We are all being asked to provide feedback on how to measure post-2015 education goals and targets through a public consultation launched by UNESCO through its Institute for Statistics. The list of proposed indicators is both inspiring and daunting. On the one hand, it marks the start of a monitoring framework designed to get all children into school and learning. But ultimately will it just lead to the production of nice league tables that tell us which countries are doing well and which badly?
No! One of the biggest lessons learnt from the Millennium Development Goals is the critical role of benchmarking progress. But benchmarking alone is not particularly helpful and can even be harmful. Low rankings can demotivate countries – from the minister of education to the teachers and students in classrooms. Benchmarking or comparisons can also lead to superficial copying of high performers’ practice.
It’s not only about indicators
Indicators alone won’t lead to concerted action or effective policymaking. To drive reform, indicators must be embedded in contextual information in order to diagnose problems or shortcomings in an education system.
What does this mean for the international measurement agenda? The UNESCO proposal (pdf) presents about 70 indicators that can be used to monitor education goals. To help us sort through this long list, the proposal also provides a very clever system to gauge the feasibility of producing them. Clearly not everything desirable is possible immediately, or even in the medium term.
The good news is that there is a growing consensus around the development of some common metrics on reading and numeracy skills (pdf) in primary and lower secondary education. While welcoming this initiative, we must be careful about how we interpret and use the resulting indicators.
It’s all about context
If we know that 45% of children in a country can read to a certain level by the end of primary school– and 55% cannot – what can we do with this information?
First, we must understand the figures in context – the duration and nature of primary schooling in the country, literacy resources in school and at home, attendance patterns, the relationship between language of instruction and language of the home, distribution of scores between girls and boys, rural and urban, and so on. Only then can we take the targeted actions needed to secure real improvement.
There is another potential pitfall even when available indicators are used effectively. While welcoming the development of new indicators on foundational skills such as reading and numeracy, we cannot lose sight of the larger picture of a comprehensive education. Consider the example of teachers who ‘teach for the test’ and end up neglecting other areas of learning.
Now imagine the risks arising at the level of an entire education system if those aspects of learning that lend themselves to indicator construction are given disproportionate attention in schools.
The Learning Metrics Task Force articulated a widely shared consensus with its emphasis on the seven domains of learning, and indeed called for a future indicator to measure students’ breadth of learning. When indicators of literacy and numeracy are strongly established it will be important to ensure that all students are offered a broad set of learning experiences.
Join the online consultation on the post-2015 education indicators.
Seamus Hegarty was Chair of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) from 2005 to 2012 and has chaired the Standards Working Group of the Learning Metrics Task Force.