Politics, Systems Thinking, and the Development Agenda: A roundtable discussion on the politics of educational reform and learning

• In Event: Roundtable Group 11

Group Submission Type: Refereed Roundtable Session

Proposal

Since the late 1980s, and in some cases well before, many low and middle-income countries have drastically expanded access to schooling. Yet, various international learning assessments - PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, PIAAC and others - suggest that many if not most countries are not producing learning outcomes needed for development, let alone freedom. More recent reports indicate that ‘learning losses’ from COVID-induced ‘shocks’ (i.e. school closures, drop-outs, fiscal responsibilities, etc.) have not only paused progress, but likely altered long-term learning trajectories in ways that will be difficult to make up.

Traditionally, most analyses have attributed poor learning outcomes to proximate determinants: inadequate funding, human resource deficits, poor curricular development, perverse incentive structures, poor management and the like. Increasingly, analysts have sought to explore the role of politics and, in particular, the interests of state elites in preventing broad improvements in learning, and more broadly the politics of societal acceptance of poor outcomes over decades.

This roundtable discussion will foster dialogue on links between learning outcomes and politics. We start with the premise that sustainable educational change hinges on understanding the motivations and behaviors of actors and the contestation of competing political and social conditions that have been (or could be) fostered to make learning a priority for education systems. We pay attention to the potential for building some guiding principles for understanding the political economy of education system development in developing countries and, in particular, enrolment and learning outcomes. We discuss the application of some of these principles through comparative country case studies to elucidate the political obstacles to improved learning outcomes and the more rare conditions under which they have been overcome. Finally, we consider implications for donor and government efforts to better incorporate political considerations in reforms to enhance learning in developing countries.

We provide a comparative analysis of the kind of conditions and contextual particularities that make learning a priority. We will discuss in-depth the historical cases of Chile, Japan and Korea; We will also darw on work on Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, several states in Brazil, as well as comparative work of 12 historical country case studies produced by the RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education) Programme’s political economy research teams (India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Peru and Chile). We will also discuss a systems approach built on an accountability framework based in part on the “accountability triangle” elaborated originally in the World Development Report 2004 and used to guide all aspects of the RISE Programme. The roundtable discussion will encourage participants to contemplate how new insights into the politics of educational reform might lead to the development of strategies for champions of education reform to navigate the politically charged environments of educational change.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Maria Balarin, GRADE

Individual Presentations

• Ignoring concepts of the nation in educational development: comparing today's development agenda and historical case studies of Japan and Korea - Luis Crouch, RTI; Deborah Elaine Spindelman, CARE USA

• The Political Economy of Regulation: Chile’s Educational Reforms since the return of democracy - Pablo Alberto González Soto, University of Chile

• Politics, Accountability, and Learning: Insights from the RISE Programme’s Political Economy Case Studies - Alec I Gershberg, University of Pennsylvania