap of existing learning levels from the SDG. Fourth, there are very few children assessed to be above the SDG minimum threshold and there are very very few at high levels of performance. The absolute number of children at PISA level 4 or above (roughly 30 percent of OECD children reach this level) in the low performing PISA-D countries is less than a few thousand—and sometimes only a few hundred.

Authors

• Martina Viarengo, The Graduate Institute

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