Xavier Rambla Sociologia

For the last decades Brazil has overcome the Philippines regarding the UNDP  indexes of education and life expectancy. These disparate trends highlight the diversity of middle-income countries. Although Brazil and the Phillippines have suffered in a similar way from the so-called “middle-income trap“, their human development has not followed a correlative pattern. I have analysed the factors of these trends in a recent publication.

A particular correlation with the patterns of education policy transfer is telling. Both countries have repeatedly adopted the policies widely sponsored by the International Financial Institutions since the eighties. Some time ago the Philippines was also cited a best practice of the Green Revolution.

However, Brazil struggled to adopt a different view regarding social policies. Its main conditional cash transfer scheme, Bolsa Familia, was initially a local initiative but became a popular programme for most international organisations. The administrations of Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff also engaged in multi-layered consultation to design and implement Federal plans for Education, as required by the 1988 Constitution. At the same time, an array of political players built coalitions which promoted diverging but related views of education policy. Thus, the Global Campaign for Education allied with teacher unions, Federal, state and local administrations as well as international organisations such as UNESCO and the Organisation of Ibero-American States. The business community also searched for the support of the World Bank to launch the Todos pela Educaçao campaign. Did this dense network of collaboration foster an improving trend of human and educational development? Statistical trends were remarkably positive since the nineties. How was conflict managed within the frame of this civil society? Looking at the impeachment of President Rousseff, it is obvious that conflict was a powerful underlying process. This is really an intriguing case for further research

Since 1990 the UNDP emphasizes that human development is multidimensional. At least, it has three distinct faces such as income, education and public health. Other complementary indexes have noticed that housing conditions must be taken into account too. In addition, divides between socio-economic groups, gender and ethnic groups cannot be overlooked.

For years the human capital approach has almost monopolised the official reading of this point. In this vein, the contribution of education to foster the other dimensions has been widely documented. In fact, education has positive effects on opportunities in the labour market, on economic performance, on fertility, on public health, on democracy and many other aspects. However, recently the interest in the wider picture is growing, not least because the connections between the other dimensions are noticed but also because the effects on education of any other shortcomings are also taken into account (e.g. see this policy brief). The 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report clearly states that education is linked to the other SDGs. The Report also claims that this is a two-way connection with education impacting on the other SDGs and these other SDGs influencing education too. Therefore, it is interesting to think carefully about an array of possible connections. Three examples provide some food for thought.

To start with, sanitation may impinge on education in direct and indirect ways. The direct effect has to do with material constraints at home, such as the availability of space for playing and doing homework. The indirect is even more powerful, since sanitation influences health, and health may determine the potential for education. Here, data tend to indicate that the correlation between sanitation and primary school completion has changed during the last decades, probably due to improvements in both dimensions (see here).

The fact that the bulk of the world population leaves in cities provides other illustrations. Latin America is the continent with the most extreme manifestations of this phenomenon. There, evidence shows an increasing trend to socio-economic segregation so much so that high-income persons normally live in socially homogeneous areas which are well connected with other similar communities. This trend provokes perverse consequences for other social groups, mostly because it tends to accumulate problems of poverty, school drop-out and low-skills jobs in peri-urban areas where the basic facilities are also weak (here). In addition, urban violence is particulary worrying in some countries. This is the case in Latin America, This violence constrains the use of urban space, and certainly, shortens the life expectancy of the youth. These consequences are clearly harmful for education (see map 5 and figure 3 here)

Last but not least, income inequalities and adult skills are correlated in the countries with a higher HDI. Income gaps are an effect of skills polarisation, but income poverty also becomes a powerful barrier to skills development. While Scandinavian countries are able to alleviate inequality and strengthen the skills of the adult population, Anglo-Saxon countries maintain large economic gaps and polarised distributions of skills, and other countries maintain economic gaps and lower average levels of skills (eg. Spain, Italy, Ireland and Poland) (see graph and blog post here).

El Semestre Europeo incluye la recomendación de prevenir el abandono escolar prematuro para responder a los principales desafíos que tienen que afrontar las sociedades del continente (aquí). El Semestre Europeo es el proceso de elaboración coordinada de los presupuestos de los países del euro. Desgraciadamente, la opinión pública dedica toda la atención a la magnitud del déficit, pero otras cuestiones como las políticas impositivas, el estado del bienestar o la educación también figuran en la agenda oficial.

The Austrian Foundation for Development Research has just published this policy brief (here)

World Bank SABER basically provides data so that governments design ‘smarter’ education policies. In contrast with this top-down approach, the Civil Society Education Fund attempts to influence on educational policy-making by means of research-based advocacy (watch the video specially from minutes 0-1:30 and 4:40-5)

Some recent articles on the issue published by Routledge here

The World Bank Systems Analysis for Better Educational Results, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the Global Partnership for Education Civil Society Education Fund and the European Union Open Method of Coordination are currently creating repositories and data sets as well as producing reports, score cards, guidelines, best practice case studies, policy briefs and guidelines in order to constitute worldwide systems of knowledge management in the field of education policy.

However, these initiatives largely overlook two important conditions of knowledge management.

First, their approach is not interested in developing the capabilities of specific organisations, particularly schools. Lead commentators on management such as Peter Drucker and Chris Argyris nevertheless highlighted the connection between innovation, knowledge and organisation.

Second, their approach mostly focuses on explicit knowledge. This is a very significant bias to the extent that knowledge management is particularly aware of the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (Nonaka, Collins).

UAB Divulga: cat, cast, eng

According to recent findings, the German federation has become innovative in educational policy-making. On the one hand. the Länder and the federation found new ways of cooperating after the conflict on the role of regions in the European Single Act. Currently, they take some time to make decisions, but the intense interaction and deliberation observed in the process seems to be fruitful. On the other hand, most of the Länder have successfully aligned their education policy with other policy areas which contribute to research, development and education.

Recently published evidence also notices a somehow successful consolidation of cooperative federalism in Brazil. In that country, since municipalities and states are all of them units of the federation and keep their own resources, some commentators expected competitive strategies to prevail, and welfare downsizing to be the likely consequence. However, the federation has managed to equalise resources and outcomes in such areas as education and health by creating a core system of strategic planning for local and regional governments. This system sets benchmarks and makes all of them accountable in these policy areas.

In Spain, devolution of education and health policies to ‘autonomous communities’ was completed by 2000. In the aftermath, the central government tried to foster ‘territorial coordination’ by providing complementary funds for the schools to implement some wide-ranging initiatives in order to tackle school failure (e.g. individualised tutoring, mentoring, extending after-class activities to all). Some regional governments have also proved to be innovative in launching a multilaterally supported, ambitious and long-term strategy for lifelong learning (the Basque country), and delivering scholarships conditioned to successful participation in further education (Andalusia). Some local governments have also strengthened their authority to guarantee more transparent school admission policies and have been struggling to widen career guidance (in Catalonia). However, the pressure for the Constitutional Court to cancel the bulk of the 2006 Catalan Statute Act (which had been voted in the Spanish Parliament and in a referendum in Catalonia) and the final decision of the court challenging many articles of that act severely damaged trust between the central and the regional governments. After 2010 fiscal consolidation has weakened some of these innovations by reducing the educational and health budgets as well as restricting social protection in a context of increasing hardship.

These three examples suggest that multi-level government can be as innovative as the Forum of Federations NGO expects it to be. However, this potential directly depends on the mainstream political arrangements and the underlying rationale of fiscal policies.

A variety of political actors are involved in the current negotiations about the Millennium Development Goals and the Education for All Goals after 2015. Maybe the role of new philantropists and the emphasis of some lobbies on the potential of public-private partnerships have provided the most telling evidence of this growing complexity. However, this is not the whole story, since governments themselves are aligning their policies in new ways. A clear illustration of these new alliances is the interest of BRICS in coordinating their education policies, as their recent meeting with UNESCO clearly shows. This is a noticeable event not only because of the international relevance, and the increasing participation in first-line conflicts, of Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa, but also because of the disparate socio-economic and educational development of these five countries.