We need more bad schools

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Observation

Some people claim that a bad school is better than no school.

I received an e-mail saying: "SuperMemo Guru is wrong! See the article by Justin Sandefur, which says that "Even bad schools are good for society, according to research". Here is an excerpt from that critical mail:

FAQ question. What are FAQs?
The article "The World Needs More Bad Schools" by Justin Sandefur seems to contradict Guru's stance in Problem of schooling. From the "Center for Global Development" website (emphasis added): bad schools still seem to produce good outcomes.

While the research literature shows a weak link from money to learning gains, it also shows that education in the developing world has amazingly high returns. This is paradoxical. We know that learning levels in poor countries are abysmally low. In an earlier post, I showed that in half of the fifty or so developing countries where we have data, fewer than 50 percent of women who left school after fifth grade could read a single sentence.

Sending kids to school has huge social returns, particularly for girls. Not only are the wage returns to a year of schooling generally estimated at around 10 percent per annum, but more educated women have fewer children and their children are less likely to die. This is somewhat puzzling if school isn't even teaching them to read. Looking at the individual level data, women who completed six years of primary schooling had roughly 0.6 fewer children than women with no schooling, and those children were about 5 percent more likely to be alive. But if you focus only on women who went to school and didn't even learn to read—i.e., women seemingly failed by bad schools—they still had about 0.25 fewer children and their kids were still about 2 percent more likely to be alive (...).

More:

  1. In Indonesia, where the median student on PISA scores below the 10th percentile for Vietnam, Duflo (2001) found that the surge in school construction between 1973 and 1976 still led to a significant increase in earnings of between 6.8 to 10.6 percent per extra year of schooling, and Breierova & Duflo (2004) showed it also led to a decline in both fertility and child mortality.
  2. In Nigeria, where just 8 percent (!) of adult women who left school after fifth-grade can read a single sentence, Osili and Long (2008) show that one additional year of schooling nevertheless leads to 0.26 fewer births, a result based on regional differentials in the timing of the introduction of universal primary education
  3. In Uganda, where teachers are absent from the classroom 60 percent of the time, Anthony Keats (2016) found that Museveni's Universal Primary Education program launched in 1997 led to reduced overall fertility and fewer chronically malnourished children.
  4. In Ethiopia, where Singh (2014) shows that primary schools lag far behind India, Peru, and Vietnam in learning gains, Luke Chicoine (2016) found that the extra 1.5 years of schooling that girls achieved after the abolition of user fees in stages between 1993 and 1996 still led to a significant decline in fertility driven by delays in sexual activity, marriage, and birth, as well as increased contraception usage.
  5. In Kenya, where Lucas and Mbiti (2014) found that even the best secondary schools don't add much additional 'value' in terms of learning gains, Andrew Brudevold-Newman (2016) finds that free secondary education led to delayed child birth and a shift from agricultural to skilled employment

This FAQ expands on the content of "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

Reply

We need more bad roads

The statement "we need more bad schools" in reference to the LDCs is as true as the claim that "we need more bad roads that kill people". Africa is the world leader in road fatalities, and yet road building has a well-known positive economic effect early in development. In similar fashion, road building has a diminishing economic effect in the industrialized world, while schooling is slowly evolving into becoming a burden that is yet to be fully measured and comprehended.

In that context, we need to ask a question if we want to assist the LDCs to follow our increasingly inefficient roadmap to education, or there are better trajectories, like free access to the web and on-line learning.

Core problem of schooling

The core problem of schooling is the unhappy population of kids who abhor the system and lose their love of learning. This is not the case in the LDCs. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to "I would never send my kids to school":

In a small village in Liberia, in a Rio favela, in a 10-house village in Poland, in the Mathare slum, in post-Taliban Afghanistan, or in a poverty trap of immigrant banlieue, a school is a blessing. It may be an escape from poverty, violence, or abuse

All the research facts presented in the GCD article refer to similar situations. Those are pretty remote from the modern experience of schooling, where, instead of being liberated, kids move from good homes to the oppressive environments dominated by grades and testing, where the pleasure of learning is a rare species.

Correlation is not causation

There is always a risk of a misinterpretation of statistical data. In the western world, we tend to believe that years of schooling reduce the risk of incarceration. However, if we look at astronomical dropout rates for minorities, we should suspect that the root of the evil is in the social environment, and that schools provide only a limited remedy.

Similarly, if you discover a correlation between extra schooling and the delay in marriage in Ethiopia, you may be tempted to believe that school has a good educational effect that makes girls more considerate when it comes to marriage. In fact, the entirely different factor may come into play. It is the institution of marriage, in this particular cultural setting, that prevents girls from enrolling in school or results in early drop outs. The girls who escape the tradition receive additional years of education, which helps explain the correlation. The Nigerian example is a good clue. If schools are bad at improving literacy, the difference in birth rates cannot be explained by literacy alone.

A larger trend can be observed in the LDCs where home environment, personality and natural talents contribute to better outcomes in education, social life, employment, and more. The kids who go to school are already privileged and advantaged. Schooling is just a stowaway on the way to a better future. Schools may wish to take credit for good outcomes that are rooted elsewhere. In simplest terms, good kids are more likely to stay at school and contribute to good statistics.

Last but not least, in the LDCs, there is no culture of unschooling. Kids that don't go to school are more likely to fill the ranks of child labor, suffer arranged marriage, or meet other misfortunes that are hardly known in the industrialized world.

Compulsory schooling

The key turning point in the optimization of education seems to always be the introduction of compulsory schooling. In the LDCs, governments often strive at increasing school attendance. Once it improves, they are tempted to make school compulsory. This closes the vicious circle that transforms a tool of liberation into a tool of oppression. The right to be educated becomes a burden of schooling. Compulsory schooling must end

Investment in education

Should we then assist the LDCs in building more schools? I am far more enthusiastic about an idea of free access to the Internet (e.g. as advocated by Sugata Mitra and the hole in the wall). I agree with Mark Zuckerberg who claims that connectivity should become a human right:

The world economy is going through a massive transition right now. The knowledge economy is the future. By bringing everyone online, we’ll not only improve billions of lives, but we’ll also improve our own as we benefit from the ideas and productivity they contribute to the world. Giving everyone the opportunity to connect is the foundation for enabling the knowledge economy

On-line access experiments in poverty stricken areas seem to indicate that they are likely to provide a better investment than money spent on school reforms. Mark Zuckerberg has already learned this painful lesson. He vowed to improve.

Conclusion

Despite its provocative title, the quoted article is solid and stands in no contradiction to the claims presented in Problem of schooling. This excerpt is important to remember:

A vast body of research questions the link between education spending and learning outcomes, and some of the best micro research on interventions to improve learning focuses on things that cost zero money, or even reduce education budgets [...] When aid budgets are tight, advocating for one specific sector like education isn't a question of generosity or a moral crusade, it's essentially just a zero-sum game of earmarking a fixed budget. If that's the game we're playing, education advocates can't duck the conversation about how to generate the biggest learning gains at the lowest cost