Politicians’ goals for basic education in South Asia are different from parents’ goals. Politicians want to build schools, recruit teachers, free textbooks and a centralized education system. Parents want a quality education that will give their children a better future.

It is therefore no surprise to see a steady increase in South Asian parents sending their children to non-government schools (private (low cost) schools, NGO schools, madrassas) with the hope that their children will learn, the little, the ability to read the local language at a basic level and do basic arithmetic.

But even in these modest wishes, we believe that both children and their parents are being betrayed by the school systems in South Asia – with the exception of Sri Lanka. For example, rates of “learning poverty” in the three most populous countries in South Asia range from 56% in India and 58% in Bangladesh to 78% in Pakistan. The outlier is Sri Lanka, where the rate is only 14%, better than many high-income countries.

Why is this, given that in the last three decades there has been almost universal access to primary education?

To understand this, you have to appreciate that school systems are comprised of institutions dominated by education bureaucracies, politicians, and teacher unions. The dominant purpose of these groups is not to teach children, but to protect their own interests.

Game the system

Politicians see education as a tool to promote common loyalty and national loyalty among citizens. That is why bureaucrats and politicians played universal primary education in different ways. In 2009, India passed an ambitious right to education law for all children between the ages of 6 and 14. At the same time, Bangladesh introduced the Primary Education Leaving Examination (PECE). Both initiatives resulted in higher primary enrollment and completion, but not better learning.

The most credible assessment of primary school student learning in India is the ASER, a large-scale assessment conducted in students’ homes with a statistically significant sample size. It is organized by Pratham, a big NGO. The most advanced questions asked concern the sampled children’s ability to read a story at the 2nd grade level and to divide a three-digit number by a one-digit number. The national averages of the latest ASER survey, in 2022, are disappointing. In 5th grade, in government schools 39 percent of children can read the story and 22 percent can do the division. Although far from ideal, non-government schools perform much better: in class 5, about 57 percent can read the story and 37 percent can do division.

But, this begs the question: Why do children successfully graduate from school but can neither understand a 2nd grade level passage nor solve a simple division problem? The ‘game’ in Bangladesh and India was to lower the bar to pass the 5th class exam and allow the question paper to leak frequently before exam day.

For example, for more than a decade, Bangladesh has conducted the National Student Assessment (NSA), a highly sophisticated school-based assessment of a representative sample of primary school students in grades 3 and 5. But in 2022, Bangladesh compromised the integrity of the assessment. by providing special guidance to 5th graders using the testing tools to demonstrate better performance in their final NSA. Ironically, the national entity that oversees the provision of primary education services played this “game” instead of protecting the integrity of assessment. The international organization that oversaw NSA 2022 collaborated with Bangladesh’s primary education department and failed to protect minimal research integrity.

In Bangladesh, despite this kind of scam, international organizations have played an important role in expanding primary education opportunities for millions of children. Like many other developing countries, Bangladesh has received significant development assistance in education since the 1980s as a result of the increase in education as an investment stemming from the Jomtien conference in Thailand and the subsequent Education for All commitment towards universal primary education.

After 1990, Bangladesh began to receive more development assistance in education. Politicians and bureaucrats used the money to create more positions for more teachers, build more classrooms, distribute free textbooks to all primary school students, and expand teacher training facilities. Everything improved except the actual learning. After the Jomtien conference, the bureaucracy and politicians got their wish; parents don’t.

Education as an investment – ​​for whom?

Around the world, national governments and multilateral and bilateral organizations have initiated development programs aimed at alleviating poverty. In this development effort, education has always been considered as the most important means of increasing the household income of the poor. The importance of basic literacy and numeracy is so obvious, and the evidence so overwhelming, that bilateral and multilateral agencies, philanthropies—even private enterprises—are all investing in education.

However, development assistance for education in South Asia has never kept pace with basic educational needs. International organizations emphasize quality and equity in basic education and “reluctantly” shared strategies, without adequate evidence, to persuade political and bureaucratic leadership to address chronic quality deficits in basic education in South Asia.

In Bangladesh, several development partners tried to include interventions to improve basic literacy and numeracy in the fourth Primary Education Development Program (PEDP), but their efforts were uncoordinated and sometimes undermined. Multilateral banks were more interested in disbursing funds than adding accountability measures to achieve quality educational goals in primary education.

The second PEDP (2004-2010) received 37% as development assistance from 11 bilateral and multilateral donors for a total primary education budget of US$1.8 billion. But through PEDP-3 and PEDP-4, this was reduced by as much as eight percent, despite the fact that the absolute value of donor contributions remained constant, as the government substantially increased its budget for primary education.

The government financed this significant increase by negotiating several loans from multilateral banks such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank – loans that would have to be repaid. In fact, additional domestic government revenue served mainly political and bureaucratic goals – not learning goals for children and their parents, which continued to decline. Moreover, the declining share of donors in primary education budgets in Bangladesh has reduced their influence in discussions of learning outcomes.

Where now for basic education in Bangladesh?

Where does this leave basic education in Bangladesh under the new political dispensation?

While education will not be high on Professor Muhammad Yunus’s short-term priorities, there are opportunities to change and address the systemic deficiencies highlighted above, not least through more consultative and inclusive processes.

Conducting an assessment of students’ basic skills using the ASER process developed in India is one such opportunity. The results will reveal the scale of the problem and determine how to act quickly to reduce levels of learning poverty.

Investing in teachers is a second essential strategy. Professionalism and teacher performance are the change factors in education. A reimagined teaching profession should attract and retain the best talent in the profession, but it also requires changed performance standards, status, incentives, compensation and career paths. This rethinking of teachers will be a longer-term task, but it should begin in earnest now.

Decentralizing education management under a single ministry of education can open up the reform process to gain stronger action and wider support. This will be important if it is to have a real impact on basic literacy and numeracy.

There is now a real opportunity in Bangladesh to stop the betrayal of politicians and bureaucrats. By meeting the demands of parents by focusing on learning outcomes and reforming the education system to accommodate more voices, change can be possible.

This article was first published by Re Education on October 8, 2024. The authors were part of a research looking at basic education systems in South Asia.

The Martyr of Islam is an expert in educational policy and planning.
Dr. John Richards is Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors.

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