Education: Lessons from next door

Earlier this month, the World Bank had some nice things to say about the results of Kenya’s education reforms.

Though it noted a boatload of problems that still plague it, it noted a marked improvement in literacy and arithmetic despite challenges like crowding and the disruption caused by Covid-19. Kenyan students are also posting improved learning outcomes, with its students performing better than their peers in the East African region.

It is a dramatic change of fortunes. Up until about 15 years ago, Kenyan students were overrunning Ugandan schools as parents sent them to study away from what was a broken system. The exodus led to an explosion in private schools, and a whole sub-economy built around Kenyan students. Not anymore.

Kenya split the years spent in school through the competency-based curriculum (CBC), with emphasis on practical learning, not just studying to pass examinations. In the past, pupils previously spent eight years in primary school and four in secondary. With the reforms, they now spend six years in primary, then three years in junior secondary and a further three in senior secondary. More money has been invested in teacher training, more school textbooks, connecting schools to electricity, and better school management.

The thing is, some of these reforms have been tried elsewhere in Africa, and the results have, in some cases, been worse than before. Reporting on the World Bank’s plaudits, The East African weekly called it “rare praise.”

It’s rare because good outcomes from well-meaning tinkering with education are extremely scarce. If you built a hospital, staffed it with diligent nurses and doctors, stocked it with medicine (and ensured it isn’t stolen), and kept the lights on, patients will troop there and you will have improved health outcomes.

If you did the same thing with a school, you will infrequently get better results. Some years ago we were travelling in rural Uganda when we stopped in a market under a cluster of giant mango trees to buy roasted maize.

To our right, was a grass-thatched miserable-looking village primary school, but it was full of life. Cheerful and loud children were running about during the break.

Directly opposite it was a beautiful school with a shiny metal roof, white walls, a nice football field, latrines, and the works. It was silent. Curious, we inquired why there were no children at the modern school which, we learnt, was government-owned. The folks in the market told us that it used to turn out poor results in the national examinations; the teachers were not always paid on time, and the headmaster was a hopeless fellow.

The villages around abandoned it and moved to the grass thatched one, which had decent examination results. The poorly paid teachers also crossed and started moonlighting there. The village cows roamed the modern school’s playground, feeding on the grass, as the children played happily on dusty grounds across. The contrast was surreal.

Schools are like markets. Politicians campaign big on markets, promising mobile and roadside vendors facilities fit for the 21st century. And, sure enough, in Kenya and around Africa very many new markets have been built. Many of them have been failures. In Kenya, several are white elephants being eaten up by bushes. The problem is that governments don’t understand a thing about user experience, don’t get consumer behaviour, and have no clue about vendor economies. The “small fee” they are asked to pay for stalls is what used to be the vendors’ profit.

Well-paid teachers are of little use if they are not good teachers.

A school can have all the textbooks in the world, but that doesn’t mean students will read them. Or if they do, that they will be helped by them. They are good things, to begin with, though.

The World Bank recommended that other countries in the region look to Kenya for lessons on how to improve their own education systems. However, if the reasons for success are so hard to put a finger on, one has to wonder how much use that can be.

I have a suspicion that after building, changing curriculums, upping the quality of teachers, stocking up on books, and all those things, what happens outside the school might be a significant contributor to learning outcomes.

I think that building highways, real estate booms, nice cars on the roads, increased lighting, the proliferation of bright things like screens (TVs), malls and supermarkets with an array of brightly packed products, Sunday church services with well-dressed beautiful people, Friday Muslim “Jummah” prayers with worshippers in bright expensive starched white gowns, neighbourhoods with well-trimmed hedges and lawns, and clean safe streets fire up the imagination and add up to create a positive factor that enables students to do well in school.

If you look at places in Africa like Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda, where education has improved, you get the sense that what is happening outside the school fence is as definitive as what is happening inside.