Enrollment vs. Education

Millennium Development Goal #2: Achieve Universal Primary Education

It should come as no surprise that education ranked as one of the eight areas the UN chose to address in its Millennium Development Goals; targets set in 2000 to promote development and reduce global poverty by 2015. There is little debate about the value of education. A lack of basic education closes off many opportunities to individuals and limits their empowerment in society. Additional education is proven to increase potential income over the course of life, raise national wealth, and, as most of us know, allows an individual to compete for a wider range of jobs. What is up for debate is how best to deliver this important service. I believe the UN is getting it wrong.

The key question here is: in the push for universal access, are we promoting education or simply enrollment, and what effect is that having on quality?

In his paper The Long Walk to School, Michael Clemens sheds light on the realities behind the numbers in countries who have seen substantial increases in enrollment rates. In the mid 1990’s, Togo increased primary education rates from 69% to 84% over only two years, but about 50% of students failed and were held back. Around the same time in Rwanda, failure and repetition rates increased by a factor of three, to which much of the 57% rise in enrollment rates was attributed. Massive enrollment rate increases in Malawi went hand in hand with a drop in quality of schools to one of the worst in Africa, and Uganda’s claim of doubling the number of enrolled students was accompanied by a doubling of average students per teacher and a halving of student test scores.

A common strategy for achieving universal enrollment is abolishing school fees. Governments can also strive for economic stability and growth to create jobs and incentivize education. These policies often leads to “explosions in enrollment” which put pressure “on already overburdened education systems,” in countries such as Kenya, which is used as an example in Charles Kenny’s “Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding.” And education systems are suffering. In Filmer, Hasan and Pritchett’s A Millennium Learning Goal, students with primary education in less developed countries around the world often displayed underachieving results. 31% of students with a primary education in India could not read a simple story and 29% could not complete simple math problems. Only 25% of 15 to 19 year olds in Ghana could score more than 50% on a simple math test with one and two digit problems. Kenny summarizes it nicely: “the challenge is no longer staying in school but actually learning something while there.”

The point I’m driving at is increased rates of enrollment don’t necessarily reflect increased rates of education; in fact they can sometimes reflect quite the opposite. This comes from a decline in a number of factors including student to teacher ratio, available teaching resources, teacher qualification and facility capacity. In short, when government investment in educational capacity fails to keep up with enrollment, quality will decrease. Furthermore, investment is bound to lag behind when these changes occur practically overnight. It is predictably difficult for a system to prepare to handle a million additional students in a short amount of time as was the case in Kenya after the launch of its primary schooling initiative in 2003. So, abrupt changes to education enrollment are likely to exacerbate any issues public schools are already facing.

In many African countries there is a serious market for private schools, which seem to spring up on every corner. If a family can afford to pay the fees (or students earn scholarships to attend), they offer a strong alternative to the many overcrowded and underfunded public school options. When governments abolish public school fees and push enrollment this can draw students from private to public schools where they could face a reduction of the service they are receiving. In James Tooley’s paper Is Private Education Good for the Poor? he shows that students in private schools score better in subjects such as Math and English. He also found that private schools typically have better student to teacher ratios, better teacher commitments and sometimes better facilities than public schools. On a local level, I can draw from research done by my predecessor at Kucetekela Foundation, Jamie Nadeau, which shows that massive differences exist between the public and private schools the organization interacts with. For example, the student to teacher ratio in our former three private secondary school partners was, on average, 9.3. Compare this to nearby public secondary school options which averaged 30.6 students per teacher. Those same private schools had, on average, a Grade 12 examination pass rate of 94.3%, versus 74.1% at the public schools. 91% of the students graduating from those private schools enrolled in either college or university, whereas only 53.8% of graduates from the public schools did the same. This all reinforces the point that government policy change that encourages large shifts from private to public schools can negatively affect the quality of service the students receive. Rather than undermining the advantages of private schools by encouraging students to relocate to public schools for the sake of enrollment, policy makers should find a better way to make use of and learn from their successes.

Governments and Education Ministries should focus on putting enrollment rate increases in lock-step with quality and capacity improvements in schools. While there are some who raise questions about how much government policy can actually influence improvements in education, providing the highest quality service to the largest number of people will, in the long run, positively influence those factors that do affect education (such as parents’ level of education and income). The UN should refine its goal to incorporate this essential element. Otherwise, they may be pushing governments to produce numbers rather than results, potentially leading to reverse progress.

What good is access for all without benefits for all who access?