Like most of my colleagues in the development field, I have defended public schooling on the grounds that education indirectly helps people who wouldn’t pay voluntarily for the benefits they receive from it, and thus education would be undersupplied if left exclusively to private funding. I made that argument in Brazil, in Ukraine, in China, and again in Vietnam where I had the privilege of working with my friend and talented colleague, Dr Alam Chowdury.
In making the public good argument for education, I acted in confidence because I had no doubt that expanding access to schooling and increasing (the somewhat vague notion of) school quality would lead to human capital formation. I did not question that formulation. Excellence in schooling meant several things, but most important among them was that the population served would have more knowledge and more skills – in other words more human capital. Education makes labour more productive, I taught, and a more productive labour force leads to economic growth.
We made a related argument that if countries were to rely on private education only, poor people would not obtain enough of it. Although they would have an incentive to obtain education (for themselves or their children), the private incentive alone would not ensure that there would be sufficient education to satisfy society’s needs.
These arguments lead inevitably to the claim that the government must help to provide education, and indeed, the government of Bangladesh is heavily engaged in supplying this “public good.” When (as in past centuries) ideal amounts of education couldn’t be provided privately, many people and many multilateral development institutions argued that tax-financed provision should be forthcoming from the government.
But now this fundamental principle, the case for education as a public good, is under credible attack from economists, public policy experts, and educators. The reason isn’t simply that education is to a considerable extent also a private good. Purchasers of education benefit directly from what they pay for. Rather, the challenge is based on something quite fundamental and new.
A former World Bank colleague of mine succinctly puts the challenge in the title of his new book, The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning. When I first met him, Dr Lant Pritchett was a young research assistant. But he is now a celebrated Harvard professor. More than anyone else in the world today, Professor Pritchett has boldly and correctly helped us see what has gone wrong with schooling, how the problem came to plague education systems right around the globe, and what we need to do to fix it.
What is the challenge? A public good is not simply something that is “good for the public.” It is something that benefits many people, including those who do not pay for it. Learning to read and write helps the individual, and in that sense it is a private good. But it is also a public good because it makes people better citizens, acquaintances, and workers, thus contributing to the lives of others, even though these others do not pay for those benefits.
But if education does not produce those benefits, if students do not learn how to read and write and do maths, then there are few benefits from schooling, and the public good argument disappears. Pritchett contends that schooling does not lead to learning, and therefore it is a bad public good.
I am aware that the number of schools in relation to the number school-aged children in Bangladesh has dramatically increased. Government and civil society are to be applauded for the remarkable accomplishment. Schooling in Bangladesh has expanded so rapidly that the average Bangladeshi had more years of schooling in 2010 than the average Frenchman or Italian had in 1960.
Sadly, increases in the average level of knowledge and skills in the student-age population have not kept pace with expansion of access. One of the important and frustrating points is that it’s taken a long time for the problem of very low levels of learning to surface.
There are all kinds of statistics we keep track of – how many kids enter school, of what gender, what age, of what grade progression, how many finish or complete the cycle, etc. But when it comes to the numbers of what we want to get out of schooling – such as increases in knowledge and skills – that is very hard to come by. There are no internationally reliable and comparable statistics on what kids know.
Let me begin the necessary conversation about learning in Bangladesh by referring to some evidence on the matter from Bangladeshi sources. Drawing on a large sample of children aged between 10 to 18 years in rural Bangladesh, Asadullah and Chaudhury discovered a sobering fact about mathematics assessment. Basically they discovered that children don’t continue to progress very much in their learning competence as they grow older. Here is how they did the study; they asked two questions to the children: Suppose you save Tk20 each month. How much will you have saved after six months? And suppose you have Tk250 in total and a chicken costs Tk60. How many chickens can you buy? How much money will be left after the purchase?
What this figure shows is the probability of achieving competence meaning that all children in the age group will eventually answer both questions correctly. The results are striking. A child who has completed grade five is only 11.6 % more likely to give the correct answers than a child with no schooling at all. Put another way, the average gain in “competence” between grade one and grade eight is just 4% per year.
As distressing as this learning profile is, it mostly likely overstates the actual learning from year to year as, especially after grade five, more and more children drop out. If children with greater competency are less likely to drop out, as seems plausible, the increase in competence of those who complete grade eight could be due to the fact that those with lower competence dropped out somewhere along the school path.
These results from Bangladesh add to a growing body of evidence about flat learning profiles. Results from India, Pakistan, and East Africa show slow progress by grade on a simple literacy and mathematics test. Unfortunately, Bangladesh must now be added to the list of countries with evidence from learning profiles indicating a serious learning crisis. And a learning crisis weakens the case for education as a public good.
