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How Ghana can improve educational results for its poor children

Feature Article How Ghana can improve educational results for its poor children
MAY 13, 2015 LISTEN

One of the best ways to avoid being poor as an adult is to obtain a good education. People who have higher levels of academic achievement and more years of schooling earn more than those with lower levels of human capital. This is not surprising, since economists believe that schooling makes people more productive and that wages are related to productivity. Yet in modern Ghana poor children face an elevated risk for a variety of adverse educational outcomes. The 1992 constitution of the country has committed Ghana to the principle of free Universal basic education and gave this commitment some substance by establishing a time-frame. Article 38(2) of the Constitution states that “The Government shall within two years after Parliament first meets after coming into force of this Constitution draw up a program for the implementation within the following ten years for the provision of a free, compulsory universal basic education. (Government of Ghana 1992). The 10-year Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education Program (FCUBE) emerged from this constitutional mandate in 1996, with the three goals of improving the quality of teaching and learning across the Ghanaian educational system, improving management efficiency, and increasing access to and sustained participation in schooling. With this quote above we can say that education is a right not a privilege. Even though some ignorant parents do not follow what the constitution says about education, the government has also played its role actively in the currently poor and fast declining standard of education in Ghana.

Disagreements about how to improve schooling outcomes for poor children stem in part from different beliefs about the problems that underlie the unsatisfactory outcomes in many of our nation’s public schools. Broadly speaking, critics tend to invoke, at least implicitly, one of the following explanations for why children in high-poverty schools are not performing as well as we would like:

Schools serving poor and minority students have fewer resources than they need. In this case, a potential solution would be to provide more money to disadvantaged schools.

High-poverty schools lack the capacity to substantially improve student learning, independent of financial resources. Potential solutions to this problem would involve helping schools improve the quality of their standard operating practices, or increasing the instructional capacity of staff in these schools through professional development or more selective hiring.

High-poverty schools do not have sufficient incentives or flexibility to improve instruction. Proponents of this perspective argue that without clarifying key objectives and holding key actors accountable, additional spending will be squandered.

Schools matter only so much. The real problem rests with the social context in which schools operate— namely, the family, neighborhood, and peer environments that under this perspective make it difficult for low-income children to take advantage of educational opportunities. Adopting accountability or market oriented reforms without changing social policy more broadly will punish educators for factors beyond their control, and potentially drive the most able teachers toward schools serving less-disadvantaged students.

For some reason, current education policy debates often seem to be argued as if the problems listed above are mutually exclusive. In contrast, we believe that there is likely some truth to each of these major explanations; schools confront no single problem that can be addressed with just one solution. Identifying the optimal policy response to the mix of problems that plagues our public schools is complicated by the possibility that these problems might interact with each other. For example, it may be the case that certain curriculum reforms are effective only if they are accompanied by an increase in resources such as student support services, or by an increase in teacher quality generated by reforms to hiring and tenure policies. Social science theory and common sense are likely to carry us only so far in identifying the most effective— and cost-effective—mix of education policy changes.

For almost every education intervention that some theory suggests might be effective, another plausible theory suggests that the intervention is likely to be ineffective or even harmful. Education policy also needs to be guided by rigorous evaluation evidence about what actually works in practice.

In contrast, we offer a message of tempered optimism. Over the past few decades, the technology of education-policy evaluation has improved dramatically, making it much easier to detect moderately-sized program impacts within the complex environment that determines schooling outcomes. The available evidence reveals a number of potentially promising ways to improve the learning outcomes of low-income children. This is not to say that everything works: many current and proposed education policies either have no empirical support for their effectiveness, or in some cases have strong empirical evidence for their ineffectiveness. The most successful educational interventions will reduce, but not eliminate, racial and social class disparities in educational outcomes. This is not a reason for either despair or inaction. The appropriate standard of success for policy interventions is that they generate net benefits, not miraculous benefits. Education policies that are capable of improving poor children’s schooling outcomes by enough to justify the costs of these policies are worth doing, even if these policies or programs by themselves are not enough to equalize learning opportunities for all children in Ghana.

School resources
The question of whether “money matters” has been the subject of contentious debate in the research literature for the past 40 years. Isolating the causal effects of extra school funding is complicated by the possibility that compensatory spending may be directed towards schools serving the most disadvantaged students, and adequately controlling for all aspects of student disadvantage is quite difficult in practice. The weight of current evidence provides fairly weak support for the idea that increases in unrestricted school funding on average improve student outcomes. There is, however, stronger evidence that some targeted increases in specific school inputs can improve student outcomes. Three areas in which we believe increased resources may yield important benefits for poor children are

(1) Increased investments in early childhood education;

(2) Class-size reductions in the early primary education; and

(3) Targeted salary bonuses to help disadvantaged schools and retain better teachers.

Early childhood education
Disparities in academic achievement by race and class are apparent as early as ages three and four—well before children enter kindergarten. Recent research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, economics, and other fields suggests that the earliest years of life may be a particularly promising time to intervene in the lives of low-income children. Studies show that early childhood educational programs can generate learning gains in the short-run and, in some cases, improve the long-run life chances of poor children.

Moreover, the benefits generated by these programs are large enough to justify their costs. Although preschool interventions represent a promising way to improve the life chances of poor children, their success is not well reflected in government budget priorities, which allocate nearly seven times as much money per capita for schooling as for pre-kindergarten, other forms of early education, and child care subsidies for three- to five year-olds. Most social policies attempt to make up for the disadvantages poor children experience early in life. But given the substantial disparities between poor and non-poor children that already exist among very young children, it is perhaps not surprising that many disadvantaged children never catch up.

Class-size reduction
Reducing average class sizes may enable teachers to spend more time working with individual students, tailor instruction to match children’s needs, and make it easier for teachers to monitor classroom behavior. Class-size reductions are expensive, as they require hiring additional teachers and in some cases expanding a school’s physical space. However, the best available evidence suggests that class-size reduction, holding teacher quality constant, can improve student outcomes by enough to justify these additional expenditures, with benefits that are particularly pronounced for low income and minority children. Some research has suggested that class-size reduction might be most effective if focused on low-income districts or schools.

Bonuses for teaching in high-needs schools or subjects

Research has identified substantial variation across teachers in the ability to raise student achievement, both within and across schools. These studies attempt to isolate the value that a teacher adds to student achievement, referred to as “value-added” measures of teacher effectiveness. If disadvantaged children were taught by the most effective teachers, disparities in schooling outcomes might be narrowed. Value-added measures of teacher effectiveness are not very strongly correlated with the easiest-to-observe characteristics of teachers. Novice teachers are less effective than more experienced ones. Teachers who have higher scores on the training or various teaching exams are generally more effective than others. Still, many other observable teacher characteristics, such as whether teachers hold traditional teacher certifications or advanced degrees, are not systematically correlated with student learning. The policy challenge in this domain is to induce more effective teachers to teach in schools serving the most disadvantaged children, knowing that effectiveness cannot easily be measured. The dramatic variation in effectiveness that we observe among teachers highlights the great potential value of successful policies in this area.

Changing school practices
Some observers of Ghana’s schooling system remain skeptical that additional spending is needed to improve the learning outcomes of poor children. They argue that improving the ways in which schools are organized, including the way they deliver instruction, could improve student achievement with few additional resources. This line of reasoning assumes there is good evidence on which practices are most effective, but that school personnel do not have the capacity to identify or implement these programs on their own. Some low-cost changes in school operating practices that seem to improve student outcomes include changes to school organization, classroom instruction, and teacher hiring and promotion. What remains unclear is why these “best practices” have not been more widely adopted—presumably the answer is some combination of lack of information, political resistance, bureaucratic inertia, or other factors.

Teacher labor markets
A key policy challenge for school districts is to induce more effective teachers to teach in high-poverty schools. There are a variety of potential inefficiencies in the way the ministry of education through the Ghana Education Service hire, promote, and dismiss teachers, and at least some of these problems might be addressed without substantial increase in resources.

One promising approach is to promote alternative pathways into teaching. Traditional certification requirements impose a high cost (both in money and time) on individuals interested in teaching, particularly on those with the best outside labor market options. Studies exploring the relative effectiveness of teachers with traditional versus alternative (or no) certification have generally found that differences between the groups are relatively small, and that in certain grades and subjects, teachers with alternative certification may actually outperform those with traditional certification Whatever system is used to hire teachers, it is inevitable that some teachers will not perform well in the classroom. Recognizing that the hiring process is imperfect, virtually all school systems place new teachers on probation. However, in practice, public schools typically do not take advantage of the probationary period to obtain additional information about teacher effectiveness and weed out lower-quality teachers.

One possible solution is to raise the tenure bar for new teachers and to deny tenure to those who are not effective at raising student achievement. We suggest that this type of high-stakes decision should be based on a variety of teacher performance measures that include, but are not limited to, measures of effectiveness at raising student test scores. Principal evaluations should be included as one factor in teacher tenure ratings, both because they may add additional information beyond student test scores, and also because they reduce potential negative effects of relying solely on an output-based measure.

Incentives and accountability
Class size reduction is an “input-based” educational intervention, based on the assumption that schools will perform better with additional resources. Comprehensive School Reform is based on the assumption that schools are not using best practices, and therefore seeks to improve schooling outcomes by prescribing a more effective instructional approach based on the knowledge of centralized decision makers. Both strategies assume that educators are willing to work as hard as they can give their resource constraints.

An alternative approach to school reform focuses on enhancing both the incentives and flexibility enjoyed by school personnel. While the theories underlying school choice and school accountability differ in important ways, both strategies rely on the core notions of incentives and flexibility. The available evidence to date is probably strongest on behalf of the ability of school accountability systems to change the behavior of teachers and principals, although one lesson from that body of research is the great importance of getting the design of such policies right.

The role of student background
Some believe that the disappointing performance of our public schools stems in large part from the challenges that poor children face outside of school. Clearly, differences in family background help explain a large share of the variation in academic achievement outcomes across children. Poor children have substantially lower achievement test scores than non-poor children as young as ages three or four, before they even start school.

More relevant for present purposes is whether the challenges of living in poverty cause poor children to benefit

Less than non-poor children from similar types of schooling experiences. Our reading of the available evidence instead suggests that improving the quality of academic programs is at the very least sufficient to make noticeable improvements in poor children’s educational outcomes. In fact, studies of early childhood education programs typically find that disadvantaged children benefit even more from these interventions than do non poor children. As a result, social policy changes outside the realm of education that reduce child poverty in Ghana, as desirable as they may be on their own merits, are not a necessary condition for enacting education reforms that improve poor children’s outcomes by enough to justify the costs of these reforms. At the same time, the fact that poor children are geographically concentrated in neighborhoods that are segregated by race and social class presents special challenges for education policy, given that children have traditionally attended neighborhood schools. For example, research suggests that, all else equal, teachers tend to prefer to work in schools that serve more affluent and less racially diverse student bodies.

In addition, systems that fail to adequately account for the confounding influence of family background may help drive the most effective teachers out of high-poverty schools. Peer characteristics may also directly affect student learning, if teachers set the level or pace of instruction to match the average student ability in their classroom.

In theory, education policies could overcome the burden that concentrated poverty imposes on poor children by breaking the link between place of residence and school assignment. Some evidence suggests that earlier desegregation efforts did improve the schooling outcomes of disadvantaged children.

However, the potential for contemporaneous desegregation policies to achieve large gains in student outcomes remains unclear. First, there are substantial barriers—both logistical and political—to further integrating schools along race or class lines. Second, both schooling and social conditions for poor children have changed substantially since the initial desegregation efforts, which may limit the effectiveness of desegregation efforts today. A different approach to addressing the problem of concentrated poverty is to use housing policy to help poor families move into different neighborhoods, though it is still unclear how effective such policies would be at changing neighborhood environment, or whether such a change would be sufficient to improve a child’s academic outcomes. Reducing the prevalence of either child poverty or the geographic concentration of poverty in America is difficult. Although the persistence of these social problems is not beneficial for the well-being of children, improving the educational opportunities of poor children in their current neighborhoods still has the potential to help them escape from poverty.

Conclusions
A careful review of the empirical evidence, however, suggests a variety of policies that are likely to substantially improve the academic performance of poor children. We found examples of successful programs or policies within each of three broad categories. Targeted investment of additional resources in early childhood education, smaller class sizes, and bonuses for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subjects seem likely to pass a cost-benefit test, even without a fundamental reorganization of the existing public school system. At the same time, researchers have identified some ways of changing standard operating procedures within schools that can improve the outcomes of poor children even without large amounts of additional spending. Finally, policies that seek to change incentives within schools offer some promise of improving schooling for poor children .Given limited financial resources and perhaps even more limited political attention, it is unlikely that policymakers could adopt all of the “successful” practices discussed in this article. Based on our read of the empirical literature, we believe that the following should be the highest priorities for education policies to improve the academic achievement of poor children:

1. Increase investments in early-childhood education for poor children. Even though short-term gains in IQ or achievement test scores diminish over time, there is evidence of long-term improvement in a variety of outcomes, including educational attainment that will help children escape from poverty as adults. Increased investment in early childhood education is particularly important given the limited investment our society currently makes in the cognitive development of very young children. This should be the top priority for new spending in public education.

2. Provide educators with incentives to adopt practices with a compelling research base while expanding efforts to develop and identify effective instructional regimes. One of the lessons from the accountability movement is that highly disadvantaged schools (and districts) often lack the capacity to change themselves. Regions and district officials should ensure that disadvantaged schools, particularly those that have continued to fail under recent accountability systems, adopt instructional practices and related policies with a strong research base.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. At the same time, the government through the ministry of education and the Ghana Education Service could help spur such advantages through more focused research and development spending, and governments at all levels could help increase the supply of high-quality practices by requiring schools to use programs that have been rigorously evaluated.

3. Continue to support and evaluate a variety of public school choice options. Although we believe that the current evidence on the benefits of public school choice is limited, we also think that the risk associated with these policies is small so long as they are implemented in ways that do not substantially exacerbate school segregation along race or class lines. We encourage the government to facilitate the expansion of magnet and charter schools, and to carefully evaluate the impact of these schools on the students they serve as well as the surrounding schools.

Most antipoverty policies focus on lifting adults out of poverty. These policies are often controversial because of an unavoidable tension between the desire to help people who have been unlucky and the motivation to encourage hard work and punish socially unproductive behavior. In contrast, successful education policies can not only help reduce poverty over the long term by making poor children more productive during adulthood, but also foster economic growth that expands the “pie” for everyone. Educational interventions also benefit from a compelling moral justification. Disadvantaged children should not be punished for the circumstances into which they are born, and improved education policy is one of the best ways to prevent this from happening.

Written by: Godson Charnor

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