Questions and Answers: Education

1. What does the report have to say about education?
2. Does the report suggest that free secondary and college-level education is a good policy?
3. What's more important: primary education for children or focused job training for youth?
4. How does the Internet enhance the opportunities of today's youth in poor countries?
5. What does your report say about "second chances" for education?
6. What does your report say about non-formal education?
7. While providing young people with access to education is a challenge in itself, it is also critical to make sure that children are getting a quality education. What can be done to monitor the quality of education in developing countries to ensure that children are meeting minimum requirements?
8. Many poor families keep their children from attending school so they can help in the home. The situation is particularly dire in the case of young people who have lost both parents to AIDS and must care for other family members. What can be done to ensure that these children still obtain a decent education while still helping their families?

1. What does the report have to say about education?

Despite great progress in primary schooling in developing countries, the educational preparation of youth for work is very low, just as demand for skills and knowledge is rising. Education policies are partly to blame for that, as the focus has been more on increasing the number of people who go through the school system rather than on learning.

A number of key policy actions can improve the skills of young people for work and life:

1. First, improve educational preparation for adolescence by investing early in life and providing quality basic education for all. This should be a priority for low-income countries with large numbers of young people lacking basic skills, such as Cambodia.

2. For countries where most people are equipped with basic skills and there is a rising demand for post-primary educational skills, such as Chile and Malaysia, the emphasis should be more on making the secondary and higher education curricula more relevant to young people and the labor market-emphasizing practical subjects, thinking skills and behavioral skills such as decision-making skills, teamwork, the ability to negotiate conflict and manage risks-and improving the connection between school and work. Young people also will need improved decision-making skills, better information on education opportunities and the labor markets and financial incentives in order to make better choices.

3. Finally, for countries with large numbers of youth who are out of school and lack basic skills, such as Pakistan and Senegal, there should be a coherent system of remedial and equivalence education or literacy and skills training programs for young people who have missed opportunities for learning.

2. Does the report suggest that free secondary and college-level education is a good policy?

No, the report does not suggest this because such a policy would limit the expansion of the system and would benefit mostly the wealthy. Many families and communities are able and willing to contribute to good-quality secondary and higher education, as the experience of Korea shows. When both governments and consumers share costs, it allows the educational systems to expand and improve, as shown in Vietnam, and also promotes accountability. To ensure the poor also benefit, governments should consider well-designed and balanced financing packages for poor families, which should include targeted grants, loans and learning accounts.

3. What's more important: primary education for children or focused job training for youth?

To acquire occupational skills, young people would still need a good-quality basic education on which to build. As a result, many countries are moving vocational specialization to the upper secondary level or later. Also, to be able to succeed in today's labor market, workers will need strong thinking and interpersonal skills as well as specialized knowledge to succeed. That is why some countries are successfully blending general and vocational curricula. Malaysia is a case in point: academic schools offer a curriculum of core subjects (e.g., English, science, mathematics, life skills) and electives, including vocational specializations.

4. How does the Internet enhance the opportunities of today's youth in poor countries?

The internet provides a powerful tool for learning, work and the spread of ideas and information. As an opportunity enhancer, the internet can facilitate, but never replace, teaching and learning, particularly in more remote areas. It also provides a wealth of information on health as well as work and education opportunities, thus enabling young people to make better decisions. And by facilitating the communication among young people worldwide, it allows the spread of ideas and the youth culture.

5. What does your report say about "second chances" for education?

The report emphasizes the need for diversity in the education system (upper secondary and higher education) in order to accommodate differing student needs, interests, and capabilities. It should also be flexible to allow students to experiment and develop their full potential. We believe second chances are needed mainly for youth who are out of school and lack the basic skills needed for work and life. And they may be in that situation out of bad education policies, rather than bad choices. That said, young people are also very different in their needs-e.g. they have different levels of schooling, different ages and interests-so second chance education programs need to reflect this diversity.

6. What does your report say about non-formal education?

Chapters 3 and 4 of the report give a lot of emphasis to non-formal education, and the “second chances” policy directions of the report reflects this as well.

7. While providing young people with access to education is a challenge in itself, it is also critical to make sure that children are getting a quality education.  What can be done to monitor the quality of education in developing countries to ensure that children are meeting minimum requirements?

Through the regular collection and public dissemination of national data on student achievement. The reality is that although many developing countries now collect national data on student achievement, the information is rarely made public and used to hold teachers and schools accountable for performance (through accreditation, funding allocation, or performance-based pay). The report alto talks about the minimum set of basic skills that these instruments should be assessing: minimal abilities needed for further learning, work, and life, including numeracy and literacy and basic levels of behavioral skills such as perseverance, self-discipline, and self-confidence.

In case you want to use an interesting example of the above: A large civil society initiative in India, the Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER), collects regular data on literacy and numeracy skills of school children in rural India. The program has a built-in strategy for dissemination and community mobilization that includes the preparation of annual regional reports and brief summaries at the district level. The 2005 survey includes key findings for policy. Pratham Resource Centre (2005).: 31 percent of 11- to 14-year-olds need remedial language instruction (they cannot read a story text with some long sentences), 47 percent need remedial numeracy instruction (they cannot do division), 23 percent of teachers were absent (on average, per school), and 8 percent of schools had no teacher present at all.
 
8. Many poor families keep their children from attending school so they can help in the home. The situation is particularly dire in the case of young people who have lost both parents to AIDS and must care for other family members.   What can be done to ensure that these children still obtain a decent education while still helping their families?

The report talks about alternative options. For those who are still in school or only dropped out of school recently, and for whom a substitute can be found for their work at home, internation evidence shows that conditional cash transfers are a powerful instrument to keep in school. Conditional cash transfers in education are subsidies given to student conditional on school attendance and its effect on schooling works directly, through the income transfer, and indirectly by compensating their parents for the forgone income from work.

For youth that dropped out of school a long time ago or for whom there is difficult replacement for their work (because there's nobody else to take care of younger sinblings), it is better to design what we call second chance education programs. These programs--equivalence education, job training, literacy and life skills training--need to be designed to serve the needs of these young people, including their work responsabilities. For example, to accommodate the pressure for adolescents to work, the Tutorial Learning System in Colombia allows students in rural areas and their facilitators to determine the preferred schedule and pace.