Politics, Accountability, and Learning: Insights from the RISE Programme’s Political Economy Case Studies

• In Event: Politics is not the Obstacle: Insights on the Politics of Learning from the RISE Programme (Panel 2)

Proposal

The RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education) Programme created two political economy research teams, one of which focused on “adoption”—or, how the political conditions have been (or could be) fostered to put learning at the centre of an education system, while understanding the challenges to doing so. This work stream has produced 12 historical case studies based loosely on a political settlements approach and this paper is part of an effort to perform comparative analysis across the diverse cases.

The first part of the paper is descriptive and integrative, depicting the issues, analyses, and findings across the 12 cases in the wide range of topics and conceptual frameworks encompassed by each of the cases. Each of the case studies pays at least some attention to two policy areas: national exams and teacher career trajectory, and this paper compares key insights regarding these two policy areas across all of the 12 cases.
At the core of all RISE research efforts is a systems approach built on an accountability framework based in part on the “accountability triangle” elaborated originally in the World Development Report 2004 (Pritchett, 2015). The basic “accountability triangle” describes an education system as a set of four principals-agent relationships, each based on five design elements (referred to as the “RISE 5x4”).

This framework calls one of the principal-agent relationships “politics,” which focuses on the relationship between citizens and the highest authorities of the state. However, there are clearly political aspects inherent in all the relationships of the RISE 5x4. For instance, in discussing how to use the RISE 5x4 to understand the coherence (or lack thereof) of accountability in an education system, Spivak (2021 p. 12) provides the following example:
“Teacher training programmes are a critical activity through which education authorities support frontline school leaders and teachers, but they often fail to improve learning outcomes. These activities fall within the “Management–Support” cell of the matrix… Applying the systems framework can reveal the incoherences at the root of why a seemingly well-designed programme can fall short of a goal to improve student learning outcomes.”
Yet we know that political forces play a key role in shaping the possibilities of what kinds of teacher training programmes may be adopted; how such programmes are implemented (supported, undermined, etc) given the management relationship between education authorities and schools, school leaders, and teachers; and the likelihood that any given programme will positively impact learning. The second part of this paper, thus, examines the political aspects of how strong relationships of accountability might align (or not) across design elements around learning objectives. Ultimately, this paper uses the 12 country case studies to examine the politics inherent within all the relationships of the RISE 5x4, thus enhancing our understanding of the relationships between politics, accountability, systems approaches, and learning. The paper then contemplates how such insights might lead to the development of tools and/or strategies to be utilised by champions of education reform who must navigate the politically charged environments of education reform.

Author

• Alec I Gershberg, University of Pennsylvania