There is a broad consensus in society that the education sector needs reform. There is also an agreement on a) within education reforms it is the public sector that, for a variety of reasons, needs to be focused on, and b) while there are plenty of sub-areas that need focus and they are interconnected, we cannot have good public sector schools unless we have qualified and trained teachers, and these teachers have proper monitoring, evaluation, accountability and support structures to ensure optimal performance. If we do not have all of the above, whatever the state of other variables (infrastructure, software, curriculum, examinations) schooling is not going to work.
Traditionally educational reforms have focused a lot more on brick and mortar issues, curriculum or issues related to teacher training, but the softer side, related to system design, has usually been ignored. The reasons are not hard to understand. Brick and mortar issues, and curriculum issues, though very important, are more concrete and easier to tackle than system design issues. They are also more tangible so governments can talk of how much they have spent on education and how the curriculum has been altered. But it is harder to boast of getting teachers’ incentives aligned or having developed better monitoring and evaluation systems.
It is also harder to work on reforms when large numbers of people, complex situations & bureaucracies, and decentralized systems are involved. The education system involves students, parents, teachers, communities, and local, provincial and federal government. Reforms, related to teaching, designed at the federal level or provincial level have to permeate to the level of individual teachers before implementation can happen. And even there, the teacher does not have full control: she has to rely on the cooperation and enthusiasm of the students to be able to affect teaching.
Given the complexity, a system that involves optimal or even reasonable control mechanisms and incentives for teachers is not going to be a simple one, and cannot be based on monitoring and evaluation through one or a few variables. It has to have multiple elements put together in a whole that works.
To start off, we need to recruit qualified and good teachers. This means we need to have people who not only have the requisite degrees but also the desire to be teachers. But talent enters a field only if there are good returns to work in a field: which is why everyone wanted to be a doctor, engineer or CSS officer at one time. Teacher compensations and career paths have to be designed to take care of entry issues. Once teachers have entered the field, we have to ensure retention of good teachers. Again, this has to be done through proper design of career paths.
The story does not end there. A qualified and trained teacher is no guarantee that she will teach well in class. We have to ensure that teachers show up in class, are motivated to teach, and are the role models for our children that we want them to be. This again requires a multi-variable monitoring/evaluation system and support system. Examination results alone are not enough to do the job. We need head-teachers, principals, peer group, parents and community to be involved in the monitoring/evaluation and support system for teachers.
Currently teachers in public sector have very few of the above mentioned in place. Teachers are not paid enough, do not have well defined career paths, have almost no effective monitoring and evaluation or support systems, and their career development has little or nothing to do with student achievements. Is it any wonder most public schools do not work? We should be asking as to why any public schools work.
There have been public sector teacher related reforms in other countries. The successful ones have some elements in common. They: a) make returns to teaching more attractive, b) offer suitable incentives for teacher retention and development, c) link compensations to teacher performance measured through student achievements, evaluations by students, head-teachers, principals, relevant administrative staff and sometimes even parents and members of the community. Without this sort of a broad and multi-pronged approach success at reform is hard to achieve.
A lot of people argue that the public sector cannot deliver good education in Pakistan. But they also know that the private sector cannot replace the public sector completely. We have to go back to the first assumption. Setting aside issues of infrastructure, curriculum or examinations; the performance of public sector educational institutions depends on how well teachers are teaching. Though difficult to implement, well-designed reforms have managed to ensure quality teaching through public sector in many places. We cannot give up on the idea of public sector provision of education. Instead, we have to focus on the design of appropriate reforms that take a multi pronged, multivariable approach to system design. As we devolve education to provinces and local bodies, we should use this opportunity to institute deeper reforms for teachers too. If we do not, educational reforms will not ensure that public sector education delivers at least the minimum quality we need from our schools.
The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]
