Summarize the attached document of the WDR 2018

OVERVIEW Learning to realize education's promise Learning to realize education's promise Assess learning Act on evidence Align actors to make it a serious goal to make schools work for all learners to make the whole system work for learning OVERVIEW Learning to realize education's promise \"Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.\" NELSON MANDELA (2003) \" If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.\" KUAN CHUNG (7TH CENTURY BC) Schooling is not the same as learning. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, when grade 3 students were asked recently to read a sentence such as \"The name of the dog is Puppy,\" three-quarters did not understand what it said.1 In rural India, just under three-quarters of students in grade 3 could not solve a two-digit subtraction such as 46 - 17, and by grade 5 half could still not do so.2 Although the skills of Brazilian 15-year-olds have improved, at their current rate of improvement they won't reach the richcountry average score in math for 75 years. In reading, it will take more than 260 years.3 Within countries, learning outcomes are almost always much worse for the disadvantaged. In Uruguay, poor children in grade 6 are assessed as \"not competent\" in math at five times the rate of wealthy children.4 Moreover, such data are for children and youth lucky enough to be in school. Some 260 million aren't even enrolled in primary or secondary school.5 These countries are not unique in the challenges they face. (In fact, they deserve credit for measuring student learning and making the results public.) Worldwide, hundreds of millions of children reach young adulthood without even the most basic life skills. Even if they attend school, many leave without the skills for calculating the correct change from a transaction, reading a doctor's instructions, or interpreting a campaign promiselet alone building a fulfilling career or educating their children. This learning crisis is a moral crisis. When delivered well, education cures a host of societal ills. For individuals, it promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. For societies, it spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion. But these benefits depend largely on learning. Schooling without learning is a wasted opportunity. More than that, it is a great injustice: the children whom society is failing most are the ones who most need a good education to succeed in life. Any country can do better if it acts as though learning really matters. That may sound obviousafter all, what else is education for? Yet even as learning goals are receiving greater rhetorical support, in practice many features of education systems conspire against learning. This Report argues that countries can improve by advancing on three fronts: Assess learningto make it a serious goal. This means using well-designed student assessments to gauge the health of education systems (not primarily as tools for administering rewards and punishments). It also means using the resulting Overview | 3 learning measures to spotlight hidden exclusions, make choices, and evaluate progress. Act on evidenceto make schools work for all learners. Evidence on how people learn has exploded in recent decades, along with an increase in educational innovation. Countries can make much better use of this evidence to set priorities for their own practice and innovations. Align actorsto make the whole system work for learning. Countries must recognize that all the classroom innovation in the world is unlikely to have much impact if, because of technical and political barriers, the system as a whole does not support learning. By taking into account these real-world barriers and mobilizing everyone who has a stake in learning, countries can support innovative educators on the front lines. When improving learning becomes a priority, great progress is possible. In the early 1950s, the Republic of Korea was a war-torn society held back by very low literacy levels. By 1995 it had achieved universal enrollment in high-quality education through secondary school. Today, its young people perform at the highest levels on international learning assessments. Vietnam surprised the world when the 2012 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that its 15-year-olds were performing at the same level as those in Germany even though Vietnam was a lower-middle-income country. Between 2009 and 2015, Peru achieved some of the fastest growth in overall learning outcomesan improvement attributable to concerted policy action. In Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga, early grade reading improved substantially within a very short time thanks to focused efforts based on evidence. And recently, Malaysia and Tanzania launched promising societywide collaborative approaches to systematically improving learning. Progress like this requires a clear-eyed diagnosis, followed by concerted action. Before showing what can be done to fulfill education's promise, this overview first shines a light on the learning crisis: how and why many countries are not yet achieving \"learning for all.\" This may make for disheartening reading, but it should not be interpreted as saying that all is lostonly that too many young people are not getting the education they need. The rest of the overview shows how change is possible if systems commit to \"all for learning,\" drawing on examples of families, educators, communities, and systems that have made real progress. 4 | World Development Report 2018 The three dimensions of the learning crisis Education should equip students with the skills they need to lead healthy, productive, meaningful lives. Different countries define skills differently, but all share some core aspirations, embodied in their curriculums. Students everywhere must learn how to interpret many types of written passagesfrom medication labels to job offers, from bank statements to great literature. They have to understand how numbers work so that they can buy and sell in markets, set family budgets, interpret loan agreements, or write engineering software. They require the higher-order reasoning and creativity that builds on these foundational skills. And they need the socioemotional skillssuch as perseverance and the ability to work on teamsthat help them acquire and apply the foundational and other skills. Many countries are not yet achieving these goals. First, the learning that one would expect to happen in schoolswhether expectations are based on formal curriculums, the needs of employers, or just common senseis often not occurring. Of even greater concern, many countries are failing to provide learning for all. Individuals already disadvantaged in society whether because of poverty, location, ethnicity, gender, or disabilitylearn the least. Thus education systems can widen social gaps instead of narrowing them. What drives the learning shortfalls is becoming clearer thanks to new analyses spotlighting both the immediate causepoor service delivery that amplifies the effects of povertyand the deeper systemlevel problems, both technical and political, that allow poor-quality schooling to persist. Learning outcomes are poor: Low levels, high inequality, slow progress The recent expansion in education is impressive by historical standards. In many developing countries over the last few decades, net enrollment in education has greatly outpaced the historic performance of today's industrial countries. For Problem example, it took the United States dimension 1: 40 yearsfrom 1870 to 1910to Outcomes increase girls' enrollments from 57 percent to 88 percent. By contrast, Morocco achieved a similar increase in just 11 years.6 The number of years of schooling completed by the average adult in the developing world more than tripled from 1950 to Figure O.1 Shortfalls in learning start early Percentage of grade 2 students who could not perform simple reading or math tasks, selected countries a. Grade 2 students who could not read a single word of a short text b. Grade 2 students who could not perform two-digit subtraction 80 80 60 60 ua Ira q Ke ny a M al aw i na ag N ic ar ha G a di In an rd ia Jo ia an er nz Ta co Lib q oc Ira al ep or M . ep N a ,R bi Ye m en m an Za Ug ha G di In aw al M da 0 a 0 na 20 i 20 da 40 an 40 Ug Percent 100 Percent 100 Sources: WDR 2018 team, using reading and mathematics data for Kenya and Uganda from Uwezo, Annual Assessment Reports, 2015 (http://www.uwezo .net/); reading and mathematics data for rural India from ASER Centre (2017); reading data for all other countries from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Early Grade Reading Barometer, 2017, accessed May 30, 2017 (http://www.earlygradereadingbarometer.org/); and mathematics data for all other countries from USAID/RTI Early Grade Mathematics Assessment intervention reports, 2012-15 (https://shared.rti.org/sub-topic/early -grade-math-assessment-egma). Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-1. Note: These data typically pertain to selected regions in the countries and are not necessarily nationally representative. Data for India pertain to rural areas. 2010, from 2.0 to 7.2 years.7 By 2010 the average worker in Bangladesh had completed more years of schooling than the typical worker in France in 1975.8 This progress means that most enrollment gaps in basic education are closing between high- and low-income countries. By 2008 the average low-income country was enrolling students in primary school at nearly the same rate as the average high-income country. But schooling is not the same as learning.9 Children learn very little in many education systems around the world: even after several years in school, millions of students lack basic literacy and numeracy skills. In recent assessments in Ghana and Malawi, more than four-fifths of students at the end of grade 2 were unable to read a single familiar word such as the or cat (figure O.1).10 Even in Peru, a middleincome country, that share was half before the recent reforms.11 When grade 3 students in Nicaragua were tested in 2011, only half could correctly solve 5 + 6.12 In urban Pakistan in 2015, only three-fifths of grade 3 students could correctly perform a subtraction such as 54 - 25, and in rural areas only just over two-fifths could.13 This slow start to learning means that even students who make it to the end of primary school do not master basic competencies. In 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, less than 50 percent of grade 6 students in Southern and East Africa were able to go beyond the level of simply deciphering words, and less than 40 percent got beyond basic numeracy.14 Among grade 6 students in West and Central Africa in 2014, less than 45 percent reached the \"sufficient\" competency level for continuing studies in reading or mathematicsfor example, the rest could not answer a math problem that required them to divide 130 by 26.15 In rural India in 2016, only half of grade 5 students could fluently read text at the level of the grade 2 curriculum, which included sentences (in the local language) such as \"It was the month of rains\" and \"There were black clouds in the sky.\"16 These severe shortfalls constitute a learning crisis. Although not all developing countries suffer from such extreme shortfalls, many are far short of the levels they aspire to. According to leading international assessments of literacy and numeracyProgress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)the average student in low-income countries performs worse than 95 percent of the students in high-income countries, meaning that student would be singled out for remedial attention in a class in high-income countries.17 Many high-performing students in middle-income countriesyoung men and women who have risen to the top quarter of Overview | 5 Figure O.2 In several countries, the 75th percentile of PISA test takers performs below the 25th percentile of the OECD average Performance of 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles in 2015 PISA mathematics assessment, selected countries Percentile 75th 600 50th 550 25th Mathematics score 500 450 400 350 ri Ko a so v M Tu o ac ni ed sia on ia ,F YR Br a z In do il ne sia Jo rd an Pe C ol ru o C mb i os ta a Ri ca La tvi a V O EC ietn a D Ru av m ss ia er n Fe age de ra tio n Ire la nd G er m an y Fi Ko nla n re a, d Re p. Ja p Si ng an ap or e bl pu Al Re an ic in m Do ge ic 300 OECD interquartile range Source: WDR 2018 team, using data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 (OECD 2016). Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-2. their cohortswould rank in the bottom quarter in a wealthier country. In Algeria, the Dominican Republic, and Kosovo, the test scores of students at the cutoff for the top quarter of students (the 75th percentile of the distribution of PISA test takers) are well below the cutoff for the bottom quarter of students (25th percentile) of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (figure O.2). Even in Costa Rica, a relatively strong performer in education, performance at the cutoff for the top quarter of students is equal to performance at the cutoff for the bottom quarter in Germany. The learning crisis amplifies inequality: it severely hobbles the disadvantaged youth who most need the boost that a good education can offer. For students in many African countries, the differences by income level are stark (figure O.3). In a recent assessment (Programme d'Analyse des Systmes ducatifs de la Confemen, PASEC, 2014) administered at the end of the primary cycle, only 5 percent of girls in Cameroon from the poorest quintile of households had learned enough to continue school, compared with 76 percent of girls from the richest quintile.18 Learning gaps in several other countriesBenin, the Republic of Congo, and Senegalwere nearly as wide. Large gaps among learners afflict many high- and middle- 6 | World Development Report 2018 income countries as well, with disadvantaged students greatly overrepresented among the low scorers. Costa Rica and Qatar have the same average score on one internationally benchmarked assessment (TIMSS 2015)but the gap between the top and bottom quarters of students is 138 points in Qatar, compared with 92 points in Costa Rica. The gap between the top and bottom quarters in the United States is larger than the gap in the median scores between Algeria and the United States. Students often learn little from year to year, but early learning deficits are magnified over time. Students who stay in school should be rewarded with steady progress in learning, whatever disadvantages they have in the beginning. And yet in Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2010, low-performing students in grade 5 were no more likely to answer a grade 1 question correctly than those in grade 2. Even the average student in grade 5 had about a 50 percent chance of answering a grade 1 question correctlycompared with about 40 percent in grade 2.19 In South Africa in the late 2000s, the vast majority of students in grade 4 had mastered only the mathematics curriculum from grade 1; most of those in grade 9 had mastered only the mathematics items from grade 5.20 In New Delhi, India, in 2015, the average grade 6 student performed at a grade 3 Figure O.3 Children from poor households in Africa typically learn much less Percentage of grade 6 PASEC test takers in 2014 who scored above (blue) and below (orange) the sufficiency level on reading achievement: poorest and richest quintiles by gender, selected countries 100 75 50 Percent 25 0 25 50 75 100 F M F M Poor Rich F M F M Poor Rich F M F M Poor Rich F M F M Poor Rich F M F M Poor Rich Niger Togo Cameroon Congo, Rep. Benin Not competent F M F M Poor Rich F M F M Poor Rich Cte d'Ivoire Burkina Faso Low competency F M F M Poor Rich F M F M Poor Rich Senegal Burundi High competency Source: WDR 2018 team, using data from World Bank (2016b). Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-3. Note: Socioeconomic quintiles are defined nationally. \"Not competent\" refers to levels 0-2 in the original coding and is considered below the sufficiency level for school continuation; \"low competency\" refers to level 3; and \"high competency\" refers to level 4. F = female; M = male; PASEC = Programme d'Analyse des Systmes ducatifs de la Confemen. Figure O.4 Students often learn little from year to year, and early learning deficits are magnified over time Assessed grade-level performance of students relative to enrolled grade, New Delhi, India (2015) b. Language a. Mathematics 9 9 8 8 Grade-level performance Grade-level performance level in math. Even by grade 9, the average student had reached less than a grade 5 level, and the gap between the better and worse performers grew over time (figure O.4). In Peru and Vietnamone of the lowest and one of the highest performers, respectively, on the PISA assessment of 15-year-old students5-yearolds start out with similar math skills, but students in Vietnam learn much more for each year of schooling at the primary and lower secondary levels.21 Although some countries are making progress on learning, their progress is typically slow. Even the middle-income countries that are catching up to the top performers are doing so very slowly. Indonesia has registered significant gains on PISA over the last 10-15 years. And yet, even assuming it can sustain its 2003-15 rate of improvement, Indonesia won't reach the OECD average score in mathematics for another 48 years; in reading, for 73. For other countries, the wait could be even longer: based on current trends, it would take Tunisia over 180 years to reach the OECD average for math and Brazil over 260 years to reach the OECD average for reading. Moreover, these calculations are for countries where learning has improved. Across all countries participating in multiple rounds of PISA since 2003, the median gain in the national average score from one round to the next was zero. 7 6 5 6 5 4 4 3 7 6 7 8 9 3 6 Enrolled grade 7 8 9 Enrolled grade Expected performance Average assessed performance 75th percentile 25th percentile Source: WDR 2018 team, using data from Muralidharan, Singh, and Ganimian (2016). Data at http://bit.do /WDR2018-Fig_O-4. Overview | 7 Figure O.5 The percentage of primary school students who pass a minimum proficiency threshold is often low Median percentage of students in late primary school who score above a minimum proficiency level on a learning assessment, by income group and region 100 Percent 80 60 40 20 0 Lowincome countries Lower-middle- Upper-middleincome income countries countries Highincome countries Sub-Saharan Africa Mathematics Middle East and North Africa Latin America and the Caribbean East Asia and Pacific Europe and Central Asia Reading Source: WDR 2018 team, using \"A Global Data Set on Education Quality\" (2017), made available to the team by Nadir Altinok, Noam Angrist, and Harry Anthony Patrinos. Data at http://bit.do /WDR2018-Fig_O-5. Note: Bars show the unweighted cross-country median within country grouping. Regional averages exclude high-income countries. India and China are among the countries excluded for lack of data. Minimum proficiency in mathematics is benchmarked to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) assessment and in reading to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment. Minimum proficiency in mathematics means that students have some basic mathematical knowledge such as adding or subtracting whole numbers, recognizing familiar geometric shapes, and reading simple graphs and tables (Mullis and others 2016). Minimum proficiency in reading means that students can locate and retrieve explicitly stated detail when reading literary texts and can locate and reproduce explicitly stated information from the beginning of informational texts (Mullis and others 2012). Because of this slow progress, more than 60 percent of primary school children in developing countries still fail to achieve minimum proficiency in learning, according to one benchmark. No single learning assessment has been administered in all countries, but combining data from learning assessments in 95 countries makes it possible to establish a globally comparable \"minimum proficiency\" threshold in math.22 Below this threshold, students have not mastered even basic mathematical skills, whether making simple computations with whole numbers, using fractions or measurements, or interpreting simple bar graphs. In high-income countries, nearly all students99 percent in Japan, 98 percent in Norway, 91 percent in Australiaachieve this level in primary school.23 But in other parts of the world the share is much lower: just 7 percent in Mali, 30 percent in Nicaragua, 34 percent in the Philippines, and 76 percent in Mexico. In lowincome countries, 14 percent of students reach this level near the end of primary school, and in lowermiddle-income countries 37 percent do (figure O.5). Even in upper-middle-income countries only 61 percent reach this minimum proficiency. The ultimate barrier to learning is no schooling at allyet hundreds of millions of youth remain out of 8 | World Development Report 2018 school. In 2016, 61 million children of primary school age10 percent of all children in low- and lowermiddle-income countrieswere not in school, along with 202 million children of secondary school age.24 Children in fragile and conflict-affected countries accounted for just over a third of these, a disproportionate share. In the Syrian Arab Republic, which achieved universal primary enrollment in 2000, the civil war had driven 1.8 million children out of school by 2013.25 Almost all developing countries still have pockets of children from excluded social groups who do not attend school. Poverty most consistently predicts failing to complete schooling, but other characteristics such as gender, disability, caste, and ethnicity also frequently contribute to school participation shortfalls (figure O.6). But it's not just poverty and conflict that keep children out of school; the learning crisis does, too. When poor parents perceive education to be of low quality, they are less willing to sacrifice to keep their children in schoola rational response, given the constraints they face.26 Although parental perceptions of school quality depend on various factors, from the physical condition of schools to teacher punctuality, parents consistently cite student learning outcomes Figure O.6 School completion is higher for richer and urban families, but gender gaps are more context-dependent Gaps in grade 6 completion rates (percent) for 15- to 19-year-olds, by wealth, location, and gender b. Urban-rural 60 40 20 0 20 c. Male-female 80 Percentage point gap between male and female Percentage point gap between urban and rural Percentage point gap between richest and poorest quintiles a. Richest-poorest 80 60 40 20 0 20 20 40 60 80 100 Overall grade 6 completion rate (%) 80 60 40 20 0 20 20 40 60 80 100 Overall grade 6 completion rate (%) 20 40 60 Source: WDR 2018 team, using data from Filmer (2016). Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-6. Note: The data presented are the latest available by country, 2005-14. Each vertical line indicates the size and direction of the gap for a country. as a critical component.27 These outcomes can affect behavior: holding student ability constant, students in the Arab Republic of Egypt who attended poorerperforming schools were more likely to drop out.28 Learning shortfalls during the school years eventually show up as weak skills in the workforce. Thus the job skills debate reflects the learning crisis. Work skill shortages are often discussed in a way that is disconnected from the debate on learning, but the two are parts of the same problem. Because education systems have not prepared workers adequately, many enter the labor force with inadequate skills. Measuring adult skills in the workplace is hard, but recent initiatives have assessed a range of skills in the adult populations of numerous countries. They found that even foundational skills such as literacy and numeracy are often low, let alone the more advanced skills. The problem isn't just a lack of trained workers; it is a lack of readily trainable workers. Accordingly, many workers end up in jobs that require minimal amounts of reading or math.29 Lack of skills reduces job quality, earnings, and labor mobility. The skills needed in labor markets are multidimensional, so systems need to equip students with far more than just reading, writing, and mathbut students cannot leapfrog these foundational skills. Whether as workers or members of society, people also need higher-order cognitive skills such as problem-solving. In addition, they need socioemotional skillssometimes called soft or noncognitive skillssuch as conscientiousness. Finally, they need technical skills to perform a specific job. That said, 80 100 Overall grade 6 completion rate (%) the foundational cognitive skills are essential, and systems cannot bypass the challenges of developing them as they target higher-order skills. Tackling the learning crisis and skills gaps requires diagnosing their causesboth their immediate causes at the school level and their deeper systemic drivers. Given all the investments countries have made in education, shortfalls in learning are discouraging. But one reason for them is that learning has not always received the attention it should have. As a result, stakeholders lack actionable information about what is going wrong in their schools and in the broader society, and so they cannot craft context-appropriate responses to improve learning. Acting effectively requires first understanding how schools are failing learners and how systems are failing schools. Schools are failing learners Struggling education systems lack one or more of four key school-level ingredients for learning: prepared learners, effective teaching, learningfocused inputs, and the skilled management and governance that pulls them all together (figure O.7). The Problem next section looks at why these links dimension 2: break down; here the focus is on how Immediate they break down. causes First, children often arrive in school unprepared to learnif they arrive at all. Malnutrition, illness, low parental investments, and the harsh environments associated Overview | 9 Figure O.7 Why learning doesn't happen: Four immediate factors that break down an te a Un le rs pr ep ar n Uns kil l ed e te d er ch iva ed ar s d m un ot le pu in l o o n' h S c t do an em a ff ent e ar ct nin g le a ff ag d nd 't t an m l e o o do a g S c h at t h hin c te a sn ts e ar ct ni ng LEARNING a th ing ch a te Source: WDR 2018 team. with poverty undermine early childhood learning.30 Severe deprivationswhether in terms of nutrition, unhealthy environments, or lack of nurture by caregivershave long-lasting effects because they impair infants' brain development.31 Thirty percent of children under 5 in developing countries are physically stunted, meaning they have low height for their age, typically due to chronic malnutrition.32 The poor developmental foundations and lower levels of preschool skills resulting from deprivation mean many children arrive at school unprepared to benefit fully from it (figure O.8).33 So even in a good school, deprived children learn less. Moreover, breaking out of lower learning trajectories becomes harder as these children age because the brain becomes less malleable. Thus education systems tend to amplify initial differences. Moreover, many disadvantaged youth are not in school. Fees and opportunity costs are still major financial barriers to schooling, and social dimensions of exclusionfor example, those associated with gender or disabilityexacerbate the problem. These inequalities in school participation further widen gaps in learning outcomes. 10 | World Development Report 2018 Second, teachers often lack the skills or motivation to be effective. Teachers are the most important factor affecting learning in schools. In the United States, students with great teachers advance 1.5 grade levels or more over a single school year, compared with just 0.5 grade levels for those with an ineffective teacher.34 In developing countries, teacher quality can matter even more than in wealthier countries.35 But most education systems do not attract applicants with strong backgrounds. For example, 15-year-old students who aspire to be teachers score below the national average on PISA in nearly all countries.36 Beyond that, weak teacher education results in teachers lacking subject knowledge and pedagogical skills. In 14 Sub-Saharan countries, the average grade 6 teacher performs no better on reading tests than do the highest-performing students from that grade.37 In Indonesia, 60 percent of the time in a typical mathematics class is spent on lecturing, with limited time remaining for practical work or problem-solving.38 Meanwhile, in many developing countries substantial amounts of learning time are lost because classroom time is spent on other activities or because teachers are absent. Only a third of total instructional time was used in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Guatemala.39 Across seven African countries, one in five teachers was absent from school on the day of an unannounced visit by survey teams, with another fifth absent from the classroom even though they were at school (figure O.9).40 The problems are even more severe in remote communities, amplifying the disadvantages already facing rural students. Such diagnostics are not intended to blame teachers. Rather, they call attention to how systems undermine learning by failing to support them. Third, inputs often fail to reach classrooms or to affect learning when they do. Public discourse often equates problems of education quality with input gaps. Devoting enough resources to education is crucial, and in some countries resources have not kept pace with the rapid jumps in enrollment. For several reasons, however, input shortages explain only a small part of the learning crisis. First, looking across systems and schools, similar levels of resources are often associated with vast differences in learning outcomes.41 Second, increasing inputs in a given setting often has small effects on learning outcomes.42 Part of the reason is that inputs often fail to make it to the front lines. A decade ago in Sierra Leone, for example, textbooks were distributed to schools, but follow-up inspections found most of them locked away in cupboards, unused.43 Similarly, many technological interventions Figure O.8 Socioeconomic gaps in cognitive achievement grow with ageeven in preschool years Percentage of children ages 3-5 who can recognize 10 letters of the alphabet, by wealth quintile, selected countries b. Kazakhstan c. Tunisia 100 80 80 80 60 60 60 40 20 Percent 100 Percent Percent a. Central African Republic 100 40 20 0 40 20 0 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 0 3 3.5 4 Age (years) 4.5 5 3 3.5 4 Age (years) Richest quintile 95% confidence interval 4.5 5 Age (years) Poorest quintile 95% confidence interval Source: WDR 2018 team, using data from Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (http://mics.unicef.org/). Data are for 2010 for the Central African Republic, 2010-11 for Kazakhstan, and 2012 for Tunisia. Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-8. Figure O.9 In Africa, teachers are often absent from school or from classrooms while at school Percentage of teachers absent from school and from class on the day of an unannounced visit, participating countries 60 Percent 40 20 Ug a nd a, oz 20 am 13 bi qu e, Ta 20 nz 14 an ia ,2 01 Ke 0 ny a, Ta 20 nz 12 an ia ,2 01 To 4 go ,2 Se 01 ne 3 ga l, 20 N 11 ig er ia ,2 01 3 0 M fail before they reach classrooms, and even when they do make it to classrooms, they often do not enhance teaching or learning. In Brazil, a One Laptop Per Child initiative in several states faced years of delays. Then, even a year after the laptops finally made it to classrooms, more than 40 percent of teachers reported never or rarely using them in classroom activities.44 Fourth, poor management and governance often undermine schooling quality. Although effective school leadership does not raise student learning directly, it does so indirectly by improving teaching quality and ensuring effective use of resources.45 Across eight countries that have been studied, a 1.00 standard deviation increase in an index of management capacitybased on the adoption of 20 management practicesis associated with a 0.23-0.43 standard deviation increase in student outcomes. But school management capacity tends to be lowest in those countries with the lowest income levels, and management capacity is substantially lower in schools than in manufacturing (figure O.10).46 Ineffective school leadership means school principals are not actively involved in helping teachers solve problems, do not provide instructional advice, and do not set goals that prioritize learning. School governanceparticularly the decision-making autonomy of schools, along with the oversight provided by parents and communitiesserves as the framework for seeking local solutions and being accountable for them. In many settings, schools lack any meaningful Teachers absent from the classroom school Source: Bold and others (2017). Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-9. Note: \"Absent from the classroom\" combines absences from school with absences from class among teachers who are at school. Data are from the World Bank's Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) surveys (http://www .worldbank.org/sdi). autonomy, and community engagement fails to affect what happens in classrooms.47 Because these quality problems are concentrated among disadvantaged children, they amplify social Overview | 11 typically disadvantage marginalized communities, but also that resources are used less effectively there, exacerbating the problem. Public policy thus has the effect of widening social gaps rather than offering all children an opportunity to learn. Figure O.10 Management capacity is low in schools in low- and middleincome countries Distribution of management scores by sector, participating countries Systems are failing schools Viewed from a systems perspective, the low level of learning and skills should come as no surprise. Technical complexities and political forces constantly pull education systems out of alignment with learning (figure O.11). Tanzania India Haiti Italy Brazil Mexico Germany Canada United States Sweden United Kingdom 1 2 3 4 5 Management score Education Manufacturing Sources: Bloom and others (2014, 2015); Lemos and Scur (2016), with updates. Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-10. Note: The underlying distributions for the education data are shown as bars; for both sectors, the smoothed distributions are shown as curves. The indexes are constructed from the nine items that are comparable across sectors. Data on manufacturing are not available for Haiti. inequalities. In low-income countries, on average, stunting rates among children under 5 are almost three times higher in the poorest quintile than in the richest.48 In schools, problems with teacher absenteeism, lack of inputs, and weak management are typically severest in communities that serve the poorest students. It's not just that spending patterns 12 | World Development Report 2018 Problem dimension 3: Deeper causes Technical challenges: Reorienting toward learning is hard Complex systems and limited management capacity are obstacles to orienting all parts of an education system toward learning. First, the various parts of the system need to be aligned toward learning. But actors in the system have other goalssome stated, some not. Promoting learning is only one of these, and not necessarily the most important one. At times, these other goals can be harmful, such as when construction firms and bureaucrats collude to provide substandard school buildings for their financial gain. At other times, these goals may be laudable, such as nurturing shared national values. But if system elements are aligned toward these other goals, they will sometimes be at cross-purposes with learning. Even when countries want to prioritize learning, they often lack the metrics to do so. Every system assesses student learning in some way, but many systems lack the reliable, timely assessments needed to provide feedback on innovations. For example, is a new teacher training program actually making teachers more effective? If the system lacks reliable information on the quality of teaching and the learning of primary studentscomparable across time or classroomsthere is no way to answer that question. To be truly aligned, parts of the education system also have to be coherent with one another. Imagine that a country has set student learning as a top priority and that it has in place reasonable learning metrics. It still needs to leap a major technical hurdle, however: ensuring that system elements work together. If a country adopts a new curriculum that increases emphasis on active learning and creative thinking, that alone will not change much. Teachers need to be trained so that they can use more active learning ar rs Te a Le rs ne e ch LEARNING a in lm na pu ts oo Political challenges: Key players don't always want to prioritize student learning Political challenges compound technical ones. Many education actors have different interests, again beyond learning. Politicians act to preserve their positions in power, which may lead them to target particular groups (geographic, ethnic, or economic) for benefits. Bureaucrats may focus more on keeping Figure O.11 Technical and political factors divert schools, teachers, and families from a focus on learning Sch methods, and they need to care enough to make the change because teaching the new curriculum may be much more demanding than the old rote learning methods. Even if teachers are on board with curriculum reform, students could weaken its effects if an unreformed examination system creates misaligned incentives. In Korea, the high-stakes exam system for university entrance has weakened efforts to reorient secondary school learning. The curriculum has changed to build students' creativity and socioemotional skills, but many parents still send their children to private \"cram schools\" for test preparation.49 The need for coherence makes it risky to borrow system elements from other countries. Education policy makers and other experts often scrutinize systems that have better learning outcomes to identify what they could borrow. Indeed, in the 2000s the search for the secret behind Finland's admirable record of learning with equity led to a swarm of visiting delegations in what the Finns dubbed \"PISA tourism.\" Finland's system gives considerable autonomy to its welleducated teachers, who can tailor their teaching to the needs of their students. But lower-performing systems that import Finland's teacher autonomy into their own contexts are likely to be disappointed: if teachers are poorly educated, unmotivated, and loosely managed, giving them even more autonomy will likely make matters worse. South Africa discovered this in the 1990s and 2000s when it adopted a curriculum approach that set goals but left implementation up to teachers.50 The approach failed because it proved to be a poor fit for the capacity of teachers and the resources at their disposal.51 Home-grown, context-specific solutions are important. Successful systems combine both alignment and coherence. Alignment means that learning is the goal of the various components of the system. Coherence means that the components reinforce each other in achieving whatever goals the system has set for them. When systems achieve both, they are much more likely to promote student learning. Too much misalignment or incoherence leads to failure to achieve learning, though the system might achieve other goals (table O.1). ge me h Sc nt Source: WDR 2018 team. politicians and teachers happy than on promoting student learning, or they may simply try to protect their own positions. Some private suppliers of education serviceswhether textbooks, construction, or schoolingmay, in the pursuit of profit, advocate policy choices not in the interest of students. Teachers and other education professionals, even when motivated by a sense of mission, also may fight to maintain secure employment and to protect their incomes. None of this is to say that education actors don't care about learning. Rather, especially in poorly managed systems, competing interests may loom larger than the learning-aligned interests (table O.2). Misalignments aren't random. Because of these competing interests, the choice of a particular policy is rarely determined by whether it improves learning. More often, the choice is made by the more powerful actors in the policy arena. Agents are accountable to one another for different reasons, not just learning. Given these interests, it should come as no surprise that little learning often results. One problem is that activities to promote learning are difficult to manage. Teaching and learning in the Overview | 13 oo l Table O.1 Alignment and coherence both matter Are system elements . . . Coherent? Yes Yes Aligned toward learning? No No High performance: Systems well organized to promote learning Incoherent strivers: Systems incoherently oriented toward learning Examples: High performers at each level (Shanghai [China], Finland, Vietnam) Examples: Countries that borrow learning-oriented \"best practice\" elements but do not ensure that the various elements are coherent with each other Coherent nonlearners: Systems well organized to promote a different goal Failed systems: Systems that are not trying to achieve learning or anything else in a coherent way Examples: Totalitarian or authoritarian systems focused on promoting loyalty to the state or nation building (Stalin-era USSR, Suharto-era Indonesia); systems that focus on school attainment rather than learning (many systems) Examples: Systems in failed states Source: WDR 2018 team. Table O.2 Multiple interests govern the actions of education stakeholders Examples of . . . Stakeholders Learning-aligned interests Competing interests Teachers Student learning, professional ethic Employment, job security, salary, private tuitions Principals Student learning, teacher performance Employment, salary, good relations with staff, favoritism Bureaucrats Well-functioning schools Employment, salary, rent-seeking Politicians Well-functioning schools Electoral gains, rent-seeking, patronage Parents and students Student learning, employment of graduates Family employment, family income, outdoing others Judiciary Meaningful right to education Favoritism, rent-seeking Employers Skilled graduates Low taxes, narrowly defined self-interests Nongovernment schools (religious, nongovernmental, for-profit) Innovative, responsive schooling Profit, religious mission, funding Suppliers of educational inputs (e.g., textbooks, information technology, buildings) High-quality, relevant inputs Profit, influence International donors Student learning Domestic strategic interests, taxpayer support, employment Source: WDR 2018 team. classroom involve significant discretion by teachers, as well as regular and repeated interactions between students and teachers.52 These characteristics, coupled with a dearth of reliable information on learning, make managing learning more difficult than pursuing other goals.53 For example, improvements in access to education can be monitored by looking 14 | World Development Report 2018 at simple, easily collected enrollment data. Similarly, school construction, cash transfer programs, teacher hiring, and school grant programs intended to expand access are all highly visible, easily monitored investments. The potential beneficiaries of better foundational learningsuch as students, parents, and employers often lack the organization, information, or shortterm incentive to press for change. Parents are usually not organized to participate in debates at the system level, and they may lack knowledge of the potential gains from different policies to improve learning.54 They also may worry about the potential ramifications for their children or themselves of opposing interests such as teachers, bureaucrats, or politicians. Students have even less powerexcept sometimes in higher education, where they can threaten demonstrationsand, like parents, they may be unaware of how little they are learning until they start looking for work. Finally, the business community, even if it suffers from a shortage of skilled graduates to hire, often fails to advocate for quality education, instead lobbying for lower taxes and spending. By contrast to these potential beneficiaries of reform, the potential losers tend to be more aware of what is at stake for them and, in many cases, better organized to act collectively. As a result, many systems are stuck in lowlearning traps, characterized by low accountability and high inequality. These traps bind together key stakeholders through informal contracts that prioritize other goals such as civil service employment, corporate profits, or reelection, perpetuating the low-accountability equilibrium. In better-run systems, actors such as bureaucrats and teachers can devote much of their energy to improving outcomes for students. But in low-learning traps those same actors lack either the incentives or the support needed to focus on learning. Instead, they are constantly pressured to deliver other services for more powerful players. As actors juggle multiple objectives, relying on each other in an environment of uncertainty, low social trust, and risk aversion, it is often in the interest of each to maintain the status quoeven if society, and many of these actors, would be better off if they could shift to a higher-quality equilibrium. This diagnosis has concentrated on the shortfalls in foundational learning, as will the priorities for action discussed in the next section. However, this focus should not be interpreted as a statement that other areas are unimportant. Education systems and their enabling environment are broader and more complex than this Report can cover, so our priority here is to highlight what can be done most immediately to strengthen the foundations of learning on which all successful systems are built. But both the diagnosis and the priorities for action are relevant for other parts of the system, such as higher education or lifelong learning. In these areas, too, many countries suffer from a lack of attention to outcomes, wide gaps in opportunity, and systemic barriers to resolving these problems. Still, there are reasons for hope Even in countries that seem stuck in low-learning traps, some teachers and schools manage to strengthen learning. These examples may not be sustainableand they are not likely to spread systemwide without efforts to reorient the system toward learningbut systems willing to learn from these outliers can benefit. On a larger scale, some regions within countries are more successful in promoting learning, as are some countries at each income level. These examples reveal that higher-level system equilibriums exist. But is it possible for a whole system to escape the low-learning trap, moving to a better one? There are at least two reasons for optimism. First, as countries innovate to improve learning, they can draw on more systematic knowledge than ever available before about what can work at the micro levelthe level of learners, classrooms, and schools. A number of interventions, innovations, and approaches have resulted in substantial gains in learning. These promising approaches come in many flavorsnew pedagogical methods, ways to ensure that students and teachers are motivated, approaches to school management, technologies to enhance teaching learningand they may not pay off in all contexts, but the fact that it is possible to improve learning outcomes should give hope. These interventions can provide substantial improvements in learning: almost one or two grade-equivalents for some students.55 Even though successful interventions cannot be imported wholesale into new contexts, countries can use them as starting points for their own innovations. Second, some countries have implemented reforms that have led to sustained systemwide improvements in learning. Finland's major education reform in the 1970s famously improved the equity of outcomes while also increasing quality, so that by the time of the first PISA in 2000, Finland topped the assessment. More recently, Chile, Peru, Poland, and the United Kingdom have made serious, sustained commitments to reforming the quality of their education systems. In all these countries, learning has improved over timenot always steadily, but enough to show that system-level reforms can pay off. Overview | 15 The education systems in Shanghai (China) and Vietnam todayand Korea decades agoshow that it is possible to perform far better than income levels would predict, thanks to a sustained focus on learning with equity. Brazil and Indonesia have made considerable progress, despite the challenges of reforming large, decentralized systems. How to realize education's promise: Three policy responses Learning outcomes won't change unless education systems take learning seriously and use learning as a guide and metric. This idea can be summarized as \"all for learning.\"56 As this section explains, a commitment to all for learningand thus to learning for allimplies three complementary strategies: Assess learningto make it a serious goal. Measure and track learning better; use the results to guide action. Act on evidenceto make schools work for all learners. Use evidence to guide innovation and practice. Align actorsto make the whole system work for learning. Tackle the technical and political barriers to learning at scale. These three strategies depend on one another. Adopting a learning metric without any credible way to achieve learning goals will simply lead to frustration. School-level innovations without a learning metric could take schools off course, and without the system-level support they could prove ephemeral. And system-level commitment to learning without school-level innovation, and without learning measures to guide the reforms, is unlikely to amount to more than aspirational rhetoric. But together, the three strategies can create change for the better. The potential payoff is huge. When children have a growth mindset, meaning they understand their own great learning potential, they learn much more than when they believe they are constrained by a fixed intelligence.57 Societies have the same opportunity. By adopting a social growth mindsetrecognizing the barriers to learning, but also the very real opportunities to break them downthey can make progress on learning. One overarching priority should be to end the hidden exclusion of low learning. This is not just the right thing to do; it is also the surest way to improve average learning levels and reap education's full rewards for society as a whole. 16 | World Development Report 2018 Assess learningto make it a serious goal \"What gets measured gets managed.\" \"Just weighing the pig doesn't make it fatter.\" There is some truth to both of these sayings. Lack of measurement makes it hard to know where things are, where they are going, and what Policy actions are making any difference. response 1: Knowing these things can provide Assess focus and stimulate action. But learning measurement that is too removed from action can lead nowhere. The challenge is striking a balancefinding the right measures for the right purposes and implementing them within an appropriate accountability framework. Use measurement to shine a light on learning The first step to improving systemwide learning is to put in place good metrics for monitoring whether programs and policies are delivering learning. Credible, reliable information can shape the incentives facing politicians. Most notably, information on student learning and school performanceif presented in a way that makes it salient and acceptablefosters healthier political engagement and better service delivery. Information also helps policy makers manage a complex system. Measuring learning can improve equity by revealing hidden exclusions. As emphasized at the outset of this overview, the learning crisis is not just a problem for the society and economy overall; it is also a fundamental source of inequities and widening gaps in opportunity. But because reliable information on learning is so spotty in many education systems, especially in primary and lower secondary schools, the way the system is failing disadvantaged children is a hidden exclusion.58 Unlike exclusion from school, lack of learning is often invisible, making it impossible for families and communities to exercise their right to quality education. These measures of learning will never be the only guide for educational progress, nor should they be. Education systems should have ways of tracking progress toward any goal they set for themselves and their studentsnot just learning. Systems should also track the critical factors that drive learningsuch as learner preparation, teacher skills, quality of school management, and the level and equity of financing. But learning metrics are an essential starting point for improving lagging systems. Figure O.12 Many countries lack information on learning outcomes Percentage of countries with data to monitor progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals for learning by the end of primary or lower secondary school 100 Percent 80 60 40 20 0 Primary Lower secondary Latin America and the Caribbean Primary Lower secondary Arab states Primary Lower secondary Primary Sub-Saharan Africa Mathematics Lower secondary Asia and Pacific Primary Lower secondary World Reading Source: UIS (2016). Data at http://bit.do/WDR2018-Fig_O-12. Note: Regional groupings follow UNESCO definitions. There is too little measurement of learning, not too much A recommendation to start tackling the learning crisis with more and better measurement of learning may seem jarring. Many education debates highlight the risks of overtesting or an overemphasis on tests. In the United States, two decades of high-stakes testing have led to patterns of behavior consistent with these concerns.59 Some teachers have been found to concentrate on test-specific skills instead of untested subjects, and some schools have engaged in strategic behavior to ensure that only the better-performing students are tested, such as assigning students to special education that excuses them from testing.60 In the extreme, problems have expanded to convictions for systemic cheating at the school district level.61 At the same time, media coverage of education in many low- and middle-income countries (and some highincome ones) often focuses on high-stakes national examinations that screen candidates for tertiary educationraising concerns about an overemphasis on testing. But in many systems the problem is too little focus on learningnot too much. Many countries lack information on even basic reading and math competencies. An assessment of capacity to monitor progress toward the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals found that of the 121 countries studied, a third lack the data required to report on the levels of reading and mathematics proficiency of children at the end of primary school.62 Even more lack data for the end of lower secondary school (figure O.12). Even when countries have these data, they are often from one-off assessments that do not allow systematic tracking over time. A lack of good measurement means that education systems are often flying blindand without even agreement on the destination. Use a range of metrics with one ultimate goal Different learning metrics have different purposes, but each contributes to learning for all. Teachers assess students in classrooms every dayformally or informallyeven in poorly resourced, poorly managed school systems. But using metrics properly to improve learning systemwide requires a spectrum of types of assessment that, together, allow educators and policy makers to use the right combination of teaching approaches, programs, and policies. Formative assessment by teachers helps guide instruction and tailor teaching to the needs of Overview | 17 students. Well-prepared, motivated teachers do not need to operate in the dark: they know how to assess the learning of students regularly, formally and informally. As the next section discusses, this type of regular check-in is important because many students lag so far behind that they effectively stop learning. Knowing where students are allows teachers to adjust their teaching accordingly and to give students learning opportunities they can handle. Singapore has successfully used this approachidentifying lagging students in grade 1 using screening tests and then giving them intensive support to bring them up to grade level.63 National and subnational learning assessments provide system-level insights that classroom assessments by teachers cannot. To guide an education system, policy makers need to understand whether students are mastering the national curriculum, in which areas students are stronger or weaker, whether certain population groups are lagging behind and by how much, and which factors are associated with better student achievement. There is no effective way to aggregate the results of classroom-level formative assessment by teachers into this type of reliable system-level information. This is why systems need assessments of representative samples of students across wider jurisdictions, such as countries or provinces. Such assessments can be an especially important part of tracking systemwide progress because they are anchored in a system's own expectations for itself. And national assessments can provide a check on the quality of subnational assessments by flagging cases in which trends or levels of student achievement diverge across the two. In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has played this role.64 International assessments also provide information that helps improve systems. Globally benchmarked student assessments such as PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, as well as regionally benchmarked ones such as PASEC in West and Central Africa and the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE), provide an additional perspective on how well students are learning. They allow assessment of country performance in a way that is comparable across countries, and they provide a check on the information that emerges from national assessments. And international assessments can be powerful tools politically: because country leaders are concerned with national productivity and competitiveness, international benchmarking can 18 | World Development Report 2018 raise awareness of how a country is falling short of its peers in building human capital. Two other types of learning metrics measured in nonschool settings can be used to strengthen the quality and equity focus of assessment systems. Grassroots accountability movementsled by civil society organizations such as the ASER Centre in India and Uwezo in East Africahave deployed citizen-led assessments that recruit volunteers to measure the foundational learning of young children in their communities. These organizations then use their learning data to advocate for education reform. Some multipurpose household surveys also collect learning data, enabling researchers to analyze how learning outcomes correlate with income and community variables. Both types of assessments are administered in people's homes, not schools. As a result, they don't suffer from a key weakness of school-based assessments: when marginal students drop out, their absence can improve the average scores on school assessments, thereby creating a perverse incentive for school leaders. But household-based assessments yield learning metrics that reward systems for improving both access and quality. This is crucial to ensuring that no child is written off. Even for students who are in school, household-based assessments provide an alternative source of learning data, which can be important in settings where official assessments are of questionable quality. Measurement can be hard Why isn't there more and better measurement of learning? As with system barriers to learning, barriers to better measurement are both technical and political. From a technical perspective, conducting good assessments is not easy. At the classroom level, teachers lack the training to assess learning effectively, especially when assessments try to capture higher-order skillssay, through project-based assessmentrather than rote learning. And at the system level, education ministries lack the capacity to design valid assessments and implement them in a sample of schools. Political factors intrude as well. To paraphrase an old saying, policy makers may decide it is better to avoid testing and be assumed ineffective than to test students and remove all doubt. And even when they do participate in assessments, governments sometimes decline to release the learning results to the public, as happened with the 1995 TIMSS in Mexico.65 Finally, if assessments are poorly designed or inappropriately made into high-stakes FIGURE O.13 Low-performing countries don't face sharp tradeoffs between learning and other education outp Other outputs Measurement doesn't need to detract from broader education objectivesit can even support them A stronger emphasis on measurable learning doesn't mean that other education outcomes don't matter. Formal education and other opportunities for learning have many goals, only some of which are captured by the usual assessments of literacy, numeracy, and reasoning. Educators also aspire to help learners develop higher-order cognitive skills, including some (like creativity) that are hard to capture through assessments. Success in life also depends on socioemotional and noncognitive skills such as persistence, resilience, and teamworkthat a good education helps individuals develop. Education systems often have other goals as well: they want to endow students with citizenship skills, encourage civic-minded values, and promote social cohesion. These are widely shared goals of education, and it is understandable that people will ask whether, especially in education systems that are already overburdened, increasing the emphasis on measurable learning will crowd out these other goals. In fact, a focus on learningand on the educational quality that drives itis more likely to \"crowd in\" these other desirable outcomes. Conditions that allow children to spend two or three years in school without learning to read a single word, or to reach the end of primary school without learning to do two-digit subtraction, are not conducive to reaching the higher goals of education. Schools that cannot equip youth with relevant job skills usually will not prepare them to launch new companies or analyze great works of literature either. If students cannot focus because of deprivation, if teachers lack the pedagogical skills and motivation to engage students, if materials meant for the classroom never reach it because of poor management, and if the system as a whole is unmoored from the needs of societywell, is it really plausible to believe that students are developing higher-order thinking skills like problem-solving and creativity? It is more likely that these conditions undermine the quest for higher goalsand that, conversely, improving the learning focus would accelerate progress toward those goals as well. Paradoxically, lower-performing countries probably do not face the same sharp trade-offs encountered Figure O.13 Low-performing countries don't face sharp trade-offs between learning and other education outputs (e.g., creativity, citizenship) tests, administrators or educators may have an incentive to cheat on them, rendering the assessment results worthless as a guide to policy. High-performing country B High-performing country A Low-performing country C Measured learning Source: WDR 2018 team. by high-performing countries on the education frontier. Economists use the concept of the production possibilities frontier to understand how producersor in this case countriesmake trade-offs between the production of different goods. This idea encapsulates the debates on education policy in OECD countries on the learning frontier (figure O.13). For example, in recent years many stakeholders in Korea have argued that their high-performing education system places too much emphasis on test scores (called \"measured learning\" in figure O.13) and not enough on creativity and certain socioemotional