Katie Cooper
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Blog
It is no surprise that in many developing countries, inequalities in learning outcomes emerge in the early years of schooling. Furthermore, for those children that fall behind, it can be a struggle to catch up.
On 15 July, RISE launched the first session of the RISE Online Presentation Series, a panel that explored some of the sources of inequalities in learning outcomes and a few strategies that have been undertaken to tackle such inequalities. The panel was chaired by RISE team member Caine Rolleston (University College London) and featured four researchers talking about their respective work.
Janice Kim discussed the expansion of access to primary schools in Ethiopia, and the effects of this expansion on children’s readiness to start primary school. Alejandro Ganimian gave insight into how educational activities in pre-school centres in India can later impact learning outcomes once children reach primary school. Harounan Kazianga shared thoughts from a study in Burkina Faso on the long-term effects on girls from expanding access and the quality of schooling. Bich-Hang Duong explored the ways in which teachers’ treatment of minority students inside the classroom in Vietnam can affect students’ experiences and outcomes.
While the hour-long session only allowed us to touch the surface of this topic, our panellists have kindly offered some additional insight based on questions submitted to the panel. Click on one of the questions below to learn more about our panellists’ research.
Harounan Kazianga: Over time, some villages which were not selected to receive a BRIGHT school got a school from other sources. Some BRIGHT villages could have an extra school. In the paper, we verify that our estimates are still internally valid. Unfortunately, we did not track the "crowding in" of other good things. Top ↑
Regression Discontinuity Design. Top ↑
Alejandro Ganimian: This is not a new policy; in fact, a few decades back the World Bank supported a similar two-worker model in Tamil Nadu (the setting of our study). However, the programme was abandoned because the extra funding ran out. This prior (positive) experience made the government of Tamil Nadu more likely to take up this innovation, and our cost-effectiveness calculation was crucial to persuade them of the potential benefits of scaling this up with government funds. Top ↑
Harounan Kazianga: No, the curriculum and teaching were not modified. However, the treated schools received more female teachers. Top ↑
Harounan Kazianga: (i) Intervening earlier (here elementary schools) can have long-term effects on academic outcomes and life choices. (ii) Adding girl-friendly amenities are effective at reducing the gender gap; (iii) Improving school quality can raise both enrollment rates and learning outcomes. Top ↑
Harounan Kazianga: I think inequality is structural when policies keep some groups of people from obtaining the resources to better their lives. So education policies can create inequalities, for example tracking students according academic performance.
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Alejandro Ganimian: We did investigate heterogeneity by baseline nutrition, children’s sex, mother education, whether the AWW position was initially vacant, and children’s baseline achievement. With the exception of a positive and statistically significant interaction effect on girls (larger in the HH assessments), we did not find much else. Maybe this reflects the across-the-board positive effects of ECE? Top ↑
Alejandro Ganimian: Careful: the cost-effectiveness is not only driven by the low ECCE facilitator wages, but also from the fairly large effects on learning. And consider that we only used the HH assessments for this calculation, where impacts were smaller. And we did not even consider the effects on nutrition, which would make this intervention even more cost-effective. And yes! We see this study as having crucial implications for the licensing of pre-school workers in India. Even if the global literature has focused on minimum qualifications for pre-school instructors, our results suggest that ***in an environment with a high-quality curriculum, daily guidance on activities, and an over-worked main worker*** we can achieve large gains in learning outcomes by adding a local facilitator with only a high school education (Karthik Muralidharan has a nice policy paper on this question). Top ↑
Bich-Hang Duong: This is one of the policy recommendations we offer. Actually, we do have this policy but it still does not work as we wish. Many minorities drop as they go to higher levels of education. Top ↑
Alejandro Ganimian: I cannot speak on behalf of unions, although yours is a good question. I can tell you, however, that (as I mentioned in my response to Luis) the government of Tamil Nadu had already experimented with a similar policy before, so this was not completely new to AWWs. With respect to the differences with primary education, I would compare our results with those of Duflo, Dupas and Kremer (in Kenya) and with those of Karthik and Venkatesh Sundararman (in India). The main difference between the results of those studies and our own was that the main teachers shifted their responsibilities to the contract workers and shirked. This did not happen in our setting — possibly because anganwadi workers were already overworked and welcomed the additional help to improve early-learning outcomes. Top ↑
Alejandro Ganimian: The anganwadi worker had a wage that was about half of that of the main worker (watch Karthik Muralidharan’s presentation for further details). And yes! The government of Tamil Nadu is well aware of the findings — as I mentioned in my response to one of the chair’s questions, we had several instances for their feedback through an ongoing partnership with J-PAL SA. As I mentioned in another answer, one of my co-authors (Karthik Muralidharan) is also conducting a study on strengthening early childhood education in primary schools. This will be another policy option that the government will consider before they decide how to move forward. We are currently in the process of collecting (and responding to) feedback from the government. I imagine that process will also inform their decision on whether to scale up this intervention.
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Harounan Kazianga: The experiment did not address norms around age of marriage. There was, however, a sensitisation programme on the benefits and the importance of girls education. We find that the overall effect (enrolling more girls and keeping them longer in school) has led to a reduction in the rates of early marriages and child bearing. Top ↑
Bich-Hang Duong: Our Vietnam study is a qualitative study with videos of three teaching sessions with students, pre-and post-interviews with teachers before we record them, and also interviews with principals.We are doing very close analysis of teachers’ beliefs with their practices that we can see in their teaching in the videos.Our analysis of these beliefs is found in the data from teachers’ interviews, also principals, but also these beliefs (about ethnic minorities) run through policy and public discourse and is quite normalised in society. Top ↑
Bich-Hang Duong: There are data from our study with teachers that show some teachers have beliefs and practices that are aimed at promoting ethnic minority learning beyond the basic learning. For example, we also see in our quant. learning data that some groups have more gains more than others, e.g., Khmer students had better gains in math and literacy than some other groups. And there may be some teaching practices that support this. We are trying to look at our data more on this. Top ↑
Bich-Hang Duong: The RISE Vietnam team is doing re-analysis of the VNEN to see it’s longer-term impacts on learning outcomes now that the students are in secondary schools. We can also look at how it does or not address inequality.There are relatively large enough numbers of some ethnic groups in this sample so we can look at this more directly. We do have some data in our interviews with teachers about how they think about the VNEN program, its curriculum, and how it impacts their practices. But because training no longer continues for secondary school teachers, we can’t follow this very systematically. But the training does not directly address teachers’ beliefs about ethnic minorities, which is one of our concerns here. Top ↑
Alejandro Ganimian: Just to clarify, the tests were conducted in anganwadi centers (not schools) and households. As I briefly mentioned in my discussion, you can think of the AWC tests capturing the effects for children who consistently attended the centers during the study (~16 months) and the HH tests capture the ITT effects (i.e., the effects of the offer of the intervention, for children who may not have attended for the full period). So yes, it is about exposure. Top ↑
Janice Kim: The gender parity index (GPI) in Ethiopia at the pre-primary level has increased slightly from 0.98 to 0.94 as enrolment has expanded from 2010/11 to 2016/17, and it is driven by historically disadvantaged regions. Compounding with regional disparities in preschool access, the most significant differences are evident in the three most disadvantaged regions of Somali (0.84), Gambella (0.89), and Benishangul-Gumuz (0.90). Patterns of GPI at the pre-primary level are similar to those at the primary level. The average GPI in primary is slightly lower at 0.90 with similar patterns in the three regions of Somali (0.78), Benishangul-Gumuz (0.84), and Gambella (0.92). Top ↑
Janice Kim: The paper by Rossiter et al., (2018) will be useful to address this question (although not fully answered). For example, it highlights incoherence between delegated national objectives and local preferences and capacities, which results in inequitable processes of early learning expansion. Top ↑
Janice Kim: In Ethiopia, the government introduced capitation School Grants for pre-primary classes, which provide much-needed additional resources for the classes nationwide. However, to reach and support most remote areas and marginalized communities, it needs to permit adjusted assignments to districts/regions based on needs. This can help to overcome the short-term inequalities in funding per-child by location. Top ↑
For more information regarding the event, including links to the papers that were presented, please visit the event page on the RISE website.
RISE blog posts and podcasts reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation or our funders.