The Gap Between Schooling and Education

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

There’s an enormous gap between schooling and education, Lant Pritchett has found:

“The vast majority of countries will meet the Millennium Development Goal target for universal primary school completion, and very few countries will miss it by much,” he writes in his new book, “The Rebirth of Education: From 19th Century Schooling to 21st Century Learning.”

The change has been so rapid that the average Haitian or Bangladeshi in 2010 had more years of schooling than the average French or Italian person did in 1960. (That data looks at average years of schooling for people 15 and older, by the way.) Even repressive and nondemocratic countries have seen tremendous gains. “Good governments do schooling, but nearly all bad governments do it, too,” Mr. Pritchett writes.

But that does not mean that all that schooling has translated into much education, he says. For instance, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, less than half of surveyed children in fifth grade could read a story intended for second graders. About one in six students in fifth grade recognized letters but could not read words.

A lot of “solutions” are productive, but only with a limited scope:

There’s literally thousands of studies on this. Let’s say you’re attending a school with no roof. You learn less, and once you have a roof, you might learn more, but it’s done. That’s it. If someone gives you a better roof, or a thicker roof, or two roofs, you’re not better off — those inputs don’t add up.

Second, a lot of teachers don’t know what to teach or how to teach it, and a lot of those teachers are not embedded in performance-oriented schools. So, two of those teachers aren’t going to make a difference. That’s why we have really good experimental evidence that smaller class sizes work really well in places like Israel and Tennessee. But we also have really good experimental evidence that smaller class sizes, or an additional teacher, don’t make a difference in India and Kenya. That’s not that surprising, actually: The system isn’t committed to learning anyway. You’re just pouring more water into leaking bucket. That’s not going to fill the bucket.

So, we’ve seen massive improvement in what we can think of as the “input” side of education in the last decade. Class size is coming down, the number of schools is going up. But in India in the past six years, for instance, the inputs are getting better but the outputs are not. And in some places, the trend is actually zero or negative. That’s not to say I have anything against inputs!

So, these things work in Israel and Tennessee, but not in India and Kenya. Hmm… must be teacher quality.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Comments

  1. Nick B. Steves says:
    November 13, 2013 at 1:55 pm

    In the Wikipedia entry on Education we find:

    In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day to day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles.[14] The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.[citation needed]

    In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of aeroplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more aeroplanes. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

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