Our very quotable Coordinator for the GPE Global Good Practice Team Luis Crouch often asks groups of educators whether they would ever agree to be flown in a plane in which the pilot has no instruments. No altimeter to determine your altitude? No compass to show your position and direction? No gauge to show whether you have enough fuel to get to your destination? The room grows quiet, and no one ever raises their hands, Luis pauses, then he asks, “then why do we run our schools that way?”
Sometimes people raise their hands and say “but if planes fly without instruments, people die, and that does not happen in education.” Luis responds that bad education systems DO cost lives: illiterate mothers are more likely to have infant deaths or die in childbirth; poorly educated societies produce less food, fewer jobs, and greater instability. Flying an education system without instruments is just as deadly as flying a plane without them.
This report is one more instrument to help those flying their own education airplane, whether it is an Airbus A380, DC-9 or a Piper Cub. All education actors need data to help determine whether what they’re doing is working, and to point to ways to improve so all children are not just in school but are also learning and growing as human beings. Entitled Results for Learning: Fostering Evidence-Based Dialogue to Monitor Access and Quality in Education, this is the first of a series of annual reports from GPE to add to the list of wonderful data sources already available. GPE developed this report as a part of its monitoring and evaluation strategy to measure the progress its partners have made in helping developing nations implement their own education sector plans. It compares the access and learning targets in each GPE country’s education plan to the actual results. It will give educators one more instrument to help steer toward education success. This data comes directly from our over 50 developing country partners, as well as our experienced multilateral partners UNESCO and the World Bank.
Among the Main Findings of the report: Of all the reasons for the exclusion of an estimated 61 million primary-school aged children now out of school, poverty is the most decisive, often interacting powerfully with gender. More children are completing primary school in GPE developing countries, rising from 56 to 71 % in the past decade. Fewer children are excluded from school in these same countries, with the rate of out-of-school kids declining from 34 to 18 % in the past 10 years. While youth literacy rates have increased somewhat, particularly for young women, learning levels are still alarmingly low. In most low- and lower-middle income countries, up to 75 % of children in grades 2 to 4 cannot read at all. Developing countries have consistently increased their own funding for education, while GPE’s donors have grown their external support for these same countries; yet funding gaps still exist, exacerbated by teacher shortages and the need to expand access to secondary education.
Assessments of learning are not sufficiently established or used to improve quality of education plans or teacher instruction, often leading to higher costs and poorer learning results. With the help of our partners, the Results for Learning Report will be refined next year with more complete data from more countries, as well as new measurements of education quality.
This is GPE’s contribution to the hard-working and under-appreciated pilots of the global education air fleet. Fly safely.
Check out: Results for Learning: Fostering Evidence-Based Dialogue to Monitor Access and Quality in Education