Education for All: Increasing Enrollment at the Expense of Quality
Ben Jones
The Education for All initiative, composed of six key components addressing the need for universal, quality education, has made measurable strides toward achieving its goals in the nineteen years since its launch. In Ghana, for instance, female literacy rates improved from 65.5% to 75.8% between 2000 and 2007. [1] Primary school completion rates in Madagascar are another example, having jumped from 35.3% in 2002 to 61.5% in 2007. These success stories, however, mask a problematic trend in the quality of education services offered. The expectation in acquiring an education is that economic and social prospects will be enhanced to the student’s benefit, with those benefits reverberating outward to positively impact family and community alike. The unintended result, however, is that EFA is something of a victim of its own success. Unprecedented levels of enrollment due to Universal Primary Education without concomitant increases in teaching ranks, learning material availability, and classroom real estate means that the pupils are falling victim to unmanageable teacher-pupil ratios. Teachers and administrators are under pressure to “teach in bulk, graduate in bulk.” Consequently, learning outcomes are revealing that primary and secondary school graduates lack the basic knowledge, literacy, and skills needed to improve their livelihoods.
The Education For All goals
Education for All is a compact between 155 nations to achieve the following six goals by 2015:
• Expand early childhood care and education
• Provide free and compulsory primary education for all
• Promote learning and life skills for young people and adults
• Increase adult literacy by 50 percent
• Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015
• Improve the quality of education
Some goals are closer to achievement than others. The most successful of the six thus far is undoubtedly the provision of free primary education for all, as previously mentioned. Gender equality is also progressing, with male-to-female ratios dropping nearly continent-wide, and having achieved rough parity as of 2005 in primary school in some nations such as South Africa, Gabon, and Botswana. On the other hand, several targets are in danger of not being met by the 2015 deadline, one of which is improving the quality of education. Literacy rates, retention rates, pupil-teacher ratios and other datasets can be used as indicators for the current level of quality. Among the difficulties in addressing this issue is, however, is obtaining the data and how best to evaluate and pull meaningful conclusions that can be applied to rectifying the problem.
Measuring the quality of learning
The quality of learning taking place in sub-Saharan African classrooms can be measured through assessment of learning outcomes. These outcomes are collated in national assessments conducted by the incumbent MoE, UNESCO, or other international consortiums such as SACMEQ (Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality). The World Bank also maintains a database of education indicators from which quality implications can be gleaned. [2]
Evaluation of the data as it pertains to education quality takes place on an institutional level with the annual UNESCO reports, as well as the more irregularly published but very influential SACMEQ [3] and PASEC (Programme d’Analyse des Systèmes Éducatifs de la CONFEMEN) reports. There is some criticism within academic and development circles that program monitoring and evaluation does not occur on a wide enough scale. SACMEQ is the principal implementer for sub-Saharan Africa, and has only done two reports since 1995 on the fifteen countries under its purview. A third report is due out before the end of 2009, promising to discuss data through late 2007.
An additional criticism, this one about the source of the data itself, is the predilection in some countries to test only certain grade levels rather than taking a more holistic view:
The main limitation of all existing internationally comparable assessment systems is that they focus exclusively on students who are currently enrolled and attending school … [I]n Malawi where only about 70 percent of pupils make it to Grade 6, many having dropped out in the earlier grades, testing only 6th graders means that improvements in learning achieved at lower grades are not being monitored, and that shortfalls in learning and the mastery of skills due to early dropout are not being captured. [4]
In a positive development, however, UNESCO indicated in its 2008 EFA Global Monitoring Report that “[s]ince 2000, countries have increasingly conducted national learning assessments; in sub-Saharan Africa, the percentage of countries that carried out at least one national assessment between 2000 and 2006 was 33%, compared with 24% between 1995 and 1999.” [5]
In what way has the quality of learning suffered?
As indicated in the opening paragraph, the quality of education on offer in sub-Saharan Africa has improved in some measurable ways, but it is currently falling far short of the EFA mandate. The manifestations of this lack of quality run the gamut from high pupil-to-teacher ratios to the lack of adequate classroom facilities. The common thread throughout is the imbalance created by the surging primary and secondary school enrollment rates.
Specific indications of declining quality of education include:
High pupil-teacher ratio
- Pre-primary pupil/teacher ratios are high in sub-Saharan Africa – above 31:1 on average in 2005. [6]
- 90 percent of schools in Sierra Leone have pupil-teacher ratios of greater than 40:1. [7]
- The largest percentage increases in the pupil-teacher ratios from 1999 to 2005 occurred in the Congo, DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
Shortage of teaching and learning materials
- “The SACMEQ survey found that over half the grade 6 pupils in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia reported that their classrooms did not have a single book. In these and other countries, between 25 and 40% of teachers reported that they did not possess a book or guide in the subjects they taught.” [8]
Deterioration of, or lack of, school buildings and furniture
- In Southern and Eastern Africa, “47% of school buildings were reported to need major repairs or complete rebuilding; only 13% were listed as being in ‘good’ condition.” [9]
Low teacher motivation
- “The SACMEQ and PASEC surveys report that many African schools cannot conform to the official school year due to high teacher turnover and late teacher postings.” [10]
Poorly-trained teachers
- “The shortage of teachers observed in many counties is compounded by a low percentage of trained teachers … The shortage of trained teachers worsened between 1999 and 2005 in some countries; in Ghana, for instance, a policy of providing free kindergarten in public pre-primary schools was accompanied by a rise in the ratio of pupils to trained teachers to 115:1, from an already high 103:1.” [11]
Use of unfamiliar language for instruction turns teachers into lecturers, students into passive listeners. [12]
Inadequate learning time
- “Schools often start the school year a month late, end it a month early and have high student absenteeism, which results in as many as 200 to 300 fewer hours of instructional time than the official calendar requires. Significant loss of instructional time and inefficient use of classroom time are indications of poor education quality, with detrimental effects on learning outcomes.” [13]
Low retention rates – pupils in crowded conditions with few textbooks and learning materials to share, few places to sit, and little direct attention from their overburdened teachers find themselves slipping through the cracks and out of school.
- “School retention remains a challenge: the median survival rate to the last grade of primary education (63%)”
- Fewer than half of all pupils reach the last grade in Benin, Chad, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda.
- Retention improved significantly in Mali, Mozambique, and South Africa between 1999 and 2004
- Retention deteriorated in that same time frame for Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, and Madagascar – associated with higher net enrollment, which schools are having trouble balancing with retention to the end of primary school.
Poor learning outcomes
The consequences of these aforementioned hurdles to learning are vividly displayed in the learning outcomes collected from national assessment surveys and reporting agencies. While more pupils than ever are attending primary and secondary school in Africa, the education results are troublesome:
- “In Ghana, a household survey administered eight mathematics questions – where master of one digit arithmetic would have been sufficient to answer half the questions and two digit arithmetic to answer all correctly found that only a quarter of 15-19 year olds could answer more than half of these very simple questions.” [14]
- “In South Africa, 63 percent answered less than half of a set of ‘real-life mathematics questions correctly” [15]
- “Results from SACMEQ II indicate that fewer than 25% of grade 6 children reached the ‘desirable’ level of reading literacy in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa and Swaziland and fewer than 10% in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda and Zambia.” [16]
- Between 2000 and 2005 in Niger, achievement levels in grade 1 and grade 6 maths declined 13% and 28% respectively; grade 6 French also declined, by about 7% [17]
Why is this happening?
Generally, many of these outcomes can be, and are, directly attributed to pegging the Universal Primary Education contingent on the abolishment of school fees. As of 2005, twenty-seven African countries no longer allowed school fees as a condition of enrollment, including ten nations who moved quickly to abolish school fees between the Dakar EFA conference and 2005. This policy decision spurred a rapid increase in number of enrolled children across sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, the average net enrollment ratio in primary education grew at six times the rate of the pre-Dakar (2000) decade. Impressive success stories came out of Benin, Madagascar, Tanzania and Zambia, which increased their enrollment rates from between 50% and 70% since 1999 to levels in excess of 80% in 2006. [18] Some nations, such as Sierra Leone, took nearly draconian steps to ensure that children attended class, as the government “introduced a policy of free education at the primary education level in 2000 … Furthermore, the government set a fine of up to Le500,000, imprisonment, or both for a parent or a guardian who does not send their child to school. These resulted in an increase in the net enrollment ratio of primary education to 63 percent in 2004.” [19]
This wave of new pupils, attracted by the promise of free education, seemed to catch planners and administrators unawares. Because student enrollment numbers did not increase gradually or organically, the education system in many countries has not had ample time to adapt by steadily training greater numbers of teachers with improved methods, building more schools and libraries, implementing gender sensitization programs, and so on. Conversely, classrooms have had the tendency to suddenly become distracting environments in which dedicated learning and dedicated attention from the teacher both come at a premium.
Solutions to improve the quality of education
The causative factors of the education quality problem as well as the current ‘state of the classroom’ suggest a series of solutions that could be implemented, including the following:
- Hire more better-trained teachers so that classroom instruction is more effective and pupil/teacher ratios improve.
- Develop and print more quality textbooks written for the intended audience
- Maintain, renovate, and rebuild dilapidated schools/classrooms
- Conduct multilingual instruction
- Conduct regular national assessments to determine where geographic, professional (teachers and school administration), and curriculum weaknesses lie
- Involve NGOs in training teachers, maintaining/rebuilding infrastructure, producing learning materials
Conclusion
The EFA initiative has opened the doorway to an education previously unattainable by millions in Africa. The abolishment of school fees and encouragement on the parts of governments and communities has measurable improved the outlook for many school-age students by ensuring that they can each have the opportunity to attend class with their peers and develop their skills and learning. This important achievement is at risk, however, of falling victim to its own success. The extent and rapidity with which students have filled classrooms is putting strain on education systems across the continent. Teachers are overworked and underprepared, infrastructure deteriorates more quickly than it can be repaired, and pupils lack textbooks of their own and run the risk of slipping through the cracks altogether. Meanwhile, infrequent and incomplete assessments of learning outcomes lead to outdated, post facto policy decisions that are constantly trying to catch up with the problem on the ground. A more holistic approach to the learning process that tackles all aspects of the student-teacher environment inside and outside the classroom can reverse these quality declines and ensure that EFA is truly education for all.
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[1] Worldbank.org
[2] http://go.worldbank.org/85XM5TBQA0
[3] http://www.sacmeq.org/
[4] Filmer, et al., “A Millennium Learning Goal: Measuring Real Progress in Education,”12.
[5] UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report, 69.
[6] UNESCO EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008, Regional Overview, pg 2
[7] Nishimuko, pg 24
[8] EFA 2008 Regional Overview, 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008
[11] EFA 2008
[12] Cynthia Guttman, “Declining Quality and Inequality in Education”, http://www.un.org/pubs/chronicle/2005/issue1/0105p29.html
[13] EFA 2008
[14] Filmer, et al., “A Millennium Learning Goal: Measuring Real Progress in Education,” 6.
[15] Ibid.
[16] UNESCO, EFA Global Monitoring Report 2009: Regional fact sheet, 2.
[17] UNESCO, EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008, 71.
[18] UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2009: Regional fact sheet – Sub-Saharan Africa, 1.
[19] Mikako Nishimuko, “Problems behind Education for All (EFA): The case of Sierra Leone,” 20.
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