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Mind the gap: understanding education inequality in developing countries

Wed, April 28, 6:15 to 7:45am PDT (6:15 to 7:45am PDT), Zoom Room, 133

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The rapid expansion of schooling is a remarkable development achievement. At the same time, in many low and middle income countries, more than half of children fail to master basic reading and math skills despite being enrolled in school. Growing recognition of the learning crisis has brought renewed attention to the measurement of learning outcomes. Expanded measurement of learning enables not only the tracking average outcomes, but also the exploration of variation in outcomes and drivers of variation both between and within countries.

Previous work from RISE Programme researchers and others has suggested that education systems that improve their average learning outcomes from low levels to middle levels tend to do so by reducing the share of students at the very bottom of the learning distribution. In other words, countries tend to improve average performance by pushing up the left tail, rather than pulling up the right. This panel expands inquiry into the structure and dynamics of learning inequality in developing countries with four papers drawn from the RISE Programme.

The papers find that the structure of learning inequality varies across countries, highlighting the need for context-specific policy design. Though the drivers of inequality vary, they also suggest that an agenda that prioritizes universal foundational skills can both reduce inequality and raise mean learning performance, as the average performance improves from the bottom up. This message is particularly important given the COVID-19 pandemic, which is poised to undermine children’s learning trajectories, raise inequalities, and stymie progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in learning.

The panel will open with a presentation that focuses on the measurement of inequality in learning outcomes in foundational skills in low and middle income countries. The authors use child-level data on early grade reading in six countries to explore the distribution of foundational skills using several measures of inequality drawn from the economics literature. The paper shows that – in the context of the cases they study – interventions aimed at improving foundational skills managed to raise average achievement levels and reduce inequality across socioeconomic groups. Additionally, inequality in learning outcomes is greater among the poor than among wealthier groups. The findings demonstrate the importance of evaluating the distributional implications of interventions aimed at raising learning levels for policy design and evaluation.

The panel moves onto an analysis of the distinction between goals of “inclusion” and “universality” in developing country education systems. Using the microdata from this the recent extension of PISA to include lower performing countries (PISA-D), the authors examine inequality at the global, national, and student level. They examine how eliminating gaps in achievement that are attributable to a child’s background advantage (a set of characteristics PISA-D uses to create an Economic, Social and Cultural Status index that includes gender, rural/urban, language, immigration, and economic status) could contribute towards progress on the universal literacy and numeracy goals laid out in the SGD agenda. They show that the drivers of inequality vary across the countries in the sample. While there are substantial gaps in mathematics outcomes along several dimensions, these gaps are modest compared to the gap between existing learning levels and the SDG. Even if these countries eliminated their respective within-country gaps in learning across background characteristics, they would still fall short of the SDG target. Moreover, inequalities in learning based on these assessed characteristics tend to be smaller in the PISA-D countries than in higher performing OECD and non-OECD countries. Their findings, taken together with the first paper, suggest that reaching the SDG will require countries to focus on universalizing foundational skills, reducing inequality in learning performance (rather than on other characteristics), and on bringing up the average by raising the outcomes for the poorest performers.

The third paper examines the interaction between two measures of education progress: schooling attainment and learning. Many programs targeting the most socially disadvantaged students, such as girls or poor and marginalized groups, focus on interventions to keep them in school. Interventions aimed at decreasing dropout and increase attainment are well documented in the literature. Yet while schooling may be a necessary condition for learning, it is certainly not sufficient, and little attention is paid to the potential for low learning while in school to drive dropout. This paper draws on data from four countries to study the relationship between low levels of learning and dropout. It also uses complementary qualitative data to investigate mechanisms underlying this relationship. The authors find that students who perform one standard deviation below the mean at age 8 are 53% more likely to drop out of school by age 12. In some cases, low learning drives dropout directly, and in others it increases the likelihood of children being affected by other more commonly cited causes of dropout, such as work or pregnancy. This paper demonstrates the benefit of studying the interaction between different drivers of poor outcomes.

The final paper examines the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for inequality in education, with a focus on Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s most recent education reform effort, launched in 2018, is focused on transforming the education system to deliver equitable learning for all. The RISE Ethiopia Team’s research has been studying these reform efforts, and in the early months of the pandemic the team launched a phone survey covering a wide range of stakeholders to understand the effects of school closures on children and likely effects on their learning outcomes. The breadth of the phone interviews, combined with the team’s existing research efforts, allows them to build a systems perspective on the pandemic’s effects on children’s learning outcomes and their implications for equity goals. They discuss strategies that can be employed to reduce risks of dropout and facilitate catch up on lost learning once schools reopen.

Overall, these papers emphasize the need to build a nuanced understanding of the distribution of learning outcomes throughout an education system. They also suggest that a focus on foundational skills can play an important role in reducing inequality in learning, and achieving the SDGs, particularly in light of the COVID crisis.

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