A reader who works for an international agency sent me this essay about a pressing problem. For obvious reasons, he will remain anonymous, but his sources are cited.
Learning Metrics Taskforce: If you can’t teach the students of poor countries, just test them!
Much has been written about testing problems and corporate interests in the US. Could similar forces be operating outside the US? Here is a story that few readers probably know.
In poor countries education is mainly for the middle class. Most citizens of countries such as Rwanda, Congo, or Papua New Guinea have traditionally remained illiterate. In 1990 a worldwide initiative was launched, called “Education for All”. It was led by the World Bank and has evolved into a multi-billion dollar fund. About 55 low-income governments have received grants to build schools, buy books, and recruit teachers. Parents desperately want to send children to school, so when schools open, they quickly fill up. But there is a glitch: In very poor circumstances, children fail to learn. A World Bank study estimated in 2012 that only 67% of students in Subsaharan Africa finish primary school and of those who finish, 25% are illiterate.
The ‘learning crisis’, as it is called, has multiple causes. My partner and I spent about 12 years teaching for a charity organization, and we witnessed them first hand. Urban classes have 60-120 students with children seated on the floor. Teachers are often absent, may not know how to teach, and they are never supervised. Corrupt officials often demand bribes, and textbooks are stolen before they get to schools. Children are malnourished and hungry. Not much is taught under these conditions.
Donors such as the World Bank ought to have a good handle on this reality. But their staff hardly visit classrooms. They prefer the company of high officials who send their children to private schools and have private agendas. Most world bankers are economists, so they love the virtual reality of datasets and glossy publications. Incredibly, the donors’ response to scant instruction is not better teaching but better testing. Governments are encouraged to develop learning benchmarks, test students against them, and then figure out how to teach children to achieve the benchmarks.
The triumph of testing over teaching was definitively proclaimed through the “Learning Metrics Task Force” deliberations. The prestigious Brookings Institute conducted a large-scale consultation that involved 1700 staff members of 30 organizations. They were asked to define what children should learn in school and how the learning should be measured. Dozens of organizer staff flew to exotic destinations like Dubai and Bellagio, Italy to deliberate on the findings.
The report was formally launched on September 24, 2013 at the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly. [click here http://globaleducationfirst.org/2996.htm see entire report here http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/09/learning-metrics-task-force-universal-learning
The report affirms the need to take immediate action to ensure children’s right to quality education. Nevertheless, it says nothing about the practical obstacles to learning such as corruption, harassment, book thefts, and failure to teach. In fact the word “teach” is not mentioned even once. Students are somehow expected to learn through “opportunities to develop competencies across seven domains of learning, starting in early childhood through adolescence.” To achieve this, a small set of key learning indicators will be tracked globally, such as literacy and numeracy. Countries will obtain technical help to diagnose the quality of their assessment systems, convene stakeholders to determine priorities, identify inequities, and make the appropriate policy changes.
To justify this view, the task force introduces the concept that assessment is a Public Good (pp. 12, 32). No country should be denied the opportunity to test students just because they cannot afford to. Parents and other stakeholders should become advocates of testing (p. 15) and for increased funding for testing (p. 17).
To help children quickly there is not a moment to lose. The task force will meet in November 2013 and develop a plan for moving forward. Launch events will be held in at least 15 cities around the world from September through November 2013, to make stakeholders aware of the test benefits.
The “learning metrics” task force seems so out of touch with reality that its main recommendation is a “Global Paradigm Shift” – from mere investment in access to “access plus learning”. Really, in 2013? Over the last 20 years piles of studies have documented learning failures, while numerous UNESCO workshops have taken place on quality improvement. With the same surreal touch, the document omits references to the large-scale testing that has already taken place. Since the 1990s the kids have been fed alphabet-soup tests such as PASEC, SACMEC, TIMSS, EGRA, EGMA, ASER, Uwezo, and other tests (see www.eddataglobal.org). And practically no cases are known of governments that put test results to good uses and improved outcomes.
So why did the Brookings Institution compromise its standards for this initiative? Why not form a teaching-for-poverty task force? Cynics point to money, but experience with poor schools leads to some sobering decisions. Donors mainly want to see activities and feel optimistic for the future. The most productive activity is to help schools teach students, but it is time-consuming, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating. Donors may become disappointed and pull out. By contrast, testing is a winner. Field work takes just a few weeks, and analyses can be done from the comfort of air conditioned offices. The staff involved get invited to international conferences, pad their resumes, get promoted. It’s up to the host governments to use test results for policy improvement.
As the task force rushes into implementation, the only certain outcome is consultant welfare. Testing companies are asked to donate time (p. 35), but seven domains in all countries of the world amount to huge numbers of tests. USAID and other donors have spent millions on testing in the past, so consultant companies and associated nonprofits are preparing for a windfall. Our boss is also optimistic.
The smell of money may be one reason why no one has criticized the report publicly. The people who are building careers and retirement funds from money destined to educate poor kids will strongly argue that they are doing the very best they can for them. Anyway many countries are slowly rising out of poverty, and eventually the poor will turn up educated. It may not be exactly ‘Education for All’, but ‘Testing for All” is considered acceptable progress.
That piece made me seriously a little sick. Leave a copy with Jon Stewart when you see him.
Unbelievable. It sounds like a windfall for testing companies, too, as well as data managers.
“International tests show achievement gaps in all countries” between poor and higher income children and that fact should be spread far and wide, and repeated over and over again, because Americans have been led to believe that this is a problem that exists only our country and US teachers are blamed for it. This only serves to let politicians and corporate “reformers” off the hook for not addressing poverty, and they should be called on the carpet for that.
http://www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievement-gaps-gains-american-students/
Tragic and so sad. Great comment above by Cosmic.
I’m going to venture a guess that teachers were not involved in any of these above activities, studies, panels, etc. Mistake number 1,
Educational assessment is a solution in search of a problem.
Also reads exactly like high poverty schools in the USA.
Non-nutritional meal programs, “teachers” who do not and cannot teach because they are too busy testing or preparing for tests, “supervisors” and corporate consultants who also know nothing and care nothing about educating in poor communities…just stay on the test script please, closets full of engaging materials no longer in use because they aren’t compatible with high stakes tests and federally-imposed “curricula”, high staff turnover and never a long, deep, investigative approach to engaging learning in high poverty neighborhoods.
Follow the $$$$$ and ask, “CUI BONO?” POVERTY is the HUGE, WHITE ELEPHANT TRUMPETING, but the ones in charge live in a “bubble” and have no clue so they blame the poor for being poor.
Several quick points.
First, the unfounded belief that you “fatten a pig by weighing it” has been translated into many languages and makes no sense in any of them. Proviso: on RheeWorld it makes perfect ₵ent$; on Planet Reality, it is a proven failure.
Second, assessment by narrowly produced and imprecise metrics is an excuse for avoiding the hard and difficult work necessary to provide sustainable high quality educational opportunities to young people around the world. So much for ‘no excuses.’
Third, over and over and over again, the members of the ‘assess to the death’ school apply their High Holy EduMetrics to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN as part of the drive to impart the necessary docility, obedience and low-level skills required in the twenty-first century. And just who will require such drones? THEIR OWN CHILDREN, who are attending schools diametrically different from those being mandated for their peers who will someday be ‘lucky’ enough to be their subordinates. For just a very small sampling of the educational experience enjoyed by the children of the ‘virtuous few’:
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org
Link: http://schools.cranbrook.edu/home
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/academics
Always remember to do the necessary translation, in this case English-to-English: “them” in the heading to this posting means “OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN” = the unworthy vast majority, a select number of whom will [the Sacred Metrics willing] find merit only in serving the ‘strivers’ of the ‘meritorious few.’
I end here before I start to get on my soapbox…
🙂
The testing companies are just expanding their markets. Sure, initially the tests are supposed to be free, but eventually they will not be. They are doing the same as tobacco companies. If the domestic market is shrinking or tapped out – expand overseas. We are silly, silly idealistic liberals to think any other way.
Talk about expanding their markets… Pearson has acquired ADHD Testing Company Bio Behavioral Diagnostics.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/8/prweb11061295.htm
Well said, Diane. Just look at the billions spent by the
World Bank Trust Fund, the Global Partnership for Education.
Unsupportable claims made about how much children are learning and
ignoring the quality of what they are being taught. A shockingly
mismanaged unit, poorly led for years and now trying to get more
money from governments. GPE (formerly FTI) needs an independent
audit by aid agencies but not done by aid agencies staff.. And the
high level Bank salaries of a growing and ridiculously large
“Secretariat” are bureaucracy gone mad.”Value for money,” they
claim — nonsense on stilts.
No large foundation is giving money to poor districts or countries for nothing. There is always an agenda. And it seems that poor countries now have fallen in the hands of the “nonprofit” companies that specialize in testing.
Pearson foundation is a very important “partner” in the Global Partnership for Education that was created at the World Bank to educate the very poor of the world. Pearson has much to gain from this status. There are books that countries must buy as well as tests.
Perhaps the worst offender is the Research Triangle Institute (RTI). They have tested the world with simple reading tests that were souped up to suck millions out of USAID and the World Bank. And RTI posted one of its vice presidents as staff at the World Bank 2-3 times! That VP, Luis Crouch, gets a World Bank staffer job, although World Bank jobs are real hard to get. Then miraculously the company gets contracts to execute what the donors conjured up.
It would not suprise anyone if RTI invented this entire “learning metrics” in order to drum up business. They are certainly influential and sneaky enough to do it.
Some of us participated in the “Learning Metrics” charade. Comments out of line with what was being promoted were deleted as “outliers”. But the food was great, and some people got to go to great resorts to discuss how to measure the skills of the poor.
Unfortunately Brookings Institute will do anything for pay. The Learning Metrics Taskforce is just a cop-out perpetrated by the World Bank and that silly Global Partnership for Education. They are little more than fronts for consultant companies that pose as ‘nonprofits’. Shame on the IRS that permits the likes of RTI,EDC, AIR, or Chemonics to claim such a status!!
Brookings Institute used to be reputable. Its board should apologize publicly to all the participants whose concerns were chucked off to consultant company profits.