Learning equity audits: Measuring the crisis within the “learning crisis”

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The United Nations SDG4 has helped to focus international and national attention on improving the quality of education—and on learning. Yet, the targets of SDG4 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. Direct investments on ways to improved learning among these poorest populations, and concomitant research has lagged behind. In other words, researchers, policymakers and practitioners still struggle to make a difference for the poor and most disadvantage learners.

Notable progress has been made in expanding educational access in recent decades, yet the quality of education is often described as in a “learning crisis.” Yet, currently, we know that there is actually a crisis within this learning crisis. For at least three 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 unchanged. This is especially the case for marginalized communities that encounter significant disadvantages in learning outcomes.

Various recent research efforts – including the Learning Equity Initiative (LEI; learning-equity.org) – seek to address this critical and enduring challenge by focusing on the poorest children, and how their learning can be improved. Several key questions arise from this perspective: How can improved learning equity be created between and within societies? Are there practical and context-specific ways to achieve learning equity? What kinds of data are needed to convince policymakers to take further action to achieve learning equity?

There exist many measures of learning outcomes that have been used in low- and middle-income countries, but there are serious interpretation and implementation problems when trying to measure learning among the most marginalized children at the bottom of the pyramid. Most of the better-known measures, designed for measuring SDG4 targets, have been normed and standardized principally around global comparability. By contrast, new research is beginning to find ways to help national policy makers and local stakeholders prioritize learning equity that pays particular attention to marginalized children through what may be termed a “Learning Equity Audit,” which can take varying forms determined by population variation.

The present papers provide varying and distinctive approaches notion of a learning equity audit. The first paper – entitled “What do we mean by a learning equity audit?” – considers the concept itself within marginalized populations in global and local contexts. The second paper – “India's FLN mission and the challenge of measuring learning equity” – considers recent efforts in six Indian states and how learning outcomes have become part of the national education mission. The third paper – entitled “Can the use of a TARL intervention both raise the floor and close the learning gaps?: Some positive evidence from Botswana” – describes recent interventions that have found positive outcomes even among the poorest and most disadvantaged students in primary school. The fourth paper – entitled “Learning poverty, learning poverty gap and learning poverty severity as measures of learning equity: Concepts, illustrations and limitation” – provides a review of how international agencies have opted for the metric of learning poverty along with some of its limits. The fifth paper – entitled “Achieving educational equality quickly: How two countries achieved educational equality, and why that matters” – Japan and Korea managed to achieve learning equity in a historical and comparative perspective, with observations on how this might be achieved in low-income countries.

In sum, each of the papers provides a different perspective on how to achieve a learning equity audit that will focus greater attention on, and increased accounting of, how to improve learning in marginalized populations – what we term “the crisis within the learning crisis.”

The five invited papers and two discussants – drawn from academia, the United Nations, non-profits, foundations and thinktanks – bring diverse ideas and high-level expertise in the measurement of learning in a variety of countries.

This is one of two panel proposals, with differing contributors, on the growing topic of learning equity.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• What do we mean by a learning equity audit? - Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania

• Learning poverty, learning poverty gap and learning poverty severity as measures of learning equity: Concepts, illustrations and limitations - Karen Avanesian, UNICEF

• Achieving educational equality quickly, learning equity audits, and how two countries achieved educational equality - Luis Crouch, RTI

Discussant

• Benjamin Piper, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation