During a mission to Niger in 2004, I spotted a newspaper article on a teacher’s desk entitled ‘A school for the gifted or the well off.’ The government was working hard to implement ‘Education for All’ (EFA), but the harder the efforts, the more the students needed outside help. Instructional time had been split in half to accommodate all those who enrolled, so kids were taught for only about two hours a day – and in French. Those few who managed to learn, either got private tuition, had educated parents to watch over homework, or were simply geniuses. The rest dropped out or graduated illiterate. As the newspaper article aptly expressed it, the schools intended for ‘all’ mainly helped the top achievers.
The EFA acronym is used every day, so few people stop to think what it means: Schools should teach basic skills not only to those who are better off, but to practically everyone, except perhaps special education cases. This implies that instruction must be geared towards students who are up to 2 standard deviations below the local average in performance (or social advantage). Textbooks, teaching methods, teacher training must work to ensure learning for the lower rather than for just the average or better students.
Is that feasible? The Jomtien conference of 1990 envisaged that by 2015 all students should be enrolled in primary school. The implied goal of course was not mere access to buildings but access to learning. In Africa, enrollment has greatly increased, but access to learning has remained restricted to the better-off and the brightest. Partly due to multilingualism, schools teach in official languages, such as English, French, or Portuguese. These languages must be learned during class along with their complex spelling systems, but teacher absenteeism is often around 20%, and less than half of the allocated instructional time may be used for teaching.
Anyway, teachers may have the equivalent of 4th grade education, and may not know how to teach. Textbooks are skimpy and expensive, so much of the class time may be spent copying incomprehensible texts on the blackboard. Social promotion reduces repetition, but students rarely catch up on their own, and they may graduate illiterate. Overall, many of the students who entered school at great expense drop out illiterate, leaving behind those who would have learned even without the extra investment and the net gain of literate graduates in some countries is uncertain.
The World Bank has promoted important systemic reforms ranging from teacher recruitment policies to school budgets, but they have largely been peripheral to learning. Decisions about how to teach are left up to local educators. Not surprisingly, the much-emphasized assessments consistently show that most students are not learning enough to acquire “21st century skills.”
The year 2015 is approaching fast. To fulfill the 1990 vision, instructional delivery must be emphasized. The Education for All Fast Track Initiative Secretariat is uniquely placed to take action. The learning research of the last decades offers some findings that are quite actionable (RTI 2009, 2010). At the very least, nearly all students can learn to read quickly. How? Local languages have consistent orthography, so basic decoding can be learned in 100 days. Evidence suggests that reading instruction, even in a neighbor’s language, may give better outcomes than reading in formal languages (assuming no political issues; Walter 2009; Walter and Trammel 2010). Reading fluency transfers in other languages using the same script, so poor students can realistically learn to read English, French, and Portuguese in higher grades.
The basic recipe involves much practice with books that maximize text rather than pictures, gradual introduction of letters, brief but systematic corrective feedback, scripted lessons, educator training through video-based modeling, a tight supervisory chain. Already pilot programs using such characteristics are showing results within a few weeks. If countries implement this process, and nearly all students read fluently, the road opens to more advanced learning. Social inequities may not be eliminated, but illiterate dropout will be minimized.
How could the support of various governments and NGOs be garnered for this literacy strategy? How active a role should the FTI Secretariate take in promoting technical content? Your thoughts would be appreciated.
References
Research Triangle Institute (RTI). 2009, 2010. EGRA Plus: Liberia.Understanding the Causal Mechanisms. USAID (www.eddataglobal.org)
Research Triangle Institute (RTI) 2010. Ethiopia Early Grade Reading Assessment. Data Analytic Report: Language and Early Learning. USAID, (www.eddataglobal.org)