Learning poverty, learning poverty gap and learning poverty severity as measures of learning equity: Concepts, illustrations and limitations

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

Proposal

Choices of measurement can significantly shape our understanding of the size of a problem and its variation over time and space. Policymakers and researchers compare educational systems over time or across countries regarding average scores. An average performance can be viewed as how much learning each student could expect to achieve if all students learned the same amount. The limitation of such an approach is evident: it is hard to imagine a situation where every child in a population achieves the same performance, given the heterogeneity of schools, teachers, peers in a classroom, family backgrounds, and intrinsic motivations. It is critical to move beyond the mean to have a richer diagnostic and a better understanding of differences between systems or of changes in performance.

In October 2019, the World Bank and UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) launched a new synthetic education indicator, “learning poverty,” based on the concept that every child should be in school and be able to read an age-appropriate text by age 10. This formulation reflects the aspiration of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 that all children must be in school and learning.

This presentation will illustrate how a broad class of equity-sensitive measures of learning can help describe a country's performance over time and improve comparisons between countries. Such measures can help policymakers identify and understand the challenge's magnitude and drivers and design better strategies to identify the most vulnerable groups in the population and their learning needs.

The paper will conclude with thoughts on the extent of effectiveness of learning poverty measures across and within countries, as well as some of the limitations encountered since its use in low- and middle-income countries.

Author

• Karen Avanesian, UNICEF