Education innovation

Dr Adil Najam
Saturday, April 12, 2014
From Print Edition





The writer has taught international relations and public policy at Boston University and the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy and was the vice chancellor of LUMS.

First, the good news about education in Pakistan. It is no longer necessary to convince parents
that education is important. There is real demand mostly unmet for education in Pakistan.
Especially for good education. Including by households that have been denied access to
education.

Many lower- and lower-middle class households at least in urban centers seem willing to spend
larger proportions of their income on their childrens education. At a visceral level, a broad and
palpable recognition has set in that education is amongst the very few passports to success
available to the otherwise marginalised.

The bad news flows directly from the good. Education in Pakistan is not a demand problem as
much as it is a supply problem. And the supply side is really really messed up. We talk much and
we talk often about how messed up it is; let me just suggest that it is even more messed up than
we think.

Suffice to say, if there is one sector that is in desperate need of innovative thinking, it is
education. Innovative both in terms of how we think of the problems that we face and also of the
solutions that may be applied to them. Here are two innovations which, in my view, would be good
initial steps to start with.

Measure quality, not just enrollment. A manifestation of the good news is that the 18th
Amendment to the constitution boldly proclaimed (section 25A) that the state shall provide free
and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen. A demonstration of the bad
news, however, is that an estimated 20 million, or more, children between five and sixteen remain
un-enrolled. However, the actual situation is much worse because no matter what the number of
un-enrolled students may be, the number of students whose promised Right to Education is not
being met is even higher.

Why? Because enrollment does not equal education. Enrollment tells us if a child is in school. It
tells us nothing about the quality of education the child will receive. In fact, we know that in a very
large proportion of schools that quality will be miserable. To put it plainly, the number of
uneducated children in Pakistan is significantly larger than the number of un-enrolled. The number
of poorly educated is larger still. Disastrously so.

There are, of course, legions of numbers mind-numbing and heart-wrenching ones to highlight
our supply side problems. I avoid them to the extent that I can. First, because in a country that is
unable and unwilling to hold something as basic as a national census, no number should be
believable. More importantly, because I do not think that the essence of our most pressing
challenges is captured by the numbers we get fixated on, which are mostly on enrollment.

An immediate innovation should be to change what we count. This means measuring, talking
about, and getting worked up about the quality of education as much as about enrollment. One
way to do this would be to set up system-wide assessments of, for example, how many 5th or 8th
graders are actually performing at a 5th or 8th grade level. Technology can enable other means of
quality assessment. But the key innovation has to be a shift from an education enrollment focus to
an education quality focus. Ultimately, we will have to acknowledge that our deadliest supply side
demons are about the quality of education as much as they are about its quantum.

Yes, enrollment gaps can be seductive, and for all the right reasons. They can also be costly
distractions. A discourse that is fixated on enrollment will trigger policy that is fixated on getting as
many more children into schools as quickly as possible. Done sloppily as it will be this can
further diminish the quality of education (for example, by overloading classes, inducting less than
qualified teachers, etc.). Such a vicious downward spiral produces armies of young people
unqualified to justify their qualifications and their battalions infiltrate onwards into the system. The
net result is a swelling of the ranks of the educated unemployables. A tragedy for all.

Quality enhancements can be self-reinforcing and system-enhancing. Invest in quality anywhere in
the system and the benefits will tend to flow and grow across the system. Unfortunately, the
converse is also true. Allow quality to fall as we have and the poison will bioaccumulate; and
spread.

To get to quality, start with teachers. Measuring quality without investing in the means of quality
enhancement is a recipe for frustration. Teachers are the weakest link in our education system but
also our strongest hope for improving thing. There are, indeed, scores of amazingly dedicated and
accomplished teachers all across the country who are a source of motivation for all around them,
and most of all for their students. There are, unfortunately, far more who are not any of these
things. An immediate task must be to make sure that the later do not overwhelm the former.

Before the quality of students education can be enhanced, the quality of the teachers who work
with them has to be addressed. In a system where we still struggle with identifying ghost
teachers and ensuring that real ones can be made to show up in ghost schools, a focus on quality
seems idealistic. It may well be so, but it is also necessary. The challenge is to find ways to
enhance teacher quality. This means finding innovative ways for teacher retraining, recertification
and renewal.

This is difficult not only because the task is large and can be expensive. It is more difficult because
the forces of inertia and habit will work against innovation. The right mix of incentive and
technology can help. Incentive can be structured by linking teacher advancements to teacher
performance for example, in technology enabled recertification programmes.

Technology can play a key role as the platform of retraining. For example, there is much talk of
online instruction including the so-called MOOCs (massive open online courses) as the newest
buzz-toy in education, especially higher education. The jury is still out on the efficacy of such
concepts for schools. However, a primary use of such technologies can be teacher upgradation.
Such innovation can be designed not only for teacher retraining but, even more importantly, for
providing teachers with the technological tools to raise the quality of their classroom instruction.
Technology can be a great equaliser.

The key realisation has to be that teachers are the key to educational quality enhancement. If we
need to get to students we will need to first get to teachers. Here, again, an urge to rapidly ramp
up the number of teachers in the system has to be tempered with the need to improve teacher
quality. Indeed, good teachers can be value multipliers and game-changers for the entire system.
Equally and maybe more so, bad teachers are value destroyers; indeed, system destroyers.

The political impulse for policymakers as well as activists is to seek instant gratification in
incorporating as many more teachers as possible, as soon as possible.

A programme that seeks also to focus on enhancing the quality and (re-)training of teachers
already in the system seems painfully slow, devoid of political mileage, hardly innovative and,
frankly, boring. However, innovation that ends up being truly transformative often starts off as
looking exactly like that. It is only when it works its magic that it can be recognised to be
disruptive in the best of ways.