A (3:25)

So there's what, pandemonium.

B (3:26)

And then throws a rock, no their.

A (3:29)

Heads down and say, you're right, we're done.

B (3:30)

What happens? No, no. And then, you know, and then there's of course the usual hubbub, but you know, the way it plays out, this guy was right. He really didn't, wasn't going to be held accountable by these villagers. And these villagers really didn't have any control over his profession. And really, and it was clear that the fate of these kids really didn't have any normative traction for him either. He really wasn't committed to education. So he had. And so there was, you know, in the end it kind of just broke up of like, okay, well that's that. And of course later, the rigorous evaluation of this, the impact of this was that these meetings had no impact on learning at all. Again, not surprisingly, if they're completely not dependent at all, not committed, neither committed to performance with their own intrinsic norms nor committed to any external accountability, nothing happened.

A (4:21)

So you told me before we started the show that there's a surprise coded to this that I did not know. So the meeting itself did nothing. The assessment, the knowledge that the kids weren't learning didn't change the way the school functioned. But then they did something and something changed.

B (4:35)

Well, later the government, since it was fiscally strapped, adopted a practice of hiring some teachers on one year contracts so they weren't part of the regular civil service. And the striking thing was these people hired on the regular contracts were making a fifth or less the salary on.

A (4:51)

The one year contracts.

B (4:52)

On the one year contracts they were making a fifth or less what the civil service teachers were made. But when you evaluated 20%. Yeah, 20% a fifth. So there's nothing about this situation.

A (5:03)

It's not like you hired better teachers and paid more.

B (5:05)

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You hired kind of similarly qualified teachers, but were paid incredibly less because the civil service teachers were really just way over market. But when you rigorously evaluated how much a child learned if he happened to be with a contract teacher, and the only difference was really this contract was a one year and so could in principle not be renewed, the kids learned twice as much with the contract teachers than with the civil service teachers. So the civil service aspect in this state of India, Uttar Pradesh, wasn't just rent seeking, it was value extracting. Teachers taught absolutely worse when they had civil service status than when they were on contractual status. So even giving the parents even a modicum of say and who taught their kids had enormous learning effects and by the way, was like enormously cheaper. So you could hire five times as many of these contract teachers as you could hire civil service teachers.

A (6:08)

The other thing that struck me, and I want to expand this beyond India, but the same Indian ngo, I guess, or other work in India surveyed behavior by teachers, things like smiling, joking, or on the other side, you know, pinching and twisting people's ears and stuff that was quite shocking.

B (6:25)

I think it was doubly shocking. First of all, what you found is about 29% of the kids reported having been pinched or beaten in the previous month. So how many get beaten or pinched over the course of their whole year is like everybody. Like everybody, essentially. So it's a hostile environment. They found, you know, the conventional wisdom is some child friendliness in school actually elicits positive responses from kids. They found almost, you know, they had lots and lots of schools in which they observed the teaching in practice and observed no child friendly practices at all. And then what was doubly shocking is that actually in the government schools, the poorer children were twice as likely as the richer children to get beaten or abused. And strangely in the private schools, and it was exactly equal between the rich and poor. So to some extent you might think, well, the government schools, they might be doing a bad job, but at least they're helping equalize. They were in fact the most unequal in their treatment of the kids, even worse than the private sector.

A (7:24)

So India's a nightmare, a horror story when it comes to education. Everywhere else is at least a little bit better. Tell me.

B (7:30)

Right, I'm afraid that's not entirely true. There are lots of places in the world where the learning performance, at least I haven't seen the detailed evidence on practices, but the learning performance is just as bad in many places as it is in India. We have similar studies coming out of Bangladesh, coming out of Pakistan, coming out of even East Africa, which typically is done better in terms of schooling. So from around the world, we find that we've had lots of kids in school for lots of years and they're just not mastering even the rudimentary basics of numeracy and literacy, much less the conceptual mastery. So conceptual mastery of things like being able to read with critical skill or being able to use math and applied problem is almost nonexistent.

A (8:16)

Well, this comes against the background. With the millennium development goals 2015, there was a big push for universal enrollment. And I think that you quote the exact wording that every child shall complete a course of primary school, and the world's done pretty well on that. Most countries are on track to either reach or come close to the goal. Have we been measuring the wrong thing and insisting on universal enrollment?

B (8:41)

I think we've been measuring only one of the right things. To say we're measuring the wrong thing implies that kids don't need to be in school at all to learn, but they need to be in school and learn. So by only by only measuring butts in seats and not ideas in heads, I think we've done a disservice because there's no reason why the two can't go together. But if you create systems where the only measures of schooling our butts in seats, you know you're going to get measures of time served rather than learning gained.

A (9:11)

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to ask you what your proposal is to do about it. This is the Global Prosperity Wonkast from the center for Global Development. We'll be back in a moment. Welcome back to the Global Prosperity wonkast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald. I'm chatting today with lant Pritchett. He's a senior fellow here at the center for Global Development, professor at Harvard, and the author of a new book, the Rebirth of Schooling Ain't Learning. In the first segment, we sure learned that schooling ain't learning. Some really sad and disturbing stories about the experiences that children are having in developing country schools. Lan, a lot of people have tried to reform education over the years, including in this country. Fads come and go. I want you to give me in a nutshell what your proposal is for the developing country schools.

B (10:17)

Well, my basic proposal is to move away from the strongly top down centralized bureaucratic systems that Attempt to turn schools into factories and, and inputs into learning outputs in some mechanistic way. And really, and this is the metaphor of the rebirth of education, go back to when schooling was more locally controlled, but with the addition of performance pressure and flexible financing. So what I mean by that is you want a combination where at the local level both parents and educators are more empowered. This isn't a contest between let's empower parents to sort of beat up on teachers. What you really want to create an environment is where educators are really free to pursue their profession and parents are free to control the schooling environment their kids are in against in some sense, lots of top down bureaucratic rules driven controls that really were never the essence of education. They were the essence of expanding a bureaucratic system. But by the same token, that requires that all the pieces of a new system fit together. So in addition to being more open and locally controlled, we need a lot more measurement and information about performance. I'm not talking about high stakes testing, but I am talking about knowing what's going on, knowing what kids are learning and having some idea of what the performance goals that we want for children to have. We want to say when children emerge from the schooling, we want them to be able to have these capabilities and then measure the performance of the system against the acquisition of those capabilities. Combined finally with financing that flows to schools so that we can remediate the socioeconomic differences that would result from a pure market.

A (12:11)

You have a nice metaphor for this, the spider versus the starfish. What is the spider and why should we fear it?

B (12:21)

Well, the spider is, and this is a metaphor from Brockman and Beckstrom who have a book called the Spider and the Starfish. But the spider is a metaphor for, with the spider there's this enormous web. So there's this enormous amount of resources. But the only decision making has happened in the spider. So if something happens far off in the web, it has to be transmitted through the web to the spider. Spider takes some decision and all the resources are allocated at the center. So the reason to fear the spider.

A (12:51)

Is that this would be a pretty conventional school system with a superintendent. Superintendent's the spider.

B (12:56)

And again, you're even thinking in the American system where the superintendent is still quite local. In some systems, every teacher in the whole, you know, in the whole country is allocated by some national process or every teacher in the whole country is selected by some examination process. And every teacher in the whole country's transfers are determined by some formula. Right. So. But yes, and the difficulty with a spider Is it's not robust and it's not flexible in the sense that if the spider dies, the whole web is worthless. Right. Because there's no brain for all that resources to be feeding into.

A (13:33)

If the spider happens to be inefficient or corrupt.

B (13:36)

Exactly. If the spider happens to be inefficient or corrupt, or even if the spider happens to be pursuing simplistic objectives like expanding an enrollment and the spiders getting no information about learning, whereas people at the local level have tons of information. Now, the way a starfish works is it's a very loosely organized organism. So the starfish actually doesn't move because all of the little legs communicate to the brain. And the brain says, let's move. It responds to the local conditions. So each leg is sensing, is it desirable to move in this direction, Is there food in this direction? And. And the starfish essentially gets pulled by the action of the individual legs.

A (14:15)

I didn't know that about starfish.

B (14:16)

That's right.

A (14:17)

I understood the metaphor, but I didn't really understand what you're talking about. These little tentacles, when you turn the starfish over, they're each.

B (14:24)

They're each kind of operating independently and they're deciding what to do. And the whole think of the starfish as a system, it gets dragged by the operations at the local level rather than the operations at the local level being controlled. Which is why if you take a starfish and you cut it into five bits, you get five starfish. It's a very robust mechanism. And what it does is it allows lots more information about what's actually going on to be used than if you attempt to synthesize and aggregate it.

A (14:51)

Okay, so I get it. So how do we get from existing spider systems to starfish systems? And given that we're at the center for Global Development and we're particularly interested in the role of the rich and powerful, what can well intentioned outsiders do to try and catalyze or hasten this transition?

B (15:09)

Well, we can accelerate one thing that's happening today even as we speak, which is one of the things the international system has done is it has imposed on the world the vision that only enrollment matters. So by all the global systems and all the global organizations putting all of their emphasis on enrollment and having tons of statistics on enrollment and not insisting on any measure of learning at all, we are sending the signal that learning isn't a key part of the schooling system. So I think one thing that's going to happen in the post 2015 period as the old MDG goes away is we're going to have an MDG with real learning goals in it. That's I think going to be enormously important because it's going to signal to the global system that enrollment alone isn't enough, that we really are going to measure learning and hence we really want you to pursue learning. So the first step to like unleashing the starfish is to create a performance metric. And I'm not proposing a top down global goal that would be inconsistent obviously, but people have in mind what they want their children to be able to do when they leave schooling and making that into metrics at early ages, middle ages and terminal, you know, as kids leave school. So you're just tracking performance and you know what performance is. That's the first step. And I think the international system putting resources and emphasis behind. Okay, now we've got to pivot. All of this momentum that we've had and in which we've been vastly successful at getting butts in seats, we're going to pivot and we're going to focus on learning. So that's the first thing the international system can do, is just make it unacceptable that countries not know about the learning of their kids.

A (16:43)

Are there any examples of countries that have done this successfully that we can look to and say, yeah, you should do what so and so did?

B (16:51)

Well, first of all, nearly every developed country is an example of having had a starfish system which was consolidated into a spider. So the origins of the US system or the French system or the nearly any, you know, OECD country, if you look at the origins, they had enormous enrollments in schools, all locally controlled before there was ever any central government.

A (17:13)

So we think of the one room Schoolhouse on the Prairie where the parents were paying the teacher and if she didn't perform, she was not invited back.

B (17:21)

Exactly. And the point is that, not that that was the best possible thing, but that established some deep organic roots of local accountability and then the formal systems we have today built on those roots. But second, Brazil, Brazil for instance, I think has gone a long ways and other Latin American countries like Chile as well have gone a long ways in creating performance metric systems where, you know, in Brazil the learning performance of every school every year. So just setting that up, not that it's high stakes, not that a centralized, top down bureaucracy intervenes in the school on the base of those performance results, but just so everybody knows what those results are. And at the same time, places like Brazil and Chile and much earlier obviously have municipalized the schools and hence given the local authorities a lot more control. That combination of performance metrics and local control allows for a lot more innovation because the localities can say let's try this or let's try that. They don't need to wait for some fad to come down from the top. They can try experimentation on their own. They can see the effect of the experimentation in the performance metrics. They don't need to do a separate experiment. They know what the performance metrics are and how they track. And then other localities can learn from each other. So you can get practices diffusing among professionalized networks of teachers. So I think Brazil, and it's starting to look, and everything takes time, but it's starting to look like Brazil, for instance, is improving its performance on these scores considerably more than other countries that have yet to fully buy into the more starfishy model.

A (18:52)

I want to tell you a little story. I didn't tell you this story before, so I'm taking a bit of a risk. But you know, my kids went to an Arlington school. It was a neighborhood school, the elementary school. And one of the things I perceived as a, you know, reasonably active parent is there'd be these back to school nights in which I think the parent, the teachers saw it as an opportunity to kind of tell you what they're going to do. But what really happened is they were pressured by the parents. The parents would come and ask all kinds of questions and why are you doing this and not doing that? And you know, parents were very heavily involved and the school was terrific, did a good job. I think, you know, was well resourced, the teachers were good. But there was also a lot of involvement, pressure from the parents. So my kids are now grown, they're one's out of college, the other ones will finish in a couple of years. Two years ago I started sponsoring a girl in Uganda. There's a school called the Arlington Academy of Hope started by local people. Child sponsorship, which I know from David Rudman's work is a bit of a checkered history. But what I realized is the 30 bucks a month that I give is, you know, probably very useful. But the other thing is she's got to write me a letter four times a year. And I'm watching those letters improve. And I think I and other donors are providing this extra set of eyes that her illiterate or moderately literate parents probably can't. So I'm wondering if you see potential in that for well intentioned outsiders to maybe be involved in school. I'm thinking if she doesn't learn to write these letters, the whole system comes down, she and all her classmates.

B (20:21)

Yeah, I mean, I hadn't thought of that in exactly this context. But there is actually rigorous evidence recently that you're right that this makes a big difference. The sponsorship programs, the revision of expectations that the children have by being exposed to it may well be a big lifelong effect. There's some recent evidence that these style sponsorship programs actually have bigger effects than one would expect on money alone. And I do think somehow the engagement that a performance is expected is a huge revolution, really. And I want to emphasize that this isn't about beating up on teachers because currently in these spider systems, the teachers are also trapped in a crappy system. You know, teachers, my wife is a teacher. Teachers who love to teach, love starfish systems that allow them to teach. And they don't mind having to report or give account to parents of what they're doing. Because this is what I'm doing and this is why I'm doing it. That's what a professional does, is they account for their performance. So I think true dedicated professionals have no problem with being engaged in a system in which they give an account of their performance.

A (21:36)

Final question. What are your hopes for this book and for the coming change? You know, if we're having this conversation as soon as say five years from now, what can you imagine might be different? What would you hope for? It's a big, big task, right?

B (21:58)

But there are steps that in five years could be completely accomplished. In five years, every country in the world could know where their children are, right? Then every country in the world could.

A (22:10)

Have done know where they are in.

B (22:11)

Terms of their learning and know where they are in terms of learning. And at least on some moderately comparable basis. Again, I don't want to get into the business of mandating a top down examination for the whole world. But for instance, early we know that early learning to read is a really critical part of the entire education experience. Five years from now, we should not be far from having every country in the world know where their children are on learning, say by grade three on a reasonably comparable basis of what reading means, what literacy means, what comprehension means. So I think now that would be a real revolution. That would be a real, it would be the start of a real revolution. Because I guarantee you those first numbers are going to be shocking. They are going to be shocking. So far, you know, experts like me that dig into the numbers try and figure out what A score of 302 really means, have some notion of this, but that yet has to translate into real penetration to people's heads. That, by the way, my kid is just way off track of what I thought they were going to get then. The second thing is, I think it is not going to be hard to unleash a lot more experimentation. There are lots of people in the world that know how to run good schools. The question is how we unleash that dynamism that's out there in a way that scales up, changes practices in the system system wide. Because what we have now is a lot of people doing just amazing, terrific things in individual schools, individual school systems. But since the system has no way of saying, oh, by the way, according to our own metrics of performance, this is really working, it's hard for the system to accept that these are better practices and scale them up. So I think the dynamism can be unleashed in the next five years. It's going to take decades, of course, for the scores to really start climbing towards OECD levels. But I think the third thing we should have in five years is the vision of where these countries want to be at the current rates of progress. If you said at the current rate of progress, how long before my kid, say, in Indonesia is getting the same levels of learning as your kid in Arlington? The answer is your child's child's child's child's child's child. Child might be at those levels. And that's only in half the countries because in the other half they're going backwards. So the answer is never. So I think third, we could easily have a revolution in we have a goal of where we want to be and when we want to be there and working towards that goal.

A (24:42)

Terrific. Thank you very much. We'll be hoping that revolution comes and maybe I can get you back here in five years. We can do an assessment.

B (24:48)

Okay.

A (24:49)

This has been the global prosperity wonkcast from the center for global development. My guest today is lant Pritchett. We've been talking about his terrific, powerful new book, the rebirth of schooling ain't learning. You can find the wonkcast online on itunes and on stitcher. Just search for wonkcast or cgd and subscribe to hear a new interview every week. Until next time, I'm Lawrence McDonald. Thank you for listening.