Lillie Kilburn
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Blog
RISE Webinar Explores Why Education Funding, Though Crucial, Won’t Fix the Learning Crisis By Itself
A RISE side event for the Global Education Summit: Financing GPE 2021-2025 will explore how to maximise the impact of education system investments by aligning the entire system with the goal of learning.
Authors
‘Necessary but not sufficient’
At the end of July, the Global Education Summit: Financing GPE 2021-2025 will bring together world leaders to reaffirm the importance of quality education for all children and pledge funds toward GPE’s mission of improving education systems.
It’s a moment for both appreciating this global commitment to education and recognising that money and inputs alone won’t be sufficient to address the learning crisis.
Accordingly, RISE has convened a side event for the Education Summit in which we’ll explore why aligning education systems with the goal of learning is essential to ensure that education funding works to raise learning outcomes.
The 22 July online event, titled ‘To Get Children Learning, More Money is Necessary But Not Sufficient’, will focus on methods of identifying and addressing key misalignments that prevent education systems from focusing on learning, paving the way for future investments in education to go much further toward ending the learning crisis.
In this webinar, we will delve into the evidence showing that many education systems are set up to maximise access rather than learning. And we'll highlight what can be done to align them with the goal of learning instead. What are the different parts of an education system that need to work together to deliver learning? What are common misalignments between these parts of the system? And what tools and approaches does RISE research suggest can be used to ensure that the system maximises learning?
Research on aligning education systems
The webinar’s panel will be chaired by Mary Goretti Nakabugo (Uwezo Uganda, PAL Network, and RELI), who will draw attention to a letter written by frontline practitioners to President Kenyatta and Prime Minister Johnson that highlights the steps leaders need to take to solve the learning crisis beyond finance.
Marla Spivack (Building State Capability at Harvard University and RISE) will present the RISE education systems diagnostic, a tool to identify high-level misalignments that are present in an education system and preventing progress on learning. Leonard Wantchekon (Princeton University, the African School of Economics, and RISE) will focus on the particular misalignments between politicians and communities and discuss how he is helping to address them in Nigeria through holding “summits” that produce concrete social contracts around education. Vincy Davis (Indian School of Public Policy) will look at how bureaucratic culture and processes are often more aligned with input-based goals rather than learning goals, and how recent reforms in Delhi were able to incrementally shift the bureaucracy away from monitoring and toward motivating and supporting teachers. Finally, Julius Atuhurra (Twaweza East Africa) will focus on the misalignment between curricula, exams, and classroom instruction in primary school in Tanzania and Uganda.
Joe DeStefano (RTI) will then facilitate a discussion, drawing connections between these different approaches to addressing system misalignments and bringing in questions from the audience.
Follow this event on Twitter: #RISEGPEWebinar #RaiseYourHand #GoBeyondFinance #GES2021
RISE blog posts and podcasts reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation or our funders.