Global Educational Expansion

Global Educational Expansion Historical Legacies and Political Obstacles Aaron Benavot, Julia Resnik, and Javier Corrales © 2006 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-87724-055-8 The views expressed in this volume are those held by each contributor and are not necessarily those of the Officers and Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or its Project on Universal Basic and Secondary Education. Please direct inquiries to: American Academy of Arts and Sciences 136 Irving Street Cambridge, MA 02138-1996 Telephone: (617) 576-5000 Fax: (617) 576-5050 Email: [email protected] Visit our website at www.amacad.org Contents v PREFACE 1 CHAPTER 1 Lessons from the Past: A Comparative Socio-Historical Analysis of Primary and Secondary Education Aaron Benavot and Julia Resnik 91 CHAPTER 2 Political Obstacles to Expanding and Improving Schooling in Developing Countries Javier Corrales 149 CONTRIBUTORS Preface The reasons for providing all the world’s children with high-quality primary and secondary education are numerous and compelling. Education provides economic benefits and improves health. Education is a widely accepted humanitarian obligation and an internationally mandated human right. These claims are neither controversial nor new. In 1990, the international community resoundingly pledged to achieve universal basic education by 2000, and later extended its deadline to 2015. The unanimity of commitment and shortfall in achievement raise a fundamental question. If universal education is such a good idea, why don’t we have it already? As part of the American Academy’s Universal Basic and Secondary Education (UBASE) Project, we asked this question of Aaron Benavot, Julia Resnik, and Javier Corrales. Benavot and Resnik considered the history and legacy of efforts to achieve universal basic and secondary education. Corrales examined the present political obstacles to and incentives for expanding and improving education where it is most scarce. Their findings, published here, provide a healthy dose of realism to estimates of the scale of the UBASE chal- lenge. But by illuminating the challenges, they also render them finite. In explaining the elusiveness of universal primary and secondary education, Benavot and Resnik call attention to the enormous progress to date and the complexity of the work remaining. They examine the emergence of com- pulsory education laws, the transformation of diverse educational frame- works into formal school systems, the problems of inequality that have aris- en, and the role played by international organizations in creating an increasingly interconnected global education system. On the basis of this geographically broad comparative history, the authors offer an essential observation and an important suggestion. The observation is that despite the apparent uniformity in contemporary schooling, past educational models took many forms, and motivations for educational expansion varied widely. The suggestion is that international organizations seeking to facilitate educational expansion need to be attuned to this varied history if their interventions are to succeed. Benavot and Resnik recount, for example, that when leaders advocated the decentralization of education in Latin American countries in the 1980s, they ignored the specific social and political purposes for which those schools had been founded, which included ending severe socioeconomic segregation. Decentralization led to a growth of private schools and renewed fragmentation along class lines, which exacerbated the social divide that school centralization was initially intended to correct. The implication is clear: global education advocates, donors, and policy makers who ignore history do so at considerable peril. PREFACE v Where Benavot and Resnik emphasize the historical legacies with which policy makers must contend, Corrales highlights the weak, conflicting, and at times perverse political incentives facing those interested in expanding and improving education. Corrales finds that, overall, international sources of leverage are weak. Even as globalization proceeds, the demand for highly skilled labor is mixed—some industries require an educated labor pool while others seek labor that is cheap and relatively unskilled. Multilateral lending institutions have emphasized education more in recent years. Corrales cites evidence, however, that funds earmarked for education are sometimes divert- ed for other purposes. Within countries, state authorities rarely face strong political pressures to expand or improve their educational systems. Societal demand for education is frequently weakest in poor regions or countries where it is most needed. Corrales argues that past state motivations to provide education—to consolidate national identity, win citizen loyalty, or neu- tralize rival political groups—were most prominent when nationalist, revolu- tionary, and totalitarian ideologies drove political development. Today, these rationales are less relevant. Corrales discusses policies that might reinforce the positive incentives for expanding education. These policies, he suggests, should be aimed at boost- ing the demand for education by reducing the cost of schooling to individual families; building up the capacity of state agencies to deliver education of high quality; generating additional performance indicators to improve the efficiency of educational delivery; containing opposition to educational expansion by compensating those most directly threatened; and strengthen- ing mechanisms for ensuring accountability of those at all levels of the education system. These are informed and ambitious proposals, and should stimu- late necessary discussion. Drafts of each paper were reviewed and discussed by experts at daylong workshops held at the American Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A workshop on “The Intellectual and Programmatic History of Universal Basic and Secondary Education,” was held on September 6–7, 2003 and was attend- ed by Leslie Berlowitz, David E. Bloom, Cecilia Braslavsky, Colette Chabbott, Michael Clemens, Joel E. Cohen, Javier Corrales, John Craig, William K. Cummings, Andy Green, Silvina Gvirtz, George Ingram, Julie Kennedy, Angela Little, Charles Magnin, Kishore Mahbubani, Martin Malin, Kenneth Prewitt, and Francisco Ramirez. We join the authors in thanking the participants for their extremely valuable comments. Benavot and Resnik also thank Juan Manuel Moreno, António Nóvoa, Yasemin Soysal, and Jón Torfi Jónasson who made helpful comments. Two anonymous reviewers provided constructive written comments. Benavot acknowledges the generous support of the International Bureau of Education during the paper’s completion. A workshop on “The Political Obstacles to Universal Basic and Secondary Education” was held on February 27, 2003. Participating were: David E. Bloom, Barbara Bruns, Claudio de Moura Castro, Joel E. Cohen, Merilee Grindle, George Ingram, Robert LeVine, Kishore Mahbubani, Martin Malin, Lant Pritchett, Jeffrey Puryear, Gene Sperling, and Camer Vellani. We thank the workshop participants, Ernesto Schiefelbein, and two anonymous vi GLOBAL EDUCATIONAL EXPANSION reviewers for their generous comments. Corrales is also grateful to Ashley Bates and Jonathan Borowsky, who provided research assistance at different stages of the project, and to Joan M. Nelson. A special thanks is due to Helen Curry at the American Academy, whose copy-editing and project coordina- tion have been indispensable. Leslie Berlowitz’s vision and leadership as chief executive officer of the American Academy made this project possible. The UBASE project focuses on the rationale, the means, and the consequences of providing the equivalent of a primary and secondary education of quality to all the world’s children. Access to primary school has increased sharply in recent decades in most of the developing world, to levels that, in some regions, approach those in developed countries. But secondary school attendance, which has also risen rapidly, is still substantially lower in developing countries than in the developed countries. The quality of the education offered at the primary and secondary levels leaves much to be desired, as judged by examination of a wide range of inputs, outputs, and practices of educational systems in most developing countries. This monograph is one in a series of the UBASE project published by the American Academy. Other papers examine related topics, including: • basic facts about education, and the nature and quality of the data that underpin these facts; • the goals of primary and secondary education in different settings, and how progress toward those goals is assessed; • means of implementing universal education, and the evaluation of these means; • consequences of achieving universal primary and secondary schooling; • health and education; • the costs of achieving universal education at the primary and secondary levels. The complexity of achieving universal basic and secondary education extends beyond the bounds of any single discipline and necessitates discipli- nary rigor as well as interdisciplinary, international, and cross-professional collaboration. By focusing on both primary and secondary education, paying attention to access, quality, and cultural diversity, and encouraging fresh per- spectives, we hope that the UBASE project will accelerate and enrich educational development. This project is supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,

Load more