Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
DOI 10.1007/s11159-007-9058-8
NANCY KENDALL
the same time argued that rapid expansion had a deleterious effect on educa-
tional quality (MOESC 2000).
As basic education services have expanded and concerns about access
have diminished, worry about educational quality has come to the fore.
Often, the two are seen as trade-offs, expansion at the cost of quality or vice
versa, although a growing literature disputes this claim (Michaelowa 2001).
One way of conceptualizing current debates about the link between educa-
tional expansion and decreasing educational quality is as a response to the
perceived failure of educational expansion to trigger expected development
outcomes. Many relatively poor states invested significant resources in
education, particularly primary education, and have taken on huge loans to
maintain the expansion of this sector. Up to one third of some governmentsÕ
annual budget is now dedicated to education. In some cases, international
development organizations refocused significant resources on education; the
World Bank now provides about 8% of all loans to the education sector, a
doubling from 5 years ago (World Bank 2007).
Despite these tremendous investments made in the rapid expansion of
primary schooling, the expected economic growth, health improvements,
and other development outcomes have not materialized. Given the political
impossibility of rolling back educational expenses by cutting access, gov-
ernments and international organizations are constrained in the practical
responses available to them. Educational quality frameworks offer a
response to this dilemma: the problem is not that basic schooling might
not in fact result in certain types of state-level development, nor is it that
it might not be the most important human right upon which for states to
spend their resources. Instead, the problem is that the intervention, the
educational service itself, is not of high enough quality to result in either
the economic or the social changes imagined for it in previous development
models.
Can educational quality be understood, measured, and improved? In
much of the mainstream development literature, the processes by which
schooling results in particular outcomes (decreased fertility and HIV rates,
increased schooling for the next generation, increased individual agricul-
tural productivity) are not well understood. In-classroom and in-school
processes remain a black box, preceded by educational inputs and
succeeded by outputs (Case and Yogo 1999). Studies of educational inputs
have provided relatively few consistent answers about how to improve
schooling, and few of these could be state-financed. Those that have been
tried on a large scale often have not resulted in quality increases large
enough to meet the expectations of policymakers and development
professionals.
There has therefore been a shift in the educational quality literature
towards thinking about how to better measure outputs (usually in the form
of large-scale, validated tests) in order either to better inform inputs or to
force improved outputs through a backwards-mapping approach to quality
Current Practices And Future Possibilities 703
Over the past 20 years, the concept of participation has infused development
discourse and planning across sectors and strategies (Cooke and Kothari
2001). As with arguments for education expansion, key arguments for partic-
ipatory approaches and partnerships include human rights and anticolonial
arguments, and economistic efficiency and sustainability arguments. The first
set contends that individuals and communities who receive international
development funding have the right to be active participants in determining
what kinds of policies and programmes are adopted and how they are imple-
mented. Participation, broadly defined, is presented as an effective way to
democratize and decolonize development approaches and developing states,
to empower individuals and collectivities, and to implement relevant and
sustainable approaches to state and community development.
The second set of arguments provides a techno-rationale for the need to
have stakeholders ‘‘buy in’’ to development approaches in order to create
more efficient and effective planning and implementation. Within this frame-
work, stakeholder participation is a necessary correction to previous
704 Nancy Kendall
development failures stemming from states and communities not fully ‘‘own-
ing’’ a particular policy or project. Initially, many of these arguments focused
on including the perspectives of elite policymakers (for example, Ministry of
Education personnel) in development planning and implementation. Argu-
ments for the involvement of a wider group of stakeholders, including
sub-national government personnel, teachers and principals, parents, and
occasionally students have, over time, become central components of such
frameworks. By involving these stakeholders throughout the development
process, these rationales claim that states and aid organizations can improve
the chances that the populace supports the goals and aims of these projects,
and thus improve the functionality of development efforts (World Bank 1996).
low quality at their local school, and then to mobilize the community to action
in response to these issues. The project provided support for communities to
create action plans and, where necessary, to apply for needed external funding.
The project resulted in communities and teachers participating in a range of
activities, from creating local teaching and learning materials, to forming par-
ent groups that escorted children to school every day, to building roads and
bridges to the school, to changing the timing of local initiation ceremonies.
These programmes have also been shown to improve educational quality,
in this case as measured by the individual communities involved in the pro-
gramming, and are often sustained by the community. More information on
SMC-EQ can be found by contacting the implementing NGO, CRECCOM,
at: www.sdnp.org.mw/creccom. Generally, however, they are extremely local-
ized and localizing; they empower communities to improve their school within
their existing resource constraints or the limited resources they might be able
to raise. They have not generally addressed systemic issues viewed as affecting
quality, such as teacher training, curricular issues, school financing systems,
and so forth, nor do they provide a scalable model of quality-improving inputs
or processes. Likewise, the participatory process models that they embody are
generally not viewed as easily scaled up, successful though they are.
The various programmes and policies designed to improve educational
quality through participatory practices have had successes and failures.
Much has been written about these, and space does not allow a review of
them here. Participatory development approaches have been widely critiqued
both by those who believe firmly in the value of participation (Groves and
Hinton 2004), and by those who believe current participation paradigms
must be fundamentally questioned (Cooke and Kothari 2001). This note
does not aim to offer the second critique, although such a critique could be
quite useful. For example, does it really create a sense of ownership to
require that parents who are at the margins of desperate poverty provide
resources they do not have in the name of ‘‘participating’’ in school con-
struction? Likewise, when parents offer a critique of decentralization reforms
as a state effort to shed responsibility for providing citizens with basic
services, such critiques are seldom taken seriously and parents may in ex-
treme cases even be accused of laziness or of ‘‘misunderstanding’’ the roles
that states should play in the 21st century.
Putting aside for now a wholesale critique of participation, the promise of
the current focus on improving participation in order to improve quality
may be that much of the work currently done to improve educational qual-
ity is only shallowly intersecting with communitiesÕ, parentsÕ, childrenÕs, and
teachersÕ daily educational experiences and desires. When it does intersect, as
in the case of the SMC-EQ project, its size and scope is generally limited.
Such programmes show, however, that educational quality, as defined by
various local and non-local actors, could be strengthened by good participa-
tory approaches. Such participation may also be central to creating long-
term community, parent, and student support for and involvement in
706 Nancy Kendall
Note
References
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Education and the Characteristics of Schools in South Africa. National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 7399. Cambridge, MA: NBER.
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The author