By — Ayushmaan

Abstract:

Chapter IV of Poor Economics: A Radical Thinking of the Way to fight Global Poverty challenges the practice of “One size fits all” education polices that were prominent in Asian Countries. Despite receiving huge budgets and awareness, it remained poor at ensuring learning outcomes and had no significant effect on poor communities. This was due to the failure of three major components in the policy – systemic dysfunction, preconceived notions, and pedagogical failures. The authors introduce the approach of “Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) as a solution, based on qualitative randomized trial experiments. While this approach’s strengths lie in its perspective to understand education polices for the poor, and challenging deep-rooted societal beliefs towards the poor. However, its limitations lie in its low-scale randomized trial experiments and its lack of attention towards secondary schooling, questioning the effectiveness of the proposed solution.     

Introduction:

Poor Economics, written by Nobel Prize-winning economist Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, challenges the intrinsic notion of “one size fits all” in the policy context. The Authors portray the stigmatization of the poor when formulating public policy and thus advocate for more context-specific and evidence-based interventions. Chapter IV, titled “The Top of the Class,” is paradoxical in nature, which questions the “one size fits all” education policies, most prominently in Asian countries. These policies, despite having massive budgets and an increase in school enrolment worldwide, learning outcomes remain poor, especially amongst the people below the poverty line or “earning less than a dollar a day”; therefore, the schools still perpetuate the elitist culture. The authors support their arguments through quantitative data from Pratham and the ASER report, and also qualitative data through different education programs worldwide and social interviews. Thus, this chapter explores the critical question of
“Why are schools failing the poor?”

Overview:

The Chapter is structured in four major sections, namely – Supply-Demand Wars, The Curse of Expectations, Why Schools Fail, and Reengineering Education.  The chapter begins by challenging the preconceived notions of those who supply, referred to as “supply-wallah”, and those who raise demand, referred to as “demand-wallah”. Supply Wallah argues on the stand that learning follows from enrolment, and thus ensuring enrolment in schools through accessibility would overall improve the education. Whereas Demand Wallah argues on the stand that education must be supplied where there is demand. The poor fail to appreciate the necessity of education as they perceive education as a return; they can get on their wage that they pay for. Thus, the authors demonstrate that the problem of education policy is not a simple, rather a complex interaction between systemic dysfunction, preconceived notions, and pedagogical failures.

Key Arguments and Concepts:

Education in poor nations has gotten better, but better education has not led to better learning. Giving more resources under the policy, such as textbooks, fewer students per class, and extra teachers, has no significant impact on students’ learning capacity. The authors provide an example of Kenyan students who received textbooks for free under its policy, which only marginally helped top students, while there was no effect on weak students.

On the demand side, authors demonstrate that parents are interested in education, but their expectations for education are often distorted by unrealistic expectations. This has been discussed in “The Curse of Expectations”. Poor parents view education as “a lottery ticket, and not as a safe investment.” Poor parents believe education is only valuable when it can lead them to a desired government job or office job that is respected. Since these jobs are extremely scarce and require many years of education and hard exams, parents invest limited resources in one or two children who are most likely to excel, which is decided from the primary years of schooling, and thus, never let the other children realize, let alone reach their potential.

This expectation trap fosters a vicious cycle. Parents can see no point in fundamental reading and arithmetic unless it serves to help their children acquire jobs. Teachers are aware that parents gauge success with grades rather than actual understanding, so teachers focus on instruction with the strongest students while abandoning those falling behind. The curriculum further catalyzes this problem by being constructed in a manner suitable for grade-level children, which complicates things for those without rudimentary skills. Here, the author moves into the underlying reasons for school dysfunctions. Teacher quality and motivation are consistently low in government schools for the poor. Teacher absence is over 25 percent in some Indian states in government schools. Also, students’ learning levels are not aligned with the curriculum. The school follows a strict age-based curriculum that assumes students enter with the right knowledge fitting for that grade level, as previously mentioned. The authors found that, when students are lagging, there is no systematic method in place to remedy and put such students back to the level where they belonged. Remedial Classes saw poor performance from the teachers in many Asian schools due to a lack of incentivization and preconceived notions towards the poor.

Lastly, private schools don’t always dominate government schools when background differences are held constant. The Author purports the finding that both government and private schools vastly differ in teacher salaries, but rather there were no stark differences in learning outcomes in both schools when both schools had the same selection criteria for enrolment of students.

In the final section, the authors present evidence of what works. The most effective approach they discovered is “Teaching at the Right Level” (TaRL), which was introduced by the Pratham Foundation in India. The TaRL involves traits of assessing students’ levels of learning regardless of grade and grouping children by learning level rather than age. And teaching of fundamental skills through creative, activity-centred methods. The authors provided a Randomized evaluation of Indian states, and it showed that TaRL had consistently brought substantial gains in learning outcomes. In Uttar Pradesh learning camps, twice as many children were able to read a paragraph or a story. TaRL is effective because it addresses the fundamental gap between what children already know and what is taught to them. Noticeably, TaRL proved effective when carried out through community volunteers and remedial programs, if it is undertaken with the sustained support of the government.

Strengths:

The author’s argument strength lies in highlighting the behavioural economics of the effect on educational policies among the poor. The Author points out the universal adoption of education policies and their common failures in learning outcomes, and therefore the creation of talent waste. Their qualitative approach in understanding the socio-economic context of the poor in many Asian countries allowed them to understand the effectiveness of educational policies beyond numbers and thus substantiated their major arguments. The Authors provide a very clear understanding of the complex interplay of systemic dysfunction, preconceived notions, and pedagogical failure in education policies towards the poor, and thus, based on these randomized trials, their solution of adopting TaRL seems to solve this intrinsic issue in the education polices. However, the authors’ major strengths do not lie in the solution, but rather in their perspective towards educational polices and their effect on poor communities, which is quintessential for developing countries to progress, and would represent a paradigm shift in the education policies across the globe.

Criticism:

Despite its strengths, its limitations lie in the author’s focus on primary schooling and less upon secondary schooling. The Author portrays through their arguments that having cured the policy issue in the phase of primary schooling, the issue does not persist for students in secondary schooling. The authors’ solution primarily focuses on early schooling phases and ignores any insights into other phases of learning. Secondly, the authors do point towards the preconceived notions in the local community, especially the poor; however, the book offers limited suggestions as to the root causes of such beliefs amongst the poor.

These critics do not render the author’s suggestion as irrelevant; however, drafting and implementing an education policy requires highlighting and dealing with these root causes of such preconceived notions. Keeping in mind the limitations on the scale of the authors’ randomized trials, the TaRL approach, in my opinion, resolves the issue with systemic and pedagogical failures of such policies; however, it lacks understanding of the socio-economic beliefs of the poor.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Chapter IV of the Poor Economics reveals that education policies fail among the poor due to a combination of system dysfunctions, preconceived notions, and pedagogical failures, rather than from the socio-economic status of poor communities. The major contribution of this chapter is not in its concept of TaRL, but in shifting our perception of education policies for the poor community. With quantitative as well as qualitative data, Banerjee and Duflo in the end posit that the poor community could be shielded from the vicious cycle of talent waste and stereotypical beliefs towards the poor communities when solutions address these intrinsic failures of “one size fits all” education polices.

Author’s Bio:

Ayushmaan is a second-year student at Jindal Law School, pursuing L.L.B. His research interests include public policy, corporate and cyber law.

Image Source: POOR ECONOMICS: RETHINKING POVERTY & THE WAYS TO END IT