What do we mean by a learning equity audit?

• In Event: Learning equity audits: Measuring the crisis within the “learning crisis”

Proposal

UN SDG4 has 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. This has led many policymakers to focus on what is often described as a “learning crisis.”

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. If one focuses on what some call those left out – those at the bottom of the pyramid – in low-income countries, we find that there is actually at “a crisis within this learning crisis.” For many decades, there has been a nearly unchanging pattern of children and youth at the bottom quintile or two quintiles (depending on the country) where intergenerational change in learning has remained relatively static. This is especially the case for marginalized communities that encounter significant disadvantages in learning outcomes (see two edited volumes on this topic (Author et al., 2018; Author et al., 2022).

Often used in terms of financial accounting, the term “audit” is used here in the sense of a verification of claims. Thus, a “learning equity audit” may be designed to provide stakeholders (such as donors, national governments, and service providers) as a way to verify that claims of helping the most disadvantaged children really do so effectively. A learning equity audit should employ two complementary approaches. The first approach – closing the gap – focuses on measuring the reduction in the difference in learning outcomes between individuals at the lowest and highest levels. The second approach – raising the floor – measures the improvement in the minimum proficiency level of learning for disadvantaged and marginalized groups. Thus, an audit approach should be designed to utilize improved locally-adapted norms that can better describe at “mini-scale” gains or loses that are verifiable through intensive focus and over-sampling of marginalized children.

Learning equity audits (each based on a particular population group) can enhance our understanding of the disparities in learning progress over time among different marginalized segments of a country’s population, such as by socio-economic status, age, gender, language, ethnicity, disability, geography and so forth. Such audits will allow for comparisons across varying learning outcomes by assuring that learners within a specific population are measured on a consistent scale. It will also provide reliable ways to evaluate the impact of targeted interventions to improve learning over time.

Naturally, by emphasizing a local focus and an mini-scale strategy, learning equity audits inherently suggest that local is more important for within-country learning improvements (and information that can help local stakeholders and teachers) than cross-national comparisons which have generally attracted more attention and resources. The paper concludes with thought on how to manage this long-standing dialectic between learning that matters locally as contrasted with global learning targets.

Author

• Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania