In Pursuit of Excellence in Education: A Cross-Country Comparison

• In Event: Promoting Excellence and School Effectiveness

Proposal

Allocating adequate financing to the education sector has been emphasized for many years now. Yet, education remains one of the underfunded public sectors in many developing countries. As countries use different approaches to utilizing their limited funds establishing "model" or "elite" networks of schools has gained popularity among many.

One of the ideas behind implementing this approach is that increasing resources in a smaller number of schools allows for innovation to take place in those schools, which can then be transferred to and scaled up in traditional public schools. Another major reason behind the policy is developing and nurturing talent and future leaders for the governments (Ruby & McLaughlin, 2014). Opponents of these approaches argue that publicly financed model schools attract the best students and teachers from the traditional public schools and use up resources which could be otherwise allocated to traditional public schools (Massachusetts Association of Superintendents, n.d).

Earlier experiences with establishing model schools go centuries back. Countries have either inherited these models as part of colonization policies and ideology or have borrowed from other countries as best practices for training the political elites and building intellectual capital (Fagerlind and Saha, 1989). In the comparative education field, the phenomenon of policy diffusion is largely studied from “borrowing and lending” lens (Steiner-Khamzi, 2008; Philips, 2004). The research and policy development are happening in two parallel directions – normative and analytical – which are not mutually exclusive (Steiner-Khamzi, 2008).

The proposed research will attempt to understand the roots of adopting model school practices in Chile, Kazakhstan and Nepal, the context in which the policy has been introduced and evolved over time. The choice of countries is due to their differences in approaches to selecting and funding these schools, as well as the differences in political, economic, and social contexts, in which these schools operate. This will allow us to compare and contrast the differences and similarities of each approach in establishing this model, but more importantly to understand how the change happens in different contexts.

The first part of the study will focus on the following key questions:
1. What are the overarching goals and expectations from model schools in each country?
a) What are the key elements of the operating model schools in each country?
b) What are the volume and sources of financing in each country as a share of the total education financing?

The second part of the study will attempt to understand how model schools impact traditional public schools in the same region/district?
c) How and in what ways does it impact teacher practice?
d) How and in what ways does it impact school leadership practice?
e) How and in what ways does it impact financing of traditional public schools?

The impact of model schools on students’ achievement varies and even most rigorous evaluations find mixed evidence (Abdulkadiroglu et al, 2011; Lucas & Mbiti, 2014). Long-term life impacts of attending such school are somewhat positive, but not widely researched. For example, a study in China estimated the causal effects of two elite high schools in low-income communities on students’ college admission outcomes (Loyalka et al, 2015). This study found that even though the chances of a typical student from a poor county getting into any college and a 4-year college increase, it has no effect on her/his chances of entering an elite college. The authors conclude that it may be more cost-effective to expand existing high schools instead of investing in the capital construction and supply-side school quality aspects associated with building “elite” schools.

The literature also provides some insight into whether model schools retain students in school for longer periods of time – students from selective conventional schools in Malawi were 50% more likely to stay in school (De Hoop, 2010) and for one more extra year in UK’s grammar schools (Clark & Del Bono, 2016). A study in Kenya (Lucas & Mbiti, 2014) found a strong causal relationship between attending an elite school and national school graduation, but no evidence of test score increases in general. Moreover, students who were not admitted to elite national schools were equally likely to stay and graduate from high school.

The impacts that these schools have on traditional public schools at the institutional level are less researched. Some studies investigated the impacts of model schools on students and found that exposure to higher-achieving peers in magnet schools in the US had minimal effect on college enrollment, graduation, or quality (Dobbie & Fryer, 2014).
With regards to promoting equity, based on the results of the studies from 12 countries, Ali et al (2018) found that only a small proportion of students get a chance to being admitted into selective elite schools – between 3 to 25 percent of the total student population, and only a fraction represents low-income groups. Even if the governments wish to make these schools merit based only, one should keep in mind in what context does these model schools operate and what signals these schools send to the general student population. Without diligent attention to equity, these schools allow using different strategies to strengthen their “eliteness” as is the case in Chile (Howard, Pine, Muench, & Peck, 2020). These strategies were found prevalent in sustaining and advancing their students' class standing in Chile, as well as securing the school's elite status and reputation.

The necessity to better understand the reasoning behind the policies of establishing model schools and the way they interact with the rest of the system is important for many reasons. First, due to their contribution to generating knowledge on the policy diffusion process both between and within the countries. It helps us better understand how and why change happens and how positive spillover effects can be scaled. More generally, how do we move toward more equal ways of nurturing talent and scaling up innovations which model schools produce? Finally, what countries can learn from each other to avoid exacerbation of socio-economic inequalities that are already prevalent in the countries?

Author

• Aliya Kadirov, University of Maryland College of Education