Equity considerations when scaling for impact

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Too often in education reform, equity and scaling are positioned as tradeoffs that oppose each other. But ensuring that education innovations address existing inequities is actually essential for them to have sustainable impact at scale. Providing robust teaching and learning to all populations, providing inclusive and fair education practices for everyone, and valuing the rights and assets of traditionally marginalized groups are not add-ons to scaling: they are by definition, what constitutes quality education. Therefore, rather than seeing equity and quality as “tradeoffs to manage,” they should be seen as complementary forces in scaling.

While exact meaning is contested and will vary across contexts, there is value in differentiating between “equity” as a process and “equality” as an outcome. The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ definition provides a helpful framing: “The term ‘equity’ refers to fairness and justice and is distinguished from equality: Whereas ‘equality’ means providing the same to all, ‘equity’ means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances. The process is ongoing, requiring us to identify and overcome intentional and unintentional barriers arising from bias or systemic structures.”

Recent research on education improvement and innovation scaling around the world finds that both individual assumptions and system-wide structures influence people’s understandings and practices around equity and scaling. Assumptions and structures can limit innovative ways of considering equity or they can promote innovative approaches. Whether or not people are aware of it, taken-for-granted assumptions around concepts like “schooling,” “learning ability,” “success,” and “equity” shape scaling efforts and policy making in education. This is because they orient individuals to the work in ways that influence their evaluations, decisions, and everyday practices around education scaling. These assumptions (or mindsets) are often called ‘soft system’ parts—and they are not always acknowledged. When soft systems are not identified, critically interrogated, and adjusted, they will continue to function as hidden biases shaping the work. But when scaling teams, decisionmakers, and others collaboratively consider, evaluate, and re-frame their views of the terms and concepts, equity can be more strategically pursued.

Similarly, the structural ecosystem of incentives (such as funding practices, electoral politics, education policies and assessment programs, institutional features, and global bureaucracies) tacitly shapes how scaling impact is implemented, supported, and measured. These ‘hard systems,” too, will benefit from collective excavation, interrogation, and updating. Incentives matter because in scaling people focus their work in ways that are emphasized by project leadership, funders, evaluation rubrics, and other forces. It would literally be irrational for scaling teams to emphasize things that are not incentivized. So, if the field wishes to adjust scaling directions in ways the prioritize equity, it will need to adjust its incentive systems.

This panel engages directly in this discussion by sharing insights from a diverse selection of researchers and practitioners who work on scaling education innovations in low- and middle-income countries center equity in their scaling work. They will discuss some of the individual and structural challenges they face while pursuing equity in scaling and share recommendations for improved attention to equity in education reform In particular, the panel will begin by introducing a new, empirically developed framework of four different ways to incorporate equity into scaling work: through innovation design, equity-based contextualization and adaptation, equity-based decision-making, and equity-focused data collection and analysis. The panel will then share three different examples of centering equity in scaling, each focusing on a different area of the education ecosystem in a different geography, from improving education funding formulas to enhancing equity in Chile, to policy implementation to improve equity in schools in Indonesia to leveraging EMIS data to make equity-informed decisions in Bhutan.

The panel will conclude with a moderated discussion among the panelists, moderated by a global funding representative, reflecting on different ways the confront individual and structural constraints to engage equity work while scaling, and taking questions and comments from the audience. This session is intended to be highly interactive and foster open conversation about this difficult topic.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Brad Olsen, The Brookings Institution

Individual Presentations

• Equity in anti-violence policy implementation: Lessons learned from education ecosystem in Indonesia - Stefani Widiyani

• Centering equity in scaling educational innovations in Bhutan's education systems - Gembo Tshering