What should the purpose of good education be?

When I was pulling together an education strategy for The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation over a decade ago, it was pretty obvious that quality of learning needed to be a core focus.

I say “obvious” because even way back in 2009 the work of pioneers like Pratham, ASER Centre, J-PAL and the seminal QEDC team at Hewlett Foundation was revealing both that (a) poor children were not learning anywhere near as much as they ought to be, and (b) there were simple, scalable ways that could lead to learning gains.

But, knowing that education had to be about more than just ‘hard learning’, I proposed a strategy framed around a core concept of “Educational Achievement”, defined as “the set of capabilities that a child has at any given time and that influence his or her ability to be a productive citizen, including high literacy, numeracy, cognitive skills, critical thinking, knowledge and socialisation”.

The influences of Sen & Freire (among others) can probably be seen quite clearly in that definition, and the inclusion of socialisation was also particularly pleasing as it created the conceptual space for a subsequent foray into pre-primary.

With a strong and clear board approval obtained for that strategy, it was a case of moving on to execution, some of which I have already written about earlier.

And even after I left CIFF in 2011 to join Omidyar Network, I was happy with, and carried, that definition in my head because I felt it captured all the important factors that constitute ‘a good education’.

Or so I thought.

The very first education grant I worked on at Omidyar was to a remarkable after-school organisation in South Africa called Ikamvayouth.

It was 2013. Earlier that year, two excellent colleagues and I had pulled together an education strategy for the Global South, that we wanted to work on in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and India. The strategy had been approved by the Omidyar board, and we were now moving into execution mode.

I was focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular a handful of countries with South Africa top of the list. Why? Because it was a Middle Income Country with an education system that performed at Low Income Country levels. Because it was an economy capable of spending more than $20 billion a year on education, but the outcomes were both shockingly low and grossly unequal across society. Because it was a society with a rich and deep supply of excellent local talent working to both analyse, and also help remedy, this underperformance.

One of these whom I had been tracking for a while was Nic Spaull. Now a leading expert on education (and rightly so), at that time he had just started his PhD at the University of Stellenbosch. I cold-called him and we started comparing notes on various aspects of South African education.

One of the organisations he talked about was Ikamvayouth. They worked after-school with highly disadvantaged secondary school students, who typically lived in “townships” (the South African equivalent of favelas). And they delivered remarkable results.

Conventional wisdom in education was (and too often still remains) that by the time students get to late secondary school, the deficits are too deep to be made up. Yet Ikamvayouth worked with such students and delivered results in the national high-stakes school-leaving exams (called “matrics” in South Africa) that exceeded national averages, let alone township averages. Yet they did not screen for ability — they asked only that the students attend at least 75% of the time.

This was intriguing. Poor, disadvantaged students towards the end of their schooling, starting with deficits and then turning around their performance so dramatically and so quickly…after more desktop analyses, I cold-called the co-founder Joy Olivier, and after a good conversation, she agreed to let me see their work in person.

On arrival in South Africa, I first also spent time with the excellent Caitlin Baron. At that time, she was running the South African activities of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and we compared notes on various things. I asked her about Ikamvayouth, and she too excitedly echoed Nic’s praise of them. She explained that while MSDF was unable to support Ikamvayouth at that time because MSDF’s strategy did not include after-school, she supported their work personally.

To me this was another good sign. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and when people put their own skin in the game, it can bode well.

Joy arranged for me to visit their work in Khayelitsha one afternoon after school hours. I drove there and parked up by the public library where they were based. Spending time with some of their team members, I saw the program in action.

Students would arrive from a variety of schools. Ikamvayouth would facilitate some group sessions in the library computer room, but also the students would cluster into smaller groups. Volunteer tutors (many of whom were former Ikamvayouth alumni) would work with the groups on whatever topics they were struggling with. And the organisation also arranged for mentors to provide support to students (especially those coming into the crucial last year when matrics have to be sat for).

The energy in the rooms, and within the student groups, was palpable.

Afterwards I had the chance to have conversations with many students, without any Ikamvayouth team members present. I asked each why they kept coming to the program, and what did they feel were the biggest benefits they got from it.

There was a range of answers as you would expect. But by far the two most frequent answers were ones I had not been expecting and which blew me away.

First, the exposure to tutors and mentors. As one student put it in words I remember to this day: “seeing what other people, who are like me and come from a background like me, have done with their lives makes me change the way I think about myself and what I can do”.

Second, the exposure to their peers. Specifically, the ability to talk with, and get mutual support from, their peers on whatever topics they were struggling with, whether academic or non-academic. Topics such as sexuality, inter-partner violence at home, absentee parents, alcohol abuse among other very challenging ones.

These points have sat with me since that day. Clearly the Ikamvayouth model helps unlock something intrinsic within the students, and then backs that up with additional academic and non-academic support that helps drive very substantial outcome gains late in their school lives. (You can find out more about their impact here).

At first, the big thing I took away from that was the power of after-school programs, tutoring and mentoring. This has often been ignored, whereas it can actually be a powerful, equitable and cost-effective way of helping disadvantaged children. Especially if it can be integrated into ways that leverage new ed-tech as well as contextually appropriate ‘human last-miles’ (whether coach-based or group-based).

After years of being overlooked as a potentially systematic approach by the education sector, it is now great to see more emphasis being placed on these. Phillip Oreopoulos and colleagues have recently completed a systematic review looking at 96 randomized evaluations and found “consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes”. It is really worth reading their rich summary.

In Germany, Armin Falk and colleagues have done a fascinating analysis of a mentoring program that works with low socio-economic status families. They find that the program had a substantial effect in changing aspirations and school-tracking decisions (by both children and parents) and thus helped to significantly narrow opportunity gaps and raise long-run educational outcomes. Most excitingly, the effect of the mentoring persisted for at least five to six years even after the initial school-tracking decision was made!

And in the United Kingdom, the government has recently announced a substantial National Tutoring Programme to help disadvantaged students overcome the impact of Covid-19 school closures. With almost $500 million set aside for this, the programme includes both tutoring and mentoring components.

But the most enduring legacy for me of those comments from Khayelitsha has not been this slightly instrumental takeaway on after-school.

Instead it has really been to make me re-assess what the purpose of ‘a good education’ should be. A re-assessment sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic.

On 31st December 2019 there was probably no one in the world who expected that this virus would change the world the way it has done. Changes to the deepest parts of human interaction for every age-group and demographic. Changes that have rippled across societies, and will continue to ripple across time.

People have been required to deal — suddenly and unexpectedly — with massive and deep change, and prolonged uncertainty. It has, in other words, been a huge test for the adaptability and resilience of people.

Many times during these last few months, I have been reminded of the insights that Victor Frankl sparked on characteristics that can help some people survive deeply unsettling change, and others not.

Now I am no expert on anything, let alone psychology — and indeed Frankl’s work has not gone uncriticised. But I have often thought about the observations many have made, that three key features seem to support people to overcome very tough, enduring challenges: (a) agency, (b) community, and (c) purpose.

And I am increasingly coming to wonder whether the purpose of ‘a good education’ should be really to equip children with exactly those three features. That the objective of an education system should to be ‘solve’ for developing those three temperaments.

This is not to take away from factors such as “high literacy, numeracy, cognitive skills, critical thinking, [and] knowledge”. In fact those remain vital components of meaningful personal agency!

But I have come to realise that there is more to education than those. That the other two parts — community and purpose — are crucial too.

Part of this realisation has been from following the fascinating work of people such as Prof. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and others on the neuroscience of adolescence, and in particular the importance of social brain development.

When I see these insights emerge from neurobiology, I am reminded strongly of the feedback from the Ikamvayouth students on the sense of community they were able to build. I am reminded equally strongly about the significant emotional and mental health challenges caused to children (of all ages) by forced social deprivation from their peers during pandemic lockdowns. And I am reminded of the tremendous resilience that many adolescents have nevertheless shown in dealing with such challenges.

One of the most exciting things that happens in education is watching the unlocking of young people’s own aspirations, attitudes and aptitudes. I suspect this is the trifecta that most motivates people who work in education?

Coaxing this trifecta allows young people to discover their own dreams, to set their own targets, and to form their own purpose. And this process has many feedback loops with the development of their own agency, and their own senses of communities and tribes. Feedback loops that can either be vicious or virtuous.

As one of the Ikamvayouth students says in this beautiful video “a dream or a talent, no matter how brilliant it is, it will die if it does not meet opportunity”. Shouldn’t the objectives of a ‘good’ education system be to nurture both the dreams and the talents, as well as deliver the opportunities?

Covid has been a wake-up call for the entire species that the world is not as predictable as we might think. And when you look into the future, not only are there the very real future pandemics, but also other fundamental shifts coming in all our lives through, for example, climate change or silicon-based intelligence.

If we as a species are to survive and thrive through these, do we not need to make sure that all our children have this trifecta of agency, community and purpose?

What, then, should the components of good education be?

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With thanks to a very special reader for their feedback on a draft of this.

Postscript: I wrote this yesterday (7th November 2020) but then got side-tracked by the celebrations about President-Elect Biden. Clearly the quote above from that young person in Khayelitsha resonates very topically when looking at the personal story of Vice President-Elect Harris as a daughter of Jamaican and Tamil immigrants who was bussed to school. She is not the only example. Barely a week ago it was also announced that the next Master of the second-oldest Cambridge college (Clare, almost 700 years old) will be a state-school educated daughter of an immigrant (Loretta Minghella).

“Development” takes time.

It’s not quite like planting a tree — even if it takes as long — because with a tree we mostly know what will grow if the conditions are ok. But with society — complex, inter-connected, dynamic, chaotic and with lots of feedback loops — its actually quite difficult to know what will happen.

We can of course have hopes, perhaps even expectations, based upon “theories of change” or evidence from other times or places. In the end, though, any kind of social change process is a step off into the unknown. We have to wait for the passage of time to reveal what will happen. Even if things go “wrong” and don’t work as hoped, there will always be ripple effects that will be uncertain and unpredictable.

So it was with much curiosity that I found myself reading a recent draft paper on an intriguing education program that was tried in Ghana about a decade ago.

The Teacher-Community Assistant Initiative (“TCAI”) was only the second funding program I ever worked on in development.

It was 2010. A year earlier we had happily secured Board approval at CIFF for a multi-pronged strategy focused on increasing “educational achievement”. The first thing we did was school-based deworming (a whole different story for another day).

With that funding approved, contracted and in the capable hands of my portfolio management colleagues at CIFF, the next priority was to look for ways of leveraging the tremendous insights that were coming out of the remedial education programs being done by Pratham in India, involving what has now come to be known across the world as “teaching at the right level” (“TaRL”).

Michael Kremer (whom I had cheekily cold-called and asked to sense-check the draft education strategy, which he had kindly agreed to do) suggested it might be worth speaking with Innovations in Poverty Action (“IPA”) on something that they were exploring with the Government of Ghana.

And so in 2010, I found myself on a phone call with Annie Duflo and Wendy Abt.

Ghana has always prioritised, even prided itself on, education. The country launched free compulsory universal primary education in 1995, well before the UN Millennium Development Goals of 2000. Education has often represented 30% of the total government budget or 10% of GDP, well above other low-, middle- and high- income countries.

And while access had improved (from 60% in 2000 to 90% eight years later), quality had not tracked this. The influx of large numbers of “first generation learners”, combined with teacher deployment challenges, had placed considerable strains on learning. By 2005, only 19% of third-grade students were proficient in maths (and 16% in English).

The Government, however, was not standing still. Reflective of the societal, and hence political, priority placed on education, Ghana Education Services (“GES”) was actively engaged in a variety of measures to turn this around.

Systematic learning assessments were being implemented, from proctored statistically representative national ones, through low-stakes non-proctored ones in every school, to attempts to set up continuous assessment schemes. Local language instruction was being introduced into earlier primary grades. Lots of teachers were being constantly recruited and trained. And, school governance approaches aimed at increasing accountability to parents were being trialled.

Yet these same systematic assessments showed that the picture was still grim. By 2007, while sixth-grade proficiency levels showed some marginal improvements, third-grade proficiency levels had actually deteriorated even further from 2005.

It was in this context that GES and IPA were exploring what else could be done. And had turned their gaze towards India and Pratham’s achievement gains involving remedial education and TaRL.

From this exploration (and an initial process pilot funded by DFID and Hitz Foundation) was born a fascinating — and at that time unprecedented — nationwide initiative: TCAI. An initiative that also involved the Ministry of Youth, the largest teachers union (Ghana National Association of Teachers, “GNAT”), the curriculum division of GES, an interesting local non-profit called School for Life (which regularly delivered significant achievement gains working with out-of-school children in rural northern Ghana) among many others.

At its heart TCAI involved curriculum-aligned TaRL pedagogy. But TCAI was also about much more than TaRL.

From a pedagogy perspective, the idea was to create local-language curriculum aligned content that would be tailored to help the bottom 50% of primary students in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades. So far, so TaRL.

But this would then be delivered in ways involving local high-school graduates who would be trained as “teacher assistants” and who would work in an officially sanctioned capacity within schools.

The “teacher assistants” would be non-unionised and be funded through the National Youth Employment Program. Further, the “teacher assistants” would have a governance line into local parent teacher committees, not just into teachers or district education officials.

Additionally, the remedial lessons would be trialled in various ways: after-school vs during the school day; delivered by the assistants vs by the teachers; to the bottom 50% of students vs just dividing the class into half.

All this would be trialled in a statistically representative nationwide pilot involving hundreds of schools, and tens of thousands of primary school children, across Ghana.

And vitally, this would all be done as a government program, through existing machinery. A very lean (four person) technical support unit was set up centrally within GES. There would not be a heavy, ongoing involvement of volunteers or non-profit staff involved in monitoring or administering TCAI. (This was quite important to try and avoid Hawthorne effects in the pilot, and thus get a more realistic sense of whether it worked or not).

The sensitivities in this are self-evident. For example, the idea of non-unionised, non-accredited high school graduates coming into schools in an official capacity on government payroll. The idea of comparing the relative efficacy of remedial lessons delivered by such assistants against unionised, university-educated teachers. The idea of officially sanctioned staff in schools having governance lines to local parents. All this in a national pilot, with important precedent-setting potential in a variety of other ways.

It took a lot of careful, delicate structuring and negotiation to get all the parties on board. GES and IPA did a very good job of bringing the key stakeholders along. And the willingness of GNAT to be part of an approach that would take many other teacher unions outside their comfort zone really deserves to be acknowledged. It was a sign of both enlightened self-interest, as well as a commitment to a national priority over and above parochial interests of defending their members’ interests at everything else’s expense.

After much due diligence (including asking lots of questions on the cost-effectiveness of education interventions, which probably drove J-PAL and Caitlin Tulloch mad looking at lots of other studies to compile their invaluable analyses!) CIFF’s Board agreed to fund the national pilot, with the International Growth Centre and the Hewlett Foundation also joining CIFF in funding a large, multi-arm, randomised control trial that would be conducted by IPA and J-PAL.

So, what happened?

Once the grant was funded, and my portfolio management colleagues took over the deal within CIFF, I moved on to the next topic — doing one of the most enthralling deep dives I have ever done, into early childhood education. And once that was kick-started at CIFF, I left to join Omidyar Network…

…which is basically a long way of saying that, embarrassingly, I sort of lost touch with the details of how TCAI was performing. Until I came across this recent draft paper by Duflo, Kiessel & Lucas on TCAI earlier this month (in this review prepared by Evans & Fei).

And it has been fascinating reading, to see what happened.

I won’t try and summarise the whole paper. You really should read it yourself (it features twice in Evans & Fei’s blog, it’s that rich in learnings). But some of the things that jumped out to me include the following.

The impact was heterogeneous across the country. We expected that to happen given the many differences in rural, peri-urban and urban settings (for example, more alternative jobs possibly changing assistant characteristics or attendance, or the linguistic diversity in the classroom in places with more incoming internal migration — Ghana has 11 official national languages).

There were implementation challenges. Materials were delayed (only 12 % of head teachers reported receiving them by the first term — this had happily increased to 90% by the third term). The program had to be tweaked about six months in and some re-training done (dynamic course correction at the start was expected). It turned out that the assistants didn’t get paid on time (some had to wait as long as eight months). Assistant-absenteeism happened (just as with teachers). Some schools were shut due to unrelated teacher strikes.

But there were still learning gains!

Two years of exposure to TCAI (with all those challenges described above) still raised childrens’ learning levels by 0.08–0.15 standard deviations, depending on which treatment variation you look at. That’s equivalent to gains of 18–34% of a year of schooling.

Girls benefited more from remedial classes than boys (by at least 0.10 standard deviations more). I find this particularly intriguing. TCAI was not designed with any explicit gender focus. The assistants were more likely to be male when compared to the teachers. Yet girls benefited more from remedial classes. Could it be that girls get crowded out in normal classrooms by boys in terms of teacher-attention?

TCAI’s effects persisted — children with only a partial exposure to the program still had up to 0.12 standard deviations of better learning a year after they had left TCAI. (This would be consistent with the importance of foundational learning as setting the base for subsequent progress).

Assistant-led remedial classes had 2x the effect of teacher-delivered targeted instruction. Teachers’ absenteeism did not reduce, but teacher engagement and time-on-task did improve.

There is a whole raft of other insights in the paper (including fascinating glimpses into the students and the assistants, the learning dispersion within classrooms and so on). It is well-written and I highly recommend spending time with it.

So, “would it have been worth it, after all, would it have been worth while”?

Well that’s up to each person to decide.

The program never did make the step from a very large national pilot to a permanent national program — although in fairness, Ghana went through a lot of macroeconomic stress during the last decade. [ERRATUM: this is no longer true — see exciting update below the end!]

Yet the counterpoint to that apparent failure is the size and persistence of the learning gains, as well as the gender benefits.

Evans & Fei’s review of effect sizes across 299 RCTs and quasi-experimental studies describes 0.15 standard deviation gains in learning as “kind of big”. Further, the working paper supporting that review also breaks studies into sample size buckets, since unsurprisingly smaller sample size studies see larger gains.

Set against those comparators, its learning gains of 0.08–0.15 standard deviations put TCAI into the 60th-80th percentile of RCTs. Even the 0.12 standard deviation persistent gain in learning a year after leaving TCAI would put it into the 70th percentile. And don’t forget that the effect on girls seems to have been a fair bit higher still, putting TCAI higher still if just a gender lens is used.

That doesn’t seem too shabby for a program that was also designed to try and minimise Hawthorne effects? But I’m no expert.

The A12n of TaRL pedagogy in a systematic way, that educationalists from Ghana and India compared notes on over a decade ago, has also evolved into ten countries on the continent trying TaRL approaches in various ways.

And even within Ghana, the lessons from TCAI have fed into new work — again being driven by GES — aimed at strengthening managerial support of teachers implementing targeted instruction, and which seems to be yielding promising gains.

Why was I reflecting on TCAI, even before I realised that this paper existed?

Because I’m struck by the similarities between certain key features of that approach and the challenges that education systems face now.

COVID is tending to increase learning gaps, budgets are constrained, and there are large numbers of under-educated and under-employed but motivated youth. Is it time to look at systematic ways of killing as many birds as possible with the fewer stones that we have left in our pockets?

For example, this recent joint piece, by the CEO of the Luminos Fund and a former Liberian minister of education, rightly draws attention to the difference between the health and education sectors in terms of last-mile leveraging of “local, motivated, high potential young people”.

And this recent RCT in Tamil Nadu by Muralidharan, Ganimian and Walters highlights the significant impact achievable in a highly cost-effective way at scale by using 10th grade educated local young women as “helpers”.

So is it time to look more systematically at better ways of reshaping and enhancing current over-strained systems? To learn from what was tried in the past in education, what has been done in other sectors, and what is being tried now in education elsewhere?

Was TCAI worth it — what do you think?

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ERRATUM: after I published this, Prof Adrienne Lucas updated that point with some v-e-r-y exciting news on how a revised program called STARS that builds on the insights from TCAI is going to be implemented by the Government of Ghana to deliver targeted instruction across 10,000 schools reaching 2 million students! See here for links to more information. Now the answer to the last question seems unquestionably clear :)

If I were in the unenviable shoes of a finance or education ministry official, and was being forced to make a Sophie’s choice for immediate large-scale effort by governments and funders, Early Childhood Education (“ECE”) would be foremost on my mind.

UN-sanctioned SDG 4.1 focuses on Universal Secondary Education (“USE”) and aims for all children to “complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes”. This is an admirable goal, and has many advocates and deep-pocketed philanthropies behind it (here’s Mastercard Foundation’s recent thoughtful report arguing that $175bn needs to be spent every year between now and 2050).

But the benefits that quality early childhood education (ECE) can deliver are lifelong, are more immediately impactful on a number of fronts, and can be done more cost-effectively. These benefits are also more equitable, and are disproportionately larger for poorer and more disadvantaged children (exactly the families being hit hardest by COVID-19). These are among the many reasons why universal quality ECE is also in the UN-sanctioned SDG 4.2.

The limitations of scaling USE as it is now

Here are the things that make me pause about a blanket expansion of the system the way that it is currently:

1. Quality of education, on the way in. It is now commonly accepted that the majority of poorer children in the “Global South” complete primary education with actual numeracy and literacy levels far behind where they ought to be . So if children are coming in behind, what will happen if they go into secondary? They will get further and further behind, and possibly thus drop out before completion. Indeed, a recent survey by World Bank and IFPRI researchers in a part of Tanzania found that >60% of the children who start lower secondary drop out before the end! Is that good for them? Is expanding such a system the best use of restricted budgets now?

2. Quality of education, on the way out. The quality of secondary education is currently far too low (especially, again, for the poor). This is apparent from the vast proportions of youth who are unemployed in places like India and South Africa (where there are essentially automatic promotion policies in secondary). It is also apparent from analyses done on the returns to education, which find that for Lower Income Countries, the returns to secondary education are lower than they are for primary or tertiary. Simply put, how much does just completing secondary education do, especially for poorer families, if you don’t actually improve your skills and employability? What is the relevance of what is currently taught in secondary schools if this is the lived experience of the people who go through it?

3. Equity. Linked to point 1 above — children from poorer families are known to be further behind in education than their wealthier peers. They are also more likely to drop out before completion, especially since the opportunity cost for their families is much higher when compared to entering the labour market early. So might a wholesale abolition of secondary school fees end up benefiting comparatively higher income families more than the poorer ones? Of course this could be mitigated by keeping fees on a means-tested basis, as for example Botswana has done (although that may not deliver the same soundbites and electoral gains that some ambitious politicians are incentivised by).

Is it hard to get ECE right?

Quality matters in ECE. Poor quality can actually have counter-productive consequences on young children. While the challenges of getting quality USE are well-recognised and being heavily researched, there is now ample research in ECE that identifies what are the approaches that work best.

Approaches that are child-centred, play-based and work on “domain-general” skills (such as attention, working memory, self-regulation, goal-setting) and “domain-specific skills” (such as emergent numeracy, dialogic reading)

Most importantly, these efficacious approaches can be delivered in highly cost-effective ways by the types of human resources that are abundant in the Global South.

For example, a program in Bangladesh that shows pre primary education provides benefits that last well into primary school. The program trained young community women with only primary education to work in pre primary centres. Aimed at more disadvantaged villages with poorer families, with stunted children whose own mothers had less education; it was found to benefit children, who went on to outperform their peers by 20%.

Another example is this more recent evaluation from Ghana of a program which works with uneducated marginalised mothers and government kindergarten teachers. The randomised control trial found “significant positive impacts on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development as well as health”.

Even more exciting are findings from another randomised control trial in Tamil Nadu, India. The program trained local young women who had finished 10th grade (lower secondary) in pre-school education. These women were deployed as “helpers” in a large government early childhood health program. The program doubled time spent on children’s education (and tripled time spent on their health) — children significantly outperformed their ‘control group’ peers in maths and language, and their height and weight also improved. The benefit:cost ratio ranged from 5x to 25x (depending on what assumptions you want to use)!

The case for ECE

Now, just pause and think about that. The gains that are available for children, and the jobs that are available for under-skilled youth (especially local women, thus hopefully having a hugely positive gender impact) for a lower cost than secondary school, and with a much higher return on the money spent than secondary school.

If you link that to the larger-scale ability of more mothers to return to the workforce, the net economic — and electoral — benefits of an ECE expansion would be far larger and more immediate. (Sidenote: I’m surprised that the gender and ECE movements in global development do not co-ordinate more to highlight these immediate political, economic and social gains more strongly, as for example happens in the United States. South Africa seems to be starting to do so, as this excellent recent piece shows).

Given the above, in these COVID-times with budgets overloaded, hunger rising, large numbers of under-skilled and unemployed youth, if you had to choose between USE and ECE, which would you pick?

How to avoid Sophie’s choice

To be clear, both ECE & secondary education can be worked on simultaneously. It doesn’t have to be a Sophie’s choice — even under current circumstances.

A bar-bell approach is doable:

1. A Marshall Plan style push on ECE because it is simpler, chronically needed, cheaper, more cost-effective, and it delivers jobs and gender benefits right now is critical.
2. And at the same time, a continuation of current focused and disciplined research that is under way to improve the quality of existing secondary school through testing and iteration.

My fear, though, is that I don’t see many signs of this bar-bell approach. Encouragingly, in India the promising new National Education Policy rightly includes ECE in its targets, as well as important changes in the structure and focus of secondary education (for example changing 10+2 years of schooling to 5+3+3+4, introducing vocational education among other things).

But in most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, this bar-bell doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead there are signs of significant distress for the nascent local ECE sector (for example in South Africa), while governments and donors enthuse about $175bn per annum for a universal expansion of secondary education.

Of course, the irony is that investing in quality ECE now would also set up the future bar-bell expansion of secondary education to be much more successful. With incoming children in future secondary cohorts benefiting from the gains of quality ECE, and the continued focus on improving the quality of foundational primary education, the marginal return on secondary education would improve significantly — even while any iterative innovations in secondary are still being bedded in.

And in case this seems far-fetched, here is longitudinal research from Ethiopia that has found that ECE increased the likelihood of children completing secondary education (even in its current state) by 25%! (Note also in that study the researchers point out that currently 5.5 million children — mostly poor and rural — in Ethiopia do not get any systematic ECE).

I hope that I’m missing something. That while I’m channeling Brent Scowcroft, decision-makers are joining the dots, seeing the evidence base, and making sure that the (even more) scarce budgets that are now left are deployed in the most cost-effective, equitable and efficacious way.

As Santayana said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Let’s not make the same mistakes with USE as happened with the expansion of primary education. The opportunity cost will not just be the children who go through ineffective secondary education systems, but also those who didn’t receive ECE as a consequence either.

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This is an edited and abriged version of an original article which can be found here — https://medium.com/@notesfrompequod/to-use-or-not-to-use-2a6fccc63ee5

Why Early Childhood Education Should Be A Post-COVID Priority for Governments was originally published in Early Insights™ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The U.K. exam fiasco this year has sparked a lot more debate than it usually does. It has revealed not just the institutional biases that disadvantaged students face, but also (rightly) provoked much conversation on the pluses and minuses of exams and selection.

There have been calls to abolish exams, as well as abolish selection and create comprehensive universities — all in the name of helping the disadvantaged. (Although no light is shed on how places in such ‘comp-unis’ would be allocated in the inevitable event of over-subscription. Presumably it would not be place-based because that way the system would end up with selection-via-property-prices as happens with many U.K. secondary schools. And if it was via lottery, how could anyone justify a situation where a private school child with grades of, say, BBB were picked by the lottery while a poor working-class child with, say, AAA was told “it’s not you”?).

Such well-intentioned reactions are unsurprising. And they have been met by thoughtful observations from others who have pointed out how even deeply socialist activists (such as the founders of the London School of Economics) “fought for an education system based around exams, because they believed that only exams could ensure that underprivileged children were treated fairly”.

So initial statements that queried why any selection was inevitable in education have modified to acknowledgments that some selection is indeed necessary.

This debate has been constructive, and some very correct points have been made about the perils of hyper-selection, especially based on assessment techniques that are either loaded with false-precision and/or involve a lot of subjectivity.

Very few people would argue that stand-alone high stakes exams are even reliable, let alone fair, yardsticks of talent, work ethic or aptitude. And yet, as with most things in education, the picture is complicated by the fact that other assessment methods often can come with their own biases (as this useful blog summarises towards the end).

Many ideas are being germinated (such as switching away from letter-grades to numerical, or switching to simple pass-fail, among others). There are merits and weaknesses to each of these, which shows that there are no straightforward answers in education.

At its heart, filtering students into different tracks is essentially a sorting and grouping problem. Or to put it another way, one of ability and clustering.

As educational content deepens and becomes more complex, such clustering is necessary and healthy. There are genuine agglomeration benefits in a knowledge-based society. Further, the competition for developing new knowledge is global, and it would be foolhardy for any country to dilute any competitive advantage it has. (The search for an effective COVID vaccine is a great example of both of those).

Clustering is also, it has to be said, important for students. Is there anyone as lonely as the child sitting in a class not understanding what the teacher is talking about, feeling more and more left out, and beginning to doubt their own self-worth?

It is widely recognised that one of the biggest challenges in education everywhere is that classrooms often have students at very different levels. Concepts like TaRL, or personalised learning, or blended learning have been developed to try and accommodate these realities. How feasible would it be to have hugely different ranges of abilities in university lecture theatres and laboratories — especially in STEM subjects?

How you cluster (as in, where you draw the separation lines) is of course a valid, tough and contested topic. There is absolutely a need to guard against the inertia of grade-based elitism, as grades do not even reflect creativity, which is where the biggest breakthroughs come from.

After all, it is not at all unusual for the most significant paradigm shifts to come from those whom orthodoxy would typically overlook. Usain Bolt, pictured at the top, is a great example of that — conventional thinking was that he was too tall to be a successful sprint athlete…Einstein was a patent clerk…Rosalind Franklin was unforgivably ill-treated by the scientific establishment of her time…the most interesting recent advances on the pivotal role of glia in schizophrenia have come from researchers in Rochester and Copenhagen…the list is endless.

And before you can cluster, of course, you have to measure “ability”. That in itself is not an easy thing to do. Mostly because ability has so many different components, develops at such different rates in children, and most crucially is often not even realised by those who have it.

(This is one of the biggest hurdles faced by disadvantaged students, whose abilities are often not fully seen — even, many times, by themselves. The best teachers are those who help such students realise that they are capable of much more, and kindle the flame rather than just fill the vessel, to paraphrase Socrates).

Now, I am no expert (on anything!). And so while I — like everyone — have some views on these (some of which can be glimpsed by writing such as this), I am not going to sit here and prognosticate or advocate.

Instead, I would like to draw attention to some absolutely fascinating insights emerging from California through the work of Zachary Bleemer, a researcher at UC, Berkeley.

Insights that I think can help inform this knotty question of ability and clustering at higher education everywhere. And especially in the U.K. while debates about exams, teacher assessments, and more equitable inclusion are so active.

You can read the paper here (it is really good, and rightly co-won the Best Paper prize at MD4SG’20). It is also 79 pages long, so I’ll try and summarise some of the findings that I find most intriguing here.

First some context for those (like me) who are outside the United States. California has a public and a private tertiary system. Selective private research universities (such as Stanford and CalTech) are counterweighted by nine selective public research universities (the “UC” system, which includes UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego among others), and various state universities and community colleges.

Students typically generate a “Grade Point Average” throughout their high schooling, based on their modular progress (as graded by their teachers). There are also high-stakes exams at the end of high school (such as the SATs) which are used (along with other things such as personal statements) for admission to tertiary education.

From 2001–2011, being mindful of the structural hurdles that disadvantaged students face (but being legally unable to apply identity-based affirmative action policies), the State of California ran something called the “Eligibility in the Local Context” (“ELC”) system.

Under this, the top 4% of students in every participating high school (which included 96% of government high schools) were guaranteed a spot in the UC system, regardless of their SAT score. They still had to apply, and it was up to each UC college whether they would accept them, but the State guaranteed that at least one would.

How were these top 4% identified? Teachers in the high schools would submit the grade transcripts of the children they thought were the top 10% of students in their school in that year to the UC President’s office of admissions. These would be looked at by UC, which would calculate a weighted GPA that would rank those students so that a cut-off score could be arrived at for that school in that year which would separate the top 4% that year.

So what happened?

This is where Bleemer’s research is both exceptional in its depth and quality, and also very thought-provoking in its findings.

Firstly, he finds that the two most selective UC colleges (Berkeley & UCLA) did not really factor in these ELC eligible students. They continued to select in their normal way, and so the ELC cut-off did not make a difference to their likelihood of being admitted there. Four UC colleges (Santa Barbara, San Diego, Davis and Irvine) did use the ELC cut-off. Students who were above that cut-off and applied to them were almost certainly accepted.

Secondly, the students who were admitted through this ELC support had broadly similar GPAs to the other students (admitted through normal processes) into those UC colleges. But they had worse scores in the high-stake exams, were more likely to be from under-represented minorities, were more likely to come from schools with lower average exam scores, and were also much poorer.

This strongly suggests that the ELC was working in an effective way to make access to tertiary education more meritocratic and more equitable (although not at Berkeley or UCLA…). So, what happened to these students?

Through excellent data-sleuthing, Bleemer has been able to explore two very interesting broad questions.

Question 1: how did these ELC supported students who were now admitted into these UC colleges fare (in terms of completion and early career wages) against the ‘normally admitted’ students (who, remember had similar GPAs but were richer and had better exam scores)?

Question 2: how did these ELC supported students fare (in the same terms of completion and early career wages) against their high-school peers with similar GPAs who just missed the ELC cut-off and so ended up in different universities and colleges?

In summary, he finds the following.

ELC students’ likelihood of finishing university increased substantially to 77% — this remained slightly below the likely 83% graduation rate of their non-ELC college peers, but was substantially higher than the 55% likelihood of their non-ELC high school peers.

ELC students’ income after graduation increased so that by their mid-20s, they were earning more than $15,000 a year more than their non-ELC high school peers.

ELC students, however, were less likely to complete a STEM degree than their non-ELC college peers (even among those ELC students who applied, and were accepted, to do STEM courses).

There are a lot more nuggets in there, and I highly recommend spending time with this paper. For example, Bleemer also reports that once this ELC program was expanded from the top 4% to the top 9% (in 2012), “most campuses ceased giving almost any extra admission consideration to ELC-eligible applicants…rendering the program nearly defunct”.

So, what might some relevant takeaways be for the debate here in the U.K. or elsewhere? Well, that’s up to each person, but here are some observations and questions that jump out for me.

1. High-stakes scores are clearly not complete or accurate predictors (as is well known), but more modular assessments by teachers on continuing work can yield a lot of information that is perhaps not being mined as fully as it could in the U.K.?
2. Did it, though, make a difference that the transcripts were reviewed, and ELC-cutoff scores sized, independently and centrally by UC (rather than relying too much on hyper-granular teacher recommendation)? Given that teachers can have biases, was this a happy combination of using rich information from people who know students well and the objectivity of an independent rubric?
3. This still remained a highly selective program. And became defunct when expanded down the curve. So clearly clustering by ability was making a difference. How and why? Is it that if the ability gradient becomes too stretched, that reduces the effectiveness of a unified tertiary class?
4. How much of the post-university wage premium that ELC students enjoyed (compared to their very similar non-ELC high school peers) was driven by signalling and networking, versus a better quality of education delivered by the UC colleges?
5. How can the quality of the lower-ranking tiers of tertiary education be improved so that children who barely missed the ELC cut-off wouldn’t have such dramatically different near-term outcomes? Is it a question of increasing the supply of the better quality colleges (but see Q3)? Or is it that lower-ranking tiers have more dispersed ability gradients, and so will unfortunately tend to perform at levels more reflective of their average (Q3 again!)?
6. Is there something about STEM that the types of mastery and skills measured by cardinal high-stakes tests do seem to make a difference? (This seems to also be a pattern from an interesting experiment in medical schools, but more work remains to be done). Flipping that around, do humanities subjects need to acknowledge this, and explore alternative ways of clustering ability (such as comparative marking techniques) instead of the false-precision of cardinal scoring?

There is bound to be a lot of subtlety that I’m missing — both regards to Bleemer’s paper and the broader topic. The area is vast, context is key, and I am no expert!

But perhaps we have to accept that there is a distribution of ability, and that there are real and meaningful gains (for society, not just individuals) from clustering by ability — in the right way at the right stages?

I do not believe such clustering should make people be described as normatively ‘better’ or ‘worse’, or ‘worth more’ or ‘worth less’. But perhaps it is a part of human nature. After all, the Olympics are a great example of this. They work because they do cluster by ability. And they work because they drive a process of identifying and developing talent that can reveal what exalted heights humans are capable of. (Yes, there is of course a dark side of sports too, as there is to everything).

Rivalrousness is a fundamental trait in nature (with even co-operation being a competitive strategy). And at an individual level, education is a rivalrous good. So families will always try to advantage their own (even, for example, being strategic about enrolment and re-enrolment in different high schools in Texas’ version of this ELC program).

The task of good mechanism design is to harness the strengths, and mitigate the weaknesses, of human nature. And given that humans are ingenious and dynamic, the challenge seems to be to make sure that (a) rich data is continually collected on patterns of inequity, so that the gamekeepers can both (b) stay ahead of the poachers and also (c) be judged on their performance?

“USE”. Universal Secondary Education. It’s part of a UN-sanctioned goal (SDG 4.1, which aims for all children to “complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes”).

It’s got many advocates, and deep-pocketed philanthropies, behind it (here’s Mastercard Foundation’s latest report arguing that $175bn needs to be spent — every year — between now and 2050).

Is it important to make secondary education more effective, more equitable & more accessible? Of course.

But I will be contrarian and say that it should not be being expanded the way that some seem to be currently pushing for (namely, blanket build-it-out-and-make-it-free approaches).

Why?

Because the opportunity cost of that is far too high (especially in COVID-affected budgets) compared to other things. Things that are critically needed; that can be done efficaciously, equitably and cost-effectively; that are also firmly part of UN SDG4 (hint, SDG 4.2); and that actually set up countries to be even more likely to fulfil SDG 4.1.

Things to be Cautious about USE

Here are the things that make me pause about a blanket expansion of the system the way that it is currently:

1. Quality of education, on the way in. It is now commonly accepted that the majority of poorer children in the “Global South” complete primary education with actual numeracy and literacy levels far behind where they ought to be (whether that ‘ought’ is in relation to their international or better-off domestic peers, or even their own national curricula). So if children are coming in behind, what will happen if they go into secondary? They will get further and further behind, and possibly thus drop out before completion. Is that good for them?
2. Quality of education, on the way out. The quality of secondary education is currently far too low (especially, again, for the poor). This is apparent from the vast proportions of youth who are unemployed in places like India and South Africa (where there are essentially automatic promotion policies in secondary). It is also apparent from analyses done on the returns to education, which find that for Lower Income Countries, the returns to secondary education are lower than they are for primary or tertiary. Simply put, how much does just completing secondary education do, especially for poorer families, if you don’t actually improve your skills and employability? What is the relevance of what is currently taught in secondary schools if this is the lived experience of the people who go through it?
3. Equity. This is linked to point 1 above. Children from poorer families are known to be further behind in education than their wealthier peers. They are also more likely to drop out before completion, especially since the opportunity cost for their families is much higher when compared to entering the labour market early. So might a wholesale abolition of secondary school fees end up benefiting comparatively higher income families more than the poorer ones? Of course this could be mitigated by keeping fees on a means-tested basis, as for example Botswana has done (although that may not deliver the same soundbites and electoral gains that some ambitious politicians are incentivised by).

Does it make sense to simply expand a system that performs likes this? Are there not fundamental problems that need to be grappled with first?

Now this is not news. The very thoughtful Mastercard Foundation report linked to above highlights many of the changes that are needed. Many have been making these points for years, and responding to this in creative ways by innovating new pedagogies, new delivery models, and so on. One only has to look at the staggering breadth of research currently under way (for example here by J-PAL’s Post Primary Education initiative — there are of course many others).

So would it not make sense to take a more measured approach to this? To test and iterate some of the improvements that are necessary. Before simply scaling up the system?

That would also be consistent with the fact that it will take time to recruit and train the vast number of secondary school teachers necessary. To be more effective, such teachers will need to have a solid subject matter grasp themselves, as well as of course be good teachers. That is not going to happen overnight?

It is also worth bearing in mind the dynamic effects that will be bound to happen. If there is a sudden expansion of secondary school enrolment, it is almost certain that there will also be a flight to the private sector. That is how the low-fee private school sector accelerated. And the same thing will happen with lower-fee private secondary schools.

I don’t have an ideological problem with that because institutional multiplicity is good in any system. But the stratification effects of that need to be borne in mind. Would it be a good use of scarce budgets to expand a system that leads to a dynamic response of economic segregation as those families who can switch to the private sector do so, and the poor are left behind in prematurely scaled, sub-optimal secondary schools?

So What Should be Done Instead?

If I were forced to make a Sophie’s choice, the clear direction for immediate large-scale effort by governments and funders should be: Early Childhood Education (“ECE”), which is also very much part of UN SDG4.

There is now a solid evidence base on the lifelong benefits that quality early childhood education can deliver. If it is done right, the domain-general skills developed through it (like attention, working memory, self-regulation, goal-setting and so on) deliver gains well beyond the completion of schooling. If it is done right, the gains are also disproportionately larger for poorer and more disadvantaged children (since the counterfactual for them is worse).

“If it is done right”…so how difficult is that? Actually not that difficult at all. There is now also a solid evidence base on the type of approaches that work best (it can of course always be improved upon, but enough is now known). And most importantly, these efficacious approaches can be delivered in highly cost-effective ways by the types of human resources that are abundant in the Global South.

For example, this analysis of a program in Bangladesh that trained young community women (often mothers) who had only completed primary education. The program was aimed at more disadvantaged villages with poorer families and more stunted children whose own mothers had less education. It found that the children who benefited from this program outperformed their peers by 20%.

Another example is this more recent evaluation from Ghana of a program which works with uneducated marginalised mothers and government kindergarten teachers. The randomised control trial found “significant positive impacts on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development as well as health”.

Even more exciting are these findings from another randomised control trial in Tamil Nadu, India. The program trained local young women who had finished 10th grade (lower secondary) in pre-school education. These women were deployed as “helpers” in a large government early childhood health program. The program doubled time spent on children’s education (and tripled time spent on their health) — children significantly outperformed their ‘control group’ peers in maths and language, and their height and weight also improved. The benefit:cost ratio ranged from 5x to 25x (depending on what assumptions you want to use)!

Now, just pause and think about that. The gains that are available for children, and the jobs that are available for under-skilled youth (especially local women, thus hopefully having a hugely positive gender impact) for a lower cost than secondary school, and with a much higher return on the money spent than secondary school.

If you link that to the larger-scale ability of more mothers to return to the workforce, the net economic — and electoral — benefits of an ECE expansion would be far larger and more immediate. (To be honest I’m surprised that the gender and ECE movements in global development do not co-ordinate more to highlight the immediate political, economic and social gains more strongly, as for example happens in the United States?)

Given the above, in these COVID-times with hunger rising, large numbers of under-skilled and unemployed youth, if you had to choose between USE and ECE, which would you pick?

Does it have to be Either/Or?

No it doesn’t. Both ECE & secondary education can be worked on simultaneously, in the right way.

A bar-bell approach, with a Marshall Plan style push on ECE (because it is simpler, it is chronically needed, it is cheaper, it is more cost-effective, and it delivers jobs and gender benefits now). And while that push is happening, getting the improvements that are fundamentally necessary in existing secondary school systems figured out through the testing and iteration that is currently happening.

My fear, though, is that I don’t see many signs of this bar-bell approach. Encouragingly, in India the promising new National Education Policy rightly includes ECE in its targets, as well as important changes in the structure and focus of secondary education (for example changing 10+2 to 5+3+3+4, introducing vocational education among other things).

But in most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, this bar-bell doesn’t seem to be happening? Instead there are signs of significant distress for the nascent local ECE sector (for example in South Africa), while governments and donors enthuse about $175bn per annum for a universal expansion of secondary education.

Of course, the irony is that investing in quality ECE now would also set up the future bar-bell expansion of secondary education to be much more successful. With incoming children in future secondary cohorts benefiting from the gains of quality ECE, and the continued focus on improving the quality of foundational primary education (through approaches such as TaRL or complementary basic education), the marginal return on secondary education would improve significantly — even while any iterative innovations in secondary are still being bedded in.

I hope that I’m missing something. That while I’m channeling Brent Scowcroft, decision-makers are joining the dots, seeing the evidence base, and making sure that the (even more) scarce budgets that are now left are deployed in the most cost-effective, equitable and efficacious way.

As Santayana said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Let’s not make the same mistakes with USE as happened with the expansion of primary education, or be myopically single-issue? The opportunity cost will not just be the children who go through ineffective secondary education systems, but also those who didn’t receive ECE as a consequence either.

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This piece has benefited immensely from some kind souls who commented on an earlier draft, and pointed out aspects that have significantly improved it. Thank you!

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This last week has been incredibly frustrating, upsetting — even depressing.

Even more so, of course, for the thousands upon thousands of young people (and their families) across the UK who have been treated so abominably by the A-level exam algorithm.

Watching this “collective punishment by statistics” in an uncaring, heartless & non-transparent way by the education system has been maddening.

Added to this has been a certain amount of incredulity watching eminent global education thinktankers advocating for the abolition of high-stakes exams as a pro-poor move.

Some might say their point is proven by this UK exam tragedy.

I believe that could not be more wrong.

Everybody knows the dice are always loaded against you if you are poor, or an immigrant, or a POC, or disabled, or (still too often) female.

People still scoff when they hear phrases like “structural disadvantages” or “institutional bias” — the insinuation being this is just whingeing.

If nothing else, the UK exam results show loud and clear that these structural factors are deeply entrenched. The results show how small classes in small schools in minority subjects are treated one way, but poorer children in larger classes in larger schools get their individual agency and effort completely tossed out of the window.

Now, imagine if there were no exams. Do you think these structural advantages for the better-off would suddenly disappear? Or that they would just become much harder to trace, call out & address?

If sunlight is a disinfectant, then inequity thrives invisibly.

I am a first-generation immigrant. I came here as a child. Stepping off the plane after the school year was already well under way, I went to a small school in London that no one has ever heard of and no longer even exists (redeveloped). There is no wikipedia page, no list of alumni — it was fee-paying (I was on a partial scholarship) but there were no playing fields (literally). It’s best described as a school for misfits or castaways — the most multi-cultural, multi-racial learning environment I’ve ever been in. Every batch some kids would always lose their way with hard drugs or hard crime.

When it came to university applications, our careers teacher didn’t even talk about Oxbridge, lecturing instead about UCCA and PCAS (that’s how old I am). So at the end of the class, I put my hand up and asked what the process was for going to Cambridge.

“You want to go to Cambridge?” came the response.

I persevered. I applied. I didn’t get interview prep. I didn’t know any alumni. I’d never been to Cambridge before in my life. I went for my interview. It was like entering another universe. I remember the drive back home to London, feeling that all I wanted was an offer — a chance.

I got that offer, and I got in. (And when I started, I saw that I was the only brown kid in the entire college year — there was one black exchange student there for a year from South Africa, and that’s it. I’d never been anywhere so white and upper/upper-middle class).

I got in because there was an objective bar (I was applying for natural sciences), and as long as I met it I could not be denied.

I knew the bar was not set on a level playing field. But my mother had always told me two things. First, to always aim for the stars so I’d land somewhere in the branches. And second, that I always had to be better (much better) than the rest because if I just performed the same, I would never be treated the same.

But I knew that as long as there were some semi-objective rules, I had a chance.

Now if there hadn’t been exams, do you think I would have had that? The social capital to know how to navigate the system? Remember my career teacher’s reaction. Remember me being the only Asian kid in the entire batch. (And remember I went to a private school for castaways, not a poor London state school).

Exams give a chance to kids to aim for a target that can’t be cloaked. No letters of referral, or legacies, or networked internships etc needed. And when they get an offer (for whatever institution) they have something that they know they can work towards. With focus, effort, determination — a target.

(This is why this year’s debacle is so upsetting. There were poor kids who were giving their all, and a computer program — designed by human beings — arbitrarily said “no”. That is not fair. It is not justice).

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think exams are a perfect (or even necessarily a good) indicator of someone’s talent or work ethic or aptitude. I have worked for decades in intensely competitive, meritocratic environments, and seen what drives those features. And I’ve seen those in so many kids who for some reason were never able to show it in exams — kids who were good enough to be there in Cambridge, or to excel in other ways, but never even applied.

So I know — first hand — that exams are not a full or fair indicator. And I firmly believe that other signals of value are needed (whether it is coursework, or EPQ-style grading, or vocational or apprenticeship qualifications).

But to take signals — imperfect as they may be — away entirely is actually to do the poor and disadvantaged a disservice. It favours those with high social capital. That is neither fair nor justice.

Because the peaks will still be there. But instead of there being a visible route that can be worked towards, the path will become obscured by fog and available only to those who come with guides.

The right answer must surely be to help the poor and disadvantaged by providing them with extra support for their own efforts to reach their peaks. Not to make those peaks even more obscure to navigate towards, nor more arbitrary to reach?

The second is this paper from economists Amalia Miller and Carmit Segal that shows integrating more women into frontline police service led to greater reporting of gender-based violence (including domestic violence) and also “significant declines in rates of intimate partner homicide and non-fatal domestic abuse”.

We all know that correlation is not causation. That sometimes it can be sheer coincidence, that at the least causation can be messy with lots of other factors involved (and sometimes it may even be unclear what direction causality is running in).

Yet that doesn’t stop so many people from relying so much on classification engines that are really nothing other than correlation-finders. Machine-learning, artificial intelligence, human intuition — all of these are methods that look at existing data sets for patterns and fit those on to current real-time data and even make forward-looking projections. For example, we have social-network based credit-scoring and lending, reoffending rate estimators, music or book recommendation engines — the list goes on and on, driven by the ingenuity of people (and computation power) in interrogating data in more and more sophisticated ways.

And a lot of attention is finally being applied to the “hidden” biases that many of these engines are revealing. Some argue that these biases are wilful, while others note that perhaps this is just a case of data holding up a mirror we don’t like — that the biases that are being revealed so starkly are the ones that are indeed quantifiably there (but which until recently were only “alleged” by the minority groups affected).

You could also be a purist and say that to the extent that the predictive models show too much “bias” or too much “variance” (using machine-learning jargon) that’s just a sign of poor algorithmic design or weak “cross-validation” testing, or a need to “retrain” the algorithms. And others build on this by saying that algorithmic transparency would guard against this — although I wish them well when trying to justify an intuitive explanation for the number of hidden layers and activation nodes and weightings in a complex neural network that is making startling classifications that unsettle some parts of society.

But the bell that those two data-points kept ringing for me was that all this attention on faster, bigger, data-led classification was actually missing something even bigger. And that is human agency. The past is not the future, and things can change!

Those two data-points right at the top are compelling illustrations that human behaviour can change in profound ways. And importantly, that that change can happen at a person-to-person level, seemingly unnoticed in aggregate, and build like that into a tidal shift where long entrenched statistical patterns are dramatically altered.

To me, this type of tidal (as opposed to seismic) change seems to drive two important lessons. The first is that it happens best by people connecting with other people, by the norms and self-beliefs that people have for themselves and their communities being shaped and inspired (either for or against!) by those that they see around them. This can of course work for better or worse, but it shows that plasticity is there all around us, and within us.

The second is that these changes do not happen as inspirational gifts from visionary leaders on high. That this sort of emergent bootstrapped change — from one person to the next, at a peer to peer level — can and does happen organically. And that this organic shift in norms is what leads to tidal changes, not the inspirational diktats or seismic orations of charismatic ‘leaders’. (To be clear, I’m not saying that such leaders cannot influence things — sadly all too often they do, and in not very pleasant ways. My point is that change that relies on charisma does not seem to have the same longevity, or resilience, as change that has happened at a bootstrap level: Ireland’s referendum victory for gay marriage seems but one example of that?).

So far, so obvious — what’s the point I’m trying to make?

Its this. We need to get back to focusing on the human, and we need to support and respect their agency. Sometimes I’m struck by the tendency of self-proclaimed social change actors (“doers”, “funders” or “leaders”) to focus on the technology, on the scale, on whichever putative solution they are promoting.

But I don’t think you can appify or automate that precious human-to-human spark and impulse — that magical interaction that can prompt a change in a person’s self-belief.

Yet it still seems like too much energy, resource and attention is diverted on the technology, on the platform, on the classification of the people and the anointed entrepreneur-leaders. All of these seem to be basically different technologies of control.

Whereas what needs investing in, and nurturing, is the army of unsung change agents — the teachers, the nurses, the peer role models among many others. In a world where capital is so skewed in the hands of the few, is it not bad conscience to advocate for, or support, control-based models as opposed to those that nourish and leverage this human spark and relinquish agency back to where it has been overly depleted from?

When the British conquered India, they deliberately manipulated and then tried to ossify a previously contested social system into the rigid caste system. Under that people were classified, and then that classification was used to shape their future lives and opportunities. The agency of the many was taken away, and redistributed to the few.

We must guard against the same happening again now. Not just through an over-reliance on machine-learning or AI, but also more fundamentally through a depletion or degradation of human to human transmission of agency. The transmission of a spark that can lead to seemingly ‘heavy’ correlation curves fundamentally changing, as people change what they feel is or is not acceptable.

But this will require lots of people with money and managerial influence to really ground themselves in humility, and to relinquish agency to people they may not agree with. How many will have the courage to do that? But unless that happens, it will all still be different classification systems competing against each other — labelling people and preferences as “good” or “bad”, as “sensible” or “foolish”, as “progressive” or “bigoted”, as “leader” or “populace”. Classification should not be allowed to become destiny.

“In many countries and communities, learning isn’t happening,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim notes in the introduction to the new World Development Report (WDR). UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics estimates that 617 million children and adolescents are not reaching minimum proficiency levels. This equates to 58 percent of the world’s school-age children on average, with that ratio rising as horrifically high as 88 percent across sub-Saharan Africa.

The WDR also reaffirms a clear tenet in Omidyar Network’s education strategy: the untapped potential of technology to help improve learning outcomes, as long as it is efficacious, leveraged in results-driven, cost-effective and gap-narrowing ways, and complemented by the human support and teaching that every child is entitled to.

On the same day that the WDR came out in Washington, D.C., one of our ed-tech investees, Siyavula Education, unveiled its exciting #1MillionMaths campaign in Johannesburg in partnership with Google.org. The partnership will massively expand the reach of Siyavula’s high-quality adaptive math platform, reaching hundreds of thousands more low-income students from South Africa to Nigeria. The truly democratized, equitable offering of quality ed-tech to all students has been a core mission of Siyavula since it was founded, and they have taken many deliberate design decisions to achieve this. We first invested in Siyavula in 2014, and this partnership is but the most recent demonstration of the exciting potential we saw in their approach and their team years ago.

When we were first introduced to Siyavula in April 2013, they had a strong curriculum and showed early promise — but we did not invest initially because our belief was that good-quality content, while necessary, would not be sufficient to drive learning gains. One year later, Siyavula’s co-founders shared their learnings with us. They had noticed that while the content was indeed being used, in order to really drive learning gains they needed a world-class, adaptive, machine-learning based system that sat on top of this content — and that was what they had started to build.

The Siyavula Practice technology they built uses powerful and sophisticated machine learning to meet all students where they are, and then helps take them on a progressive learning journey. It uses a mastery-through-practice approach which maintains a healthy balance between consolidating current skills and being stretched to the next steps. In this way, students are able to learn and progress at their own pace, often without explicitly realising their own progression until later (when they notice their exam scores and improved self-confidence!). Early on, the company was using this Siyavula Practice in 50 schools with roughly 2,500 learners. Many of these were more advantaged schools and learners, but Siyavula was also beginning to expand to lower-income students — and finding that the technology was helping students across the ability curve and across very different settings. This was the signal we needed, and in 2014 we invested.

Siyavula builds its technology to support teachers, not to substitute them. They provide dashboard analytics that allow teachers to see where each of their students is stuck — so they can provide laser-focused assistance. Teachers are innovating with this technology in a host of different ways — whether using it for small-group work in classrooms or for homework assignments. Additionally, other entrepreneurs have used the technology to develop entirely new business models, such as efficacious lower-cost after-school support to serve middle- and lower-income families.

Finally, we invested because the Siyavula team built their technology to ensure that it would not be gap-widening. This included making one vital decision right from the start. They built their technology so that Siyavula Practice could be used even on an old-fashioned feature-phone, without heavy data and video requirements. This may sound quaint, but it is vital for reaching far-flung or poorer students. A recent independent survey done by Acumen’s Lean Data team found that the income distribution profile of Siyavula Practice learners is almost identical to the South African national curve: It is a truly democratized high-quality offering, with 30 percent of its customers living below internationally recognised poverty lines.

Siyavula is improving learning outcomes at scale; from 2,500 learners three years ago they are projected to reach more than 300,000 learners next year with their adaptive technology alone. The Lean Data survey found that 97 percent of learners reported that it had helped their grades improve, and 74 percent said it had improved their quality of life. Siyavula is home-grown proof of world-class adaptive education technology born from the Global South — for the more complex secondary grades and across the socioeconomic spectrum.

It has been thrilling to see Siyavula develop, and the impact and feedback from the learners is deeply energizing and humbling. But they haven’t, and indeed couldn’t have, done this alone. Watching the way so many other organizations like Vodacom, MTN, Sasol Inzalo, Zenex, MSDF, ITSI, Google, various central and provincial governments, and others have also engaged has been wonderful. It underscores the point that while the learning problem facing us all is a massive one, it is indeed possible for collective action to emerge to help solve this problem. We are grateful to be part of this, and optimistic that together we can all help improve this awful situation.

The biggest pattern to me is this: Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Zuma, Modi, Xi. There is something happening here.

There will of course be very context-specific factors involved in each of those countries (there are no grand unified theories). But, there does seem to be a massive deterioration in social capital around the world. Or perhaps, more accurately, a transmutation of “progressive”, “inclusive” social capital into a more polarizing, animus-based, version.

Perhaps what was viewed as “progressive” and “inclusive” wasn’t that progressive or inclusive after all? Dani Rodrik was far ahead of his time when he wrote this in 1997. It seems that the potential social consequences he outlined are indeed coming home to roost. (And its worth noting that he wrote that before the full consequences of tech-driven deskilling and job evisceration were also factored in).

So perhaps its not a surprise we are where we are — perhaps we have just been willfully blind. After all Cassandra was never listened to.

Two other big questions come to mind.

First, to what extent is the prevailing marketization of everything eroding social capital more quickly than it creates it? Nature is red in tooth and claw, self-interest prevails, and indeed even group-based co-operation and kinship networks can be seen as competitive strategies. But could a view of the world that normalizes an instrumental, utilitarian, transactional view of human interaction be socially corrosive at a deeply human level?

A view that exalts individuals, but also atomises them and instils a paradigm of competitive self-interest, wouldn’t be one that builds a stronger or deeper or more inclusive social compact.

But perhaps that is an underlying trend in what is happening? (It could also partially explain how faith-based approaches that try to mitigate for this through religious identity also gain ground, like Erdogan or Modi?).

And this raises the second big question. What has philanthropy been doing the last few decades?! Philanthropy is meant to be the love for humanity. But has it been too silent if we have ended up with such a corroded social compact — something that could be gold but has been allowed to turn into lead?

Historically, so much of truly inclusive social progress has been driven by efforts that aim to build and nurture social capital. Anti-slavery, womens’ franchise, civil rights, LGBTQ, post-combat stress, mental health.

But these days, so much energy and imagination in philanthropy seems to be on market-dominated, philanthro-capitalist, tech-extolling, “solution at scale” paradigms. While they no doubt can play a role, they are but one hammer. But they seem to be the hammer that everyone eulogises about. Perhaps there are deeper, more fatal fires burning that these approaches are irrelevant to or insufficient for?

What is gained from Nero playing a beautiful tune if Rome is burning? (And its worth bearing in mind that the people left behind over the last decades probably felt the same way as they were ignored by the new creeds that were leaving them behind).

Yet modern philanthropy seems to spend too little effort or energy into building this positive social capital. In the slow, deliberate work of deepening and strengthening the social compact.

Perhaps it is time philanthropy was held more accountable for being asleep at the wheel? For perhaps being too captured by a prevailing socioeconomic frame, and for not truly challenging it enough? What were today’s philanthropies doing that it took Pope Francis’ Evangelium Gaudii to drive into the mainstream conversations and arguments that were previously brushed off as crackpot or reactionary? Perhaps, some cynics might say, the Vatican should also prepare for seductive capture as wolves seek to seem like sheep.

Driving all these questions, at least for me, is a fear. The world has seen this story before. The collusion of concentrated holdings of economic power with populist rhetoric that demonises the vulnerable. Perhaps a new feudal age is emerging, where the new lords and ladies keep the serfs pitted against each other — an age where some have more abundance than they need, and others are kept in drip-fed scarcity and at each other’s throats.

I don’t want my children, or anyone else’s children, or grandchildren to grow up in a world like that.

Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Zuma, Modi, Xi.

As Primo Levi said: “It happened, therefore it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say.”

Most people intuitively know the transformational power of a good education on the lives of individuals and their families. There is now also a host of evidence that shows that improving the quality of education also yields hugely valuable “spillover” benefits for economic growth, communities, and societies. The problem is that raising the quality of education is hard work, and it can take decades to see improvements in student outcomes.

A lot of money and effort has gone into education systems around the world. And while progress has been made, much remains to be done. The quality of education remains too low in too many places. The UN estimates that 250 million children globally cannot read, write, or count well, and one-out-of-five young people have never completed primary school and lack the skills for work. Sadly, the children who would benefit the most from better-quality education — those coming from disadvantaged families — are usually the ones who are least likely to receive it. Unchecked, this can lead to vicious circles of intergenerational poverty and lack of opportunity.

This is why today we are announcing our investment in SPARK Schools, a leading provider of high-quality affordable education in South Africa. SPARK Schools aims to go beyond delivering a marginally better education. The team’s vision is to drive internationally comparable quality of education for the children of families of all incomes, by both growing its own network of schools and also sharing the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of its approaches for the benefit of the larger system.

SPARK Schools is one of the first primary school networks in Africa to use blended learning, an academic instruction approach that combines teacher-led instruction with computer-based adaptive education technology. The combination translates into an individualized experience for each student, tailored to his or her unique learning needs. Additionally, SPARK Schools acknowledges that, at its heart, learning is a human process that involves nurturing both a child’s ability and how they engage with their peers and society. Therefore, SPARK Schools emphasizes these non-cognitive aspects through daily motivational assemblies, sports, and family engagement.

The SPARK Schools team also recognizes the crucial role of teachers. While data-led approaches and personalized learning technologies do play a powerful role, children are not merely vessels that need filling. They are unique flames that need kindling. And teachers are key to this. SPARK Schools invests heavily in their teachers’ ongoing professional development. If you talk to a SPARK Schools teacher, you will probably find yourself talking to someone who is tired at the end of each day but remains excited and enthusiastic. This steadfast dedication is a result of their students — children who are learning and thriving, who are inquisitive and caring, and who serve as the rocket fuel that powers them to be highly effective teachers.

What also differentiates SPARK Schools is its inclusiveness, as they are helping to shatter the long-held perception that quality private school is for only the wealthiest or highest-performing students. School models that are not affordable for poorer families or for the system as a whole, or which work by screening or selecting students on ability, widen the achievement gap. To overcome this, SPARK Schools has built a model that delivers elite-level quality education at a cost-per-learner that comes in at, or below, the benchmarks set by government. So, not only can poorer families afford SPARK Schools, but governments can as well, whether as customers themselves, or by replicating such pedagogic models within their own existing systems.

While SPARK Schools’ model does have the potential to reshape education opportunities throughout South Africa and beyond, the school network knows that it will not — and cannot — do this alone. Transforming an education system with deep challenges and inequities will require support from the wider education sector, society, and the government. But what SPARK Schools can do as one player in this larger movement is to show what is possible — to prove that a self-sustaining business can deliver elite-quality education to the children of home-helpers, receptionists, and traditional professionals. And that is precisely why we invested in SPARK Schools, for they are showing the world that by imaginatively leveraging the power of technology and the power of human beings, it is possible to give more people access to life-changing opportunities that can help them reach their full potential.

SPARK Schools will use its Series B funding of US$9 million/121 million South African Rand to open additional schools in South Africa. The company aims to grow its network from a current eight schools to 20 by 2019, extending its reach to 20,000 students. As impact investors, we look forward to the valuable insights that SPARK Schools’ expansion will yield, helping guide our future investments in effective and equitable education solutions.