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Africa Last Updated: Mar 27, 2017 - 9:19:45 AM


Liberia's 'Hail Mary Pass' to Save Its Failing School System
By WPR, March 22, 2017
Mar 26, 2017 - 10:44:11 AM

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Liberia’s plan to task independent operators with running some of its public schools has received extensive media attention over the past year. Not long after the plan was first unveiled, one outlet said it was an attempt to outsource the entire education sector, and a U.N. rapporteur accused Liberia of violating students’ right to education. In an email interview, Justin Sandefur, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development who is helping to coordinate the randomized evaluation of the Partnership Schools program, describes the state of Liberia’s schools and what needs to happen for the scheme to be considered a success.

WPR: What is the current state of public education in Liberia, and what prompted the government to begin converting failing schools into charter schools?

Justin Sandefur: Liberia’s education system is in pretty dire shape. It made international headlines a couple years ago when no student in the entire country passed the entrance exam to go to college. But the statistic that strikes me most comes from U.S. Agency for International Development’s Demographic and Health Surveys, which shows that among adult women who left school after five years of primary schooling, only 1 in 5 are sufficiently literate to read a single sentence. So even when kids go to school, they’re learning close to zero.

After 11 years in office, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has to own some of this failure on the education front. But term limits also prevent her from running again this fall. So in a sense, Liberia’s new program is a “Hail Mary pass,” one final shot to put points on the board before the president’s tenure runs out. It’s also a very explicit recognition that the current crisis calls for unorthodox measures.

Under the program’s first phase, which began last September, management of 93 failing public schools was contracted out to eight different private groups, including nonprofit organizations and private school chains. The plan is that the model could be gradually expanded in the years to come.

WPR: What are the model’s strengths and drawbacks, and could it be replicated in other countries?

Sandefur: It’s too soon to answer that question convincingly. First, it has to prove itself by showing learning gains. As Education Minister George Werner has emphasized, any talk of dramatically scaling up this program in Liberia or beyond has to wait for the results of the randomized evaluation of the program, which will yield its first, preliminary results this fall.

But even before we have test scores back, there are several features of Liberia’s public-private partnership that made me excited to get involved from a research perspective. First of all, the schools are free. That’s not even true of other Liberian public schools, which charge fees, even for pre-school. So we’ve seen a big enrollment bump in these schools for that reason alone, I think. The schools are also nonselective, meaning they can’t cherry-pick the best students, thereby ensuring equal access. The teachers involved are unionized civil servants, employed by the Ministry of Education just like in other public schools. The ministry also retains ownership of the physical school buildings and control of the curriculum. Finally, and crucially, the eight different companies and NGOs that are managing these 93 pilot schools have to deliver results, including learning gains, if they want to continue or expand.

So despite some of the clickbait headlines about “outsourcing” and “privatization,” Liberia’s approach to this public-private partnership is actually much more cautious, and more publicly owned and controlled, than many similar initiatives around the world, including most American charter schools.

Of course, the Liberian model has its limitations. To name just one, it’s expensive. While it’s not really costing the government of Liberia anything right now—since foreign philanthropies pay all the costs of the private operators—it’s going to need to reduce costs to be sustainable, much less expand. The hope is that many of the high costs in the pilot are fixed costs, like pedagogy development, so that unit costs will fall as the program grows, but this remains to be seen.

WPR: What explains Liberia’s difficulty in improving public education previously, and what are the social and economic ramifications of its shortcomings?

Sandefur: There’s no doubt the social and economic consequences are pretty severe. Liberian workers forego higher earnings that a better education would bring. Liberian women suffer higher maternal and child mortality that better education would help to prevent. And the list could go on. So the stakes are high.

Causes are obviously harder to diagnose. Aid money keeps Liberia’s education system alive, but also contributes to the dysfunction. Liberia’s ratio of aid to GDP is nearly the highest in the world, behind only Kiribati and Tuvalu. And while donors prefer to spend on health and education over, say, police and roads, they also prefer to spend on isolated projects that they can, often literally, plant their flag on.

This creates a vicious cycle. It’s no coincidence that aid-dependent Liberia, at about $40 per child, ranks 120th out of 121 countries in per-child spending for basic education according to the World Bank, just above the Central African Republic. The government responds quite rationally to donor preferences by reducing its own spending on education, to focus scarce domestic resources on sectors that donors are less eager to fund. That yields an education system of stand-alone aid projects, a ministry with no budget, and no one running a coherent, overall policy planning process.

If the new Partnership Schools initiative is to have a lasting impact on the broader education system beyond the 93 pilot schools, I suspect it will be by restoring some of that ministerial capacity to do systematic policymaking. This is admittedly a bit ironic. It’s clear that to hold up its end of the public-private partnership, the ministry has to invest quickly in strengthening its own monitoring and evaluation system to hold private operators accountable, and clean up its payroll office to get teachers paid. So trying to outsource a core state function is creating pressure to build up state capacity.


Source:Ocnus.net 2017

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