Achieving educational equality quickly, learning equity audits, and how two countries achieved educational equality

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

Proposal

Two of the societies on the planet which have developed the highest levels of learning equity (or actually equality, to be more precise) are Japan and Korea. Most observers know that the average levels of achievement in these societies are high. What is less known is that the indices of equality are also among the highest in the world if not actually the highest. Also not widely known is how fast, in historical terms, this equality developed, allowing, say, Korea, to do in one or one and a half generations, levels of equality that took many generations to develop in the West.

Cultural explanations for this success have been proffered, including explanations based on a supposed Confucian penchant for learning, or the simplicity of running an education system where linguistic commonality prevails to a large degree. These systems are also sometimes questioned because of their "rote learning" orientation. The present paper will re-examine some of these issues and show that (some of) these cultural advantages are actually the result, not the cause, of an education system that includes and develops the talent of every child in a manner that in the classroom "process" itself uses and develops pedagogical equality and a love of learning: what we in the West perceive as a cultural pre-condition is actually (to some degree) the result of the education approach.

The bulk of the paper will look at some of the systems planning approaches that were used to maximize equality, such as strict controls on the numbers of students flowing "up" the system until those at the "bottom" were developing extremely well, a system that could be characterized as "everyone gets to achieve a good quality minimum before large numbers can go beyond that minimum."

While this has been seen as elitist in the popular press, and sometimes even by researchers, we show that the result is quite the opposite, because the entire society has the same skills base. To ground these arguments, the paper will use, and thus exercise, the sorts of indicators called for by the Learning Equity Initiative and “learning equity audits,” to show the power of such indices.
The paper will also show that today's developing countries are proceeding in a very different direction: for example, by allowing relatively large proportions of the population to acquire higher education of very dubious quality, while only a paltry 60% of the population complete a primary level also of dubious quality. Additional empirical evidence from Taiwan and the PRC are also relevant to this perspective.

In sum, evidence suggests that there is no simple way to measure equity across cultures without a fuller understanding of historical conditions and contexts of education.

Author

• Luis Crouch, RTI