Reimagining the middle tier part I: Activating potential for implementing and scaling education innovations - Investigating roles and structures

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The mid-level of governance in education systems—situated between central government and schools, and including both government agencies and civil society organizations—is critical to education reform, policy implementation, and scaling processes. This level serves as “connective tissue” between local and national actors—helping ensure national reforms penetrate classrooms and other learning sites, supporting local contextualization of innovations and mediating implementation, communicating the experiences and voices of educators and others working at the local level back up to the center, and strengthening coherence across schools. For those interested in improving education by way of adapting and scaling promising education innovations and reforms, the middle tier represents significant untapped potential as a system change agent.

However, the middle level remains understudied and overlooked, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While on the rise, empirical research on its role in adapting and scaling innovations remains limited, leaving a gap in understanding how this level can best be leveraged to support education improvement. By better understanding the unique contours, opportunities, and challenges related to this governance level, stakeholders can strengthen capacity to drive reform and improve learning outcomes and researchers can continue to build a knowledge base.

This panel—the first in a two-part series—brings together four papers that explore the role of middle tier actors in implementing, scaling, and sustaining education innovations across diverse LMIC contexts and examines key facilitating and constraining factors to effective engagement in reform processes to improve learning outcomes. The session will first offer a round of brief presentations of each paper, but the majority of time will be dedicated to a subsequent integrated panel discussion that includes audience interaction and the discussant’s observations.

The first paper investigates the unsuccessful scale-up of the School Council Mobilization Program in Punjab, Pakistan, contrasting it with the successful Tusome program in Kenya. While the pilot program of the former showed promising results toward increasing primary school enrollment, its province-wide expansion failed to yield improvements in school inputs or learning outcomes. The paper points to lack of engagement and accountability among subnational actors as a key barrier to effective implementation. This case highlights the importance of designing reforms with scale in mind and collaborating across all levels of the education hierarchy—including the middle tier—to foster ownership and sustainability.

The second paper shares findings from a multi-country study of El Salvador, the Kyrgyz Republic, Malawi, and Nepal, which examined the role of middle tier actors in identifying and scaling education innovations. Through 90 interviews with middle level officials and NGO and donor stakeholders, the study found that middle tier offices are rarely involved in the development, adaptation, or scaling of education innovations. The paper uses the study’s findings to argue that the deep contextual knowledge, proximity to schools, and commitment to local jurisdictions possessed by the middle tier offer critical (but mostly untapped in these countries) contributions to the scaling innovation impact. The paper proposes a strategic reimagining of the middle tier’s role in reform and offers concrete recommendations to ensure that the middle tier’s meaningful inclusion in scaling processes will yield exponential gains in system functionality and learning outcomes.

The third paper places a cognitive lens onto policy implementation in India, focusing on how middle-tier actors as complex individuals interpret and enact foundational learning reforms. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations, the study found that actors’ sensemaking is shaped by their beliefs about teaching and learning, their institutional positioning, and the policy signals they receive. The paper advocates moving beyond top-down models and behavioralist approaches, and instead embracing structures and sensemaking support that empower middle-tier actors as instructional leaders.

The fourth paper explores how education systems in LMICs intersect with state capacity amid global democratic decline and weakened international cooperation. It critiques dominant international frameworks used over the past two decades to define and promote state capacity in education. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper proposes rethinking leadership and management models to foster more context-sensitive and collaborative approaches to strengthening state capacity, including at the middle tier.

Through a variety of methodological approaches and disciplinary lenses, these four papers articulate the need to move past viewing middle-tier actors as merely implementers of policy or monitors of implementation compliance. The panel will draw on their papers to discuss challenges of middle-tier participation that merit increased attention in order to activate the middle-tier as a strategic partner in education reform–including lack of accountability and motivation, lack of involvement in policy design, lack of deeper understanding of reforms, and lack of context-specific and collaborative approaches to capacity strengthening. Panelists will share empirical insights from their cases to discuss broad approaches and specific strategies for closing the gap between stated aspirations for the middle tier of education systems and the realities of this complex system level.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Molly Curtiss Wyss, Brookings Institution

Chair

• Luis A Crouch, RTI

Individual Presentations

• Implementation at scale: The role of subnational actors - Minahil Asim, University of Ottawa

• Examining mid-level government decision-making and support for scaling education impact in El Salvador, Kyrgyz Republic, Malawi, and Nepal - Brad Olsen, The Brookings Institution; Molly Curtiss Wyss, Brookings Institution

• Middle tier sensemaking of foundational learning reforms - Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University

• Rethinking state capacity in a post-aid world - Karen Mundy, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Luis A Crouch, RTI