Bricklayers: The Overlooked Leaders Unlocking Change in Education Systems

• In Event: Leadership for a Brave New World, PART 2: Fostering collective action for education reform in Zambia and the Dominican Republic

Proposal

Sustainably strengthening education systems is a complex endeavor. This presentation will feature the case of the Dominican Republic where an ex-post evaluation traces the gradual contributions of seemingly fragmented social accountability interventions to systems strengthening.
This evaluation, conducted between April and July 2024, focuses on two separate and time-distinct interventions by an INGO that sought to contribute to the quality of learning: the USAID Dominican Republic Read (LEER) program and the World-Bank funded CVME project.
This evaluation is anchored in “systems practice”, holding that people and relationships (or relational infrastructures) are the thread that ties the system together in the long term. This ex-post evaluation examines sustained change by going back and looking at how seemingly disconnected projects implemented at different times, may add up to more than the sum of their parts. The evaluation also emphasizes the connective tissue across projects over time, i.e., the overlapping sets of actors embedded in the evolving relational infrastructure, echoing Gillies’ case studies in long-term education reform:
“The political, institutional, and technical dimensions of reform efforts over two decades is that for effective and durable reform, all specific interventions, policy reforms and project activities (…) must be understood and strategized in the context of longer-term goals and trends (Gillies, 2010).”
The main finding is that different stakeholders working toward a common objective of systems strengthening layered short-term reform efforts on top of each other and in so doing brought new functionality. Layering can dynamize, stretch, and provide new meaning to existing components of a local education system, whether at school or policy levels.
This session will cover one part of the evaluation discussing how local agents, called bricklayers, contributed to incremental change by layering interventions at school, programmatic, and education system-wide levels. Bricklayers performed a function that activates positive interactions (or mitigates negative ones) among components of the education system over time.
Bricklayers advanced change across all layers of the education system, but their main focus was the micro level. In schools, as at the national level, the denser their relational infrastructure with the relevant communities, the greater seems to have been their ability to advance change (or overcome problems). Bricklayers and their work helped key stakeholders across the education system re-imagine and reach an agreement about how schools’ existing participatory structures (APMAEs) might be enabled to work better in practice. Those agreements are codified in a joint document between MINERD and this INGO that continues to inform discussions about ongoing reform efforts. Few social accountability interventions around the world have achieved this kind of milestone.
This INGO will also discuss its efforts transferring evaluation findings to its work in social accountability and education elsewhere, leading to sustainable strengthening of education systems based on two key requirements: first, similar on-the-ground characteristics that create a facilitating environment for bricklayers, and the ability of actors to layer activities that facilitate desired social accountability outcomes within education systems. We will discuss potential ways in which these requirements might combine for successful “bricklaying” in other contexts.

Authors

• Michael Greer, World Vision

• Florencia Guerzovich, Independent Consultant

• Thomas Aston