Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2018

Alexander W. Wiseman, Alexander W. Wiseman

• Editorial: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838674175
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft

Since 2013, the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education has covered the significant developments in the field of comparative and international education. This year's edition begins with a collection of reflective essays about comparative education trends and directions written by both professional and scholarly leaders in the field. Topics covered in the 2018 volume include major theoretical and methodological developments, reports on research-to-practice, area studies and regional developments, and the diversification of comparative and international education. A special introductory chapter addresses the "osmosis" of comparative and international education research across field and disciplinary boundaries. This book sheds light on the most recent advances and patterns within the field of comparative education and will prove an essential text for researchers in the field of global education.

PART I

COMPARATIVE EDUCATION TRENDS AND DIRECTIONS

CHAPTER 1

ONE INDICATOR TO RULE THEM ALL: HOW SDG 4.1.1 DOMINATES THE CONVERSATION AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE MOST MARGINALIZED

William C. Smith

ABSTRACT

Three years into the sustainable development goals (SDGs), it is clear that the broad aims of the SDGs remain a work in progress. The ambitious project, with its vision to inspire a wide range of educational goals and ensure that all children attain quality education, is often narrowed down to student achievement in mathematics and reading. To some, this is not surprising; among many in the comparative and international education community, critics were concerned that SDG 4.1 would dominate the agenda. The prioritization of achievement and the movement away from the earlier focus on access makes one wonder if some children will be forgotten. This chapter details how the SDGs have been narrowed and how that impacts the most marginalized. Although choices prioritizing time and resources to some targets over others are pragmatic in nature, that does not mean they are without tradeoffs. In a world where education has become the major stratifier and growth in education has been concentrated in the middle and upper classes, those remaining out of school are at a greater disadvantage. The second half of this chapter will review empirical work that describes the disadvantaged characteristics of the increasingly entrenched, less educated class; greater health risks; decreased access to knowledge and technology; and increased fear of the cultural other. Research plays an important role in ensuring the wide-ranging goals of the SDGs are not forgotten by highlighting this more marginalized group and maintaining a focus on the broader social and personal goals of education.

Keywords: SDGs; marginalized; student achievement; equity; stratification; assessment

Three years into the sustainable development goal (SDG) agenda, it is clear that the development of the goal for education (SDG 4) remains a work in progress. In 2015, SDG 4 was taken up by the world with an ambitious agenda. It is far more holistic than its predecessor, the millennium development goals (MDGs), applying to all countries, with coverage beyond basic education to lifelong learning and including access and participation, as well as completion and quality provision. The overarching goal of SDG 4 is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” However, instead of proceeding with this broad, aspirational agenda, the transition from the MDGs to the SDGs has often been simplified as a movement from access to quality. This reduction has largely warped the original intentions of the SDGs (King, 2017).

This shift toward quality filled what many saw as a massive hole in the MDG agenda. A view supported by reports stating that students were in school but not learning. The 2013/2014 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report highlighted a global learning crisis where 130 million primary school age children have completed at least four years of primary education but were lacking basics in mathematics and reading (UNESCO, 2014). This was supported by the 2016 International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (Education Commission, 2016) report, which emphasized that three in four children who are not learning are in school, and the World Bank’s World Development Report 2018, focused on the learning crisis (World Bank, 2018).

Diminishing quality to a limited measure of student outcomes was not the intention of critics who were looking to make quality more central. In Fehling, Nelson, and Venkatapuram’s (2013) review of the limitations of the MDGs, primary concerns with quality were focused around teachers, infrastructure, completion rates, and class sizes, not student scores on achievement tests. Still reflecting on global education goals since Jomtien in 1990, it is clear that discourse on student outcomes have largely replaced student needs (King, 2017). The movement toward student outcomes as a form of test scores reflects a larger global testing culture where student test scores are the indicator of teacher, school, and system quality (Smith, 2016). In its first report covering the SDGs, the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report recognized the reductionist approach to monitoring education quality and voiced its concern that “good quality education should not be equated with, or reduced to, learning outcomes” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 188).

This chapter details how the SDGs have been reduced to a narrow view of quality and understood as student test scores and how this minimalist approach impacts the most marginalized. It proceeds by examining how the SDGs have been reduced, before asking who is being forgotten and what it means for their future prospects.

NARROWING OF THE SDG FOR EDUCATION

The SDGs were the result of a long, collaborative process that combined efforts from the MDG summit in 2010 with the Rio+20 Conference in 2012 (Sachs-Israel, 2016). The creation of the SDGs was member state led with guidance by the United Nations (UN; Sachs-Israel, 2016). In addition to consultations with over 60 countries, the online My World Survey asked the world community what issues they wanted to see prioritized over the next 15 years; education topped the list (Sachs-Israel, 2016).

The development of the SDG for education (SDG 4) has been described as “arguably the most inclusive process of consultation in the history of the United Nations” (Naidoo, 2016), with four years of intense conversations with multiple stakeholders, including governments and civil society (Benavot & Naidoo, 2018). UNESCO took the lead, with the aim of developing a single, universally applicable agenda on education that addressed the unfinished business of the EFA and MDG goals (Sachs-Israel, 2016). Regional thematic consultations, meetings with ministry officials and civil society, EFA reviews from 131 countries, and the 2014 Global EFA Meeting in Muscat, Oman, led to the 2015 World Education Forum (WEF) in Incheon, South Korea (Sachs-Israel, 2016). The final WEF declaration, adopted by 1,600 participants from over 180 countries (Benavot & Naidoo, 2018), largely set out the SDG 4 targets and reaffirmed a single human-rights-based education agenda (Sachs-Israel, 2016).

However, while the creation of SDG 4 and its 10 targets was largely inclusive, the development of indicators was, and continues to be, a highly technical process that leaves out the voices of non-statisticians (McGrath & Nolan, 2016). Global indicators for all SDG goals were developed by the inter-agency expert group on SDG indicators, which includes 27 national statistical offices and a UN Chair (King, 2017). The technical process and the need for quantifiable, comparative indicators resulted in a set of indicators that did not match the ambition of the targets (Johnston, 2016).

The early decision on which indicators would be considered global and which would be relegated to thematic had significant ramifications on the more comprehensive aims of SDG 4. While global indicators are universally applied and expected to be reported on by all countries, thematic indicators are considered voluntary. Therefore, the majority of resources in indicator creation, monitoring, reporting, and state action will focus on the global indicators while thematic indicators are not taken into account in the UN’s annual SDGs report (King, 2017).

Among the education targets, SDG 4.1 has come to dominate discourse. The full target reads “by 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.” The associated global indicator (SDG 4.1.1), however, is limited to the “percentage of children and young people: (a) in grades 2/3; (b) at the end of primary; (c) at the end of lower secondary achieving at least a minimum proficiency in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics by sex.” Out of the original five descriptors, only “quality” makes it into the global indicator, “free,” “equitable,” “relevant,” and “effective” are relegated to voluntary thematic indicators, if included at all (King, 2017).

Not surprisingly, given its position as a global indicator, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) has prioritized SDG 4.1.1. Even when compared to other global indicators for education, SDG 4.1.1 seems to rule them all. In a world of the SDGs, UIS is identified as the source for cross-national, comparative data on SDG 4 and is expected to establish the methodology for monitoring indicators and help strengthen country data collection efforts (King, 2017). Their focus on student assessment in mathematics and reading is obvious in their efforts to create the Catalog of Learning Assessments (UIS, 2015), which feeds into their database on learning assessments, as well as the Learning Assessment Capacity Index, which evaluates countries’ resources to determine their “readiness” for measuring learning outcomes (UIS, 2016).

The Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) also has a central role to play in reducing quality to student outcomes. GAML was established by UIS and focuses mainly on parts of SDG 4 that are associated with learning outcomes – targets 4.1, 4.2, 4.4, 4.6, and 4.7 (UNESCO & UIS, 2016). However, it is clear from the GAML activity that SDG 4.1 is the focus. For example, GAML’s progress report to the fourth Technical Cooperation Group in January 2018 (Global Alliance to Monitor Learning, 2018) briefly mentions updates on other indicators before going more in depth on the comparability of national assessments for mathematics and reading. This emphasis was reinforced in a recent conversation with a country representative, where it was relayed that SDG 4.1 largely dictates the agenda at GAML meetings with targets almost appearing to be ordered according to priority, from SDG 4.1 to SDG 4.7. Due in large part to GAML’s effort and attention to SDG 4.1, global indicator 4.1.1 was moved from a tier-3 to a tier-2 indicator (Benviniste & Montoya, 2016). Each indicator has been classified into one of three tiers based on established methodology and data coverage. As of November 2018, SDG 4.1.1 is the only indicator to have advanced up a tier (UNESCO, 2018a), suggesting it has been prioritized in time and resources.

In 2017, UIS further solidified the privileged position of learning outcomes over access by creating a single composite indicator. Following a recommendation by the Education Commission (2016), the new flagship indicator was designed to provide a simple, easy-to-understand number of children not learning that could be used as an advocacy tool to rally support for SDG 4 (Crumpton & Montoya, 2017). While the indicator takes out-of-school children into account in its calculation, the publicly facing top line number – more likely to be taken up by the media and in policy discussions – effectively hides those not attending. The first roll out of the flagship indicator found that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are not meeting minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. In the corresponding factsheet, out-of-school children are included, but only as a percentage of those not meeting minimum levels (UIS, 2017). By elevating this indicator and phrasing the world’s out-of-school population as 15% of those who do not have sufficient skills in mathematics and reading, we are downplaying the millions of children not accessing education.

LARGE NUMBERS STILL WITHOUT ACCESS

Between 2000 and 2016, there has been an important reduction in the number of primary and secondary school age children out of school. However, in 2016, 263 million were still out of school, including over 63 million missing at the primary level where the enrollment rate has been stagnant since 2008 (UIS, 2018). This final 9% of the primary school age popula...