Learning to break the status quo

• In Event: Learning to support marginalized children: How can we overcome the status quo?

Proposal

The United Nations SDGs have helped to focus international and national attention on improving the quality of education—and on learning. This has led to substantial increases in attention to, and international development assistance towards, the improvement of educational quality worldwide. Yet, the UN goals are mainly normative – they tend to emphasize averages across nations, with relatively limited attention to variations within countries and to the groups performing at the low end of the distribution. In spite of a growth of attention (and pronouncements) by the UN and donors and some national leaders in LMICs to on “learning at bottom of the pyramid” (LBOP), direct investments into these poorest populations, and concomitant research research has trailed behind. In other words, researchers, policymakers and practitioners still struggle to break the status quo, by ensuring learning for all.

In this presentation, the focus will be on the status of the research and policy dimensions of learning at the BoP. In two edited volumes on this topic (Wagner et al., 2018; Wagner et al., 2022 in press), international experts reviewed each of multiple dimensions about the variation in children’s learning outcomes that can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status, language, and gender, as well as changes in globalization, migration, civil conflict and more. In addition, we know that learning is influenced by factors like access to schools (of differing quality), the presence of trained teachers (of differing quality), and more. In other words, we can detect variation in learning, and often identify one or more likely sources of variation, some of the time and in some places.

However, current research is still far too limited. In broad strokes, we know that: (1) education is cumulative (from ECD to basic and higher education); (2) that building on what the child knows (from child-centered approaches to mother-tongue education); and (3) that better trained teachers (by degrees received to practiced-based experience) generally lead to improved learning outcomes. Yet, while experts and policymakers can agree that such factors are vitally important, we also know that the amounts of these inputs correlate highly with the SES level of the child – hence exacerbating gaps that already exist. A very current example of this phenomenon may be seen in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic, where we know that educational technology (e.g., remote learning) can help most children in the crisis, those more adept in ed-tech skills and access caused an increase in the gap equity gap (Vegas, 2021).

In sum, this paper will conclude with a number of specific BoP research and policy recommendations that can narrow the gap in learning equity between the well-off and the poor that has been maintained, or even increased, in recent years. Improving learning is essential, but so too is learning how to break through the barriers to change that have established a reinforced status quo over many decades.

Author

• Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania