“They should read, no matter how…”: Interpretations of learning crisis policies

• In Event: Global Education Policy: Evidence, Competencies and Interpretations

Proposal

In the last decade, a growing salience about a ‘global learning crisis’ – wherein millions of children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are enrolled in school, but are not learning (World Bank, 2019) – has mobilized governments, transnational institutions, and donor networks globally to prioritize the achievement of universal foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) (Evans & Hares, 2021; Beeharry, 2021). In many LMICs, such as India, this has translated into national policies that seek to urgently improve children’s basic reading and math skills.

Despite debates over their framing and underlying approaches (e.g. - Sriprakash et al., 2020; Schweisfurth, 2023), dominant perspectives on the global learning crisis and FLN continue to emphasize the urgent need to solve for improving children’s reading and arithmetic abilities as a prerequisite for any other learning (e.g. Belafi et al., 2020). As such, studies on this topic have focused on quantifying the extent of the crisis, identifying cost-effective solutions, and making policy recommendations to improve learning outcomes. The popular advocacy of many such solutions, such as Teaching at the Right Level or structured pedagogy (Akyeampong et al., 2023), has led to their incorporation into national-level reforms in several LMICs to ameliorate the learning crisis. However, little is known about how actors in the last mile of policy delivery – teachers, principals, and low-level bureaucrats – make sense of these policies and interventions. In other words, while scholarship abundantly identifies ‘what works’ to solve the crisis, it doesn’t address ‘how’ those ideas may or may not work at the level of implementation (Dowd, 2024).

Using an anthropological approach for policy analysis (Wedel et al., 2005; Levinson & Sutton, 2001), this paper adds novel insights to this gap in literature by exploring – How do ground-level policy actors interpret policies that attempt to solve a learning crisis? I examine this question in the context of India, where in 2021, following an official recognition of a learning crisis, the government launched a nation-wide mission – one of the largest in the world – to achieve FLN for all children by 2026-27.

Existing scholarship on policy interpretation, largely from the context of education in the United States, shows that teachers and other stakeholders make sense of reforms based on their cognitive schemas (Spillane et al., 2002), positions within social networks and relationships of power (Coburn, 2006), and their conventional understanding of policy jargon (Hill, 2001), among other factors. Research from LMICs point out that the ways in which educators interpret policies and recommended changes in practice are informed by their socio-cultural beliefs (Sriprakash, 2010), preconceived pedagogical notions (Vavrus, 2009; Schweisfurth & Elliott, 2019), and the realities of their working conditions (Johnson et al., 2000; O’Sullivan, 2002). I integrate ideas from these studies, particularly extending Spillane et al.'s (2002) cognitive framework for sense-making, to develop my conceptual framework and examine policy interpretation during heightened system-wide urgency, in this case, in response to a learning crisis.

This paper emerges from a larger comparative case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) I conducted on how policy actors interpret, appropriate, and implement the reforms initiated by the Indian government in 2021 to solve the learning crisis and achieve universal FLN. This paper’s scope focuses particularly on the interpretation component. Findings are based on over 14 months of fieldwork conducted between 2022-2024 in rural districts in two strategically chosen states in India – Jharkhand and Haryana. Data sources for this paper include semi-structured interviews with various policy actors – teachers (n=21), school principals (n=7), and low-level government bureaucrats (n=25), as well as extensive observations of classrooms, government administrative offices, and capacity building events.

Preliminary findings reveal a nuanced interpretation of FLN policy reforms in India by various stakeholders. In line with findings from prior scholarship in LMICs, policies and programs are not simply accepted or rejected, but are selectively made sense of (Ball, 1993; Schweisfurth & Elliott, 2019). Contrary to studies that find government stakeholders overlooking or underestimating the learning crisis (e.g. Crawfurd et al., 2021), I found that most ground-level policy actors expressed their long-standing awareness of poor learning levels. As such, they resonated deeply with the moral urgency to act on the learning crisis that was embedded in FLN reforms – demonstrating a rare alignment of motivation between policymakers and practitioners.

Despite this alignment over the ‘why’, policy actors seemed unsure about ‘how’ the policy was trying to inflict change. This specifically shaped what kinds of changes they understood the policies to be asking for and the extent to which they embraced them. Policy actors often based their understanding of the learning crisis reforms on the immediate policy signal visible to them (Dyer, 1999). While for some, this would include the concrete inputs and materials provided to individual schools, for others this would depend on how their work was evaluated by superiors in the system. Interpretations of the policies were also shaped by what these actors respectively considered as causes for the learning crisis – factors that often differed from the policy’s theory of change. Additionally, without any strong training or shared vocabulary, policy actors drew diverse interpretations of vaguely-defined keywords in the policy guidelines, like ‘activity’, ‘play’, or ‘understanding’, using their cognitive and cultural schema.

In sum, this study points to a nuanced case – where despite buying into the rationale for a policy, ground-level stakeholders draw partial interpretations of learning crisis reforms and thus, implement them in ways that diverge from their intended vision. This paper presents implications for both research and policy. It extends literature on policy interpretation to show how contextual factors, traditional knowledge, and political cultures in an LMIC like India shape the same. At the same time, it adds to existing scholarship on policy interpretation in LMICs by illustrating the same during a new crisis-driven paradigm in global education. At a time when LMICs around the world are pushing for reforms in partnership with transnational actors and donor networks to address their learning crises, this study re-emphasizes that policy formulation without consideration of contextual interpretation sets it up for implementation failure.

Author

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University