International Education News

This week, IEN continues its scan of news and research on tutoring as a “learning loss” recovery strategy. The second part of this three-part series focuses specifically on what’s being written about the challenges and opportunities for carrying out tutoring strategies effectively on a large scale. Part 1 of this series described some of the funding initiatives contributing to the emphasis on “high-dosage” tutoring as a “recovery” strategy, as well as some of the initiatives to expand access to tutoring being pursued in the US in particular. Part 3 will survey some of the specific new developments and “micro-innovations” that could make tutoring more effective in the future. This series is part of IEN’s ongoing coverage of what is and is not changing in schools and education following the school closures of the pandemic. For more from the series, see “What can change in schools after the pandemic?” and “We will now resume our regular programming.” For IEN’s previous coverage of news and research on tutoring, see Scanning the News on High Dosage Tutoring, Part 1: A Solution to Pandemic Learning Recovery, and Part 2: Initiatives and Implementation So Far. This post was written by Jonathan Beltran Alvarado and Thomas Hatch.

Although it will take years to judge the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students, it’s already possible to track – and in some cases predict – the challenges that large-scale “recovery” initiatives like expanding access to tutoring are likely to encounter. Those analyses depend on the answers to several critical questions, including: 

• To what extent do the goals of the initiative meet the needs of the people involved? 
• To what extent do the capacity demands for funds, personnel, time, and other resources match the existing capabilities? 
• To what extent do the values reflected in the initiatives mesh with the values of the people, organizations, and communities where those initiatives are supposed to take off?

Both the goals and values of many tutoring initiatives match what many policymakers, funders, educators, and families perceive as an urgent need for strategies that focus directly on improving students’ learning, particularly as measured by test scores (as detailed in the first post in this series “Tutoring takes off – Scanning the news on the emergence of tutoring programs as a strategy to combat “learning loss (Part 1).” However, even with a fit between goals, needs, and values, the extent to which different schools, districts, and communities have the capacity to pursue effective tutoring interventions on a large scale remains in question. In order to get a better sense of the capacity challenges that schools may be facing in pursuing tutoring initiatives, three issues are particularly relevant:

• What kind of tutoring are students getting?
• Who is actually getting tutoring support? 
• What are the challenges of scaling up tutoring interventions?

What kind of tutoring are students getting?

Research, including eight different meta-analyses, make clear that tutoring can have a significant positive effect on student learning. For example, a systematic review of 89 tutoring programs and related field experiments shows that “tutoring programs yield consistently substantial positive impacts on learning.” There is even evidence that, under some circumstances, online tutoring programs can be effective.

“Eight meta-analyses including over 150 studies consistently find that tutoring results in substantial additional learning for students,” High-Impact Tutoring: An Equitable, Proven Approach to Address Pandemic Learning Loss and Accelerate Learning, National Student Support Accelerator

However, tutoring interventions vary in key programmatic components, such as the type of tutor, their curriculum characteristics, their mode of delivery, and their frequency and duration, and a number of studies show that not all these variations are equally effective. As Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn put it, “There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom, and anybody can tutor.”

“There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom, and anybody can tutor.” – Penny Schwinn, quoted in Despite Urgency, New National Tutoring Effort Could Take 6 Months to Ramp Up

Among the many options, high-impact or high-dosage tutoring is regarded as the most effective form of student support. As the US Department of Education sums it up, the key features of high-dosage tutoring include:

1. Duration of at least 30 minutes
2. Frequency of three or more times per week 
3. One-on-one or small group instruction
4. Alignment with an evidence-based curriculum or program 
5. Providers who are educators or well-trained tutors

Consistent with this definition, research suggest that the most effective tutors are teachers and paraprofessionals who are invested in relationship-building and well-informed in the content rather than volunteers; tutors benefit from having high-quality materials aligned with the state’s standards, which should be easy to use by tutors and students; and the best results occur when high-impact tutoring is embedded in schools, preferably taking place during school or immediately before or after the school day, making it easier for students to attend. 

Who is actually getting tutored?

Despite the considerable agreement about the impact of high-dosage tutoring, many students are not participating in it. For example, a survey by the EdWeek Research Center in 2021 found that 97% of US district leaders surveyed said they were or would be offering tutoring to about one-third of their students (equal to about 17 million of the 51 million K-12 students in the US). However, data from the Department of Education for the 2022-2023 school year shows that while 83% of schools reported offering some form of tutoring only 37% of schools provided high-dosage tutoring, and only 30% of their students received it. 

Evidence also suggests that many students are not even taking advantage of the “on-demand” tutoring programs that are supposed to be easier for them to access. For example, a study of an “on-demand” tutoring system implemented in a network of charter schools in the spring of 2021 showed that only 19% of students ever accessed the program, and struggling students were even less likely to opt in than their higher-achieving peers, with a take-up rate of 12% against 23% respectively. An intervention involving extensive communication via mail, email, and text messages with students and families increased participation substantially, but only about one-quarter of students ever logged on to the tutoring platform.

The good and bad of virtual on-demand tutoring, Brookings

As a result, the study’s authors concluded: “The availability of tutoring rarely translated into the use of tutoring. This open-access program is unlikely to have reduced—and may, in fact, have increased—inequalities in students’ academic experiences and outcomes.” 

“The availability of tutoring rarely translated into the use of tutoring. This open-access program is unlikely to have reduced—and may, in fact, have increased—inequalities in students’ academic experiences and outcomes.” — Susanna Loeb & Carly D. Robinson, “The good and bad of virtual on-demand tutoring”

Evidence of fast-growing remote tutoring approaches developed by companies like Paper and Varsity Tutors are also having trouble getting students to opt-in to their services. Varsity Tutors, for example, markets its services as a newer, more scalable tutoring model in which schools pay a subscription fee for each student. That subscription gives students access to an online platform where they can post a problem and get connected to an available tutor. Without using the camera or the microphone, a designated tutor can solve the problem by sharing the screen, uploading photos and documents, or typing in a text box. 

Despite the ease of use, the persistent low take-up rates have disappointed many school districts and altered the demand for opt-in remote tutoring. Santa Ana Unified, California, invested over $1.1 million to provide access to 41,000 students, but just 1,000 logged from December 2021 to May. In Columbus, Ohio, district data confirmed that only 7% of students received opt-in tutoring through Paper’s platform, which dissuaded them from renewing the $913,000 contract signed in 2022. Fairfax County, Virginia, recorded an even less impressive take-up rate of only 1.6 percent of students accessing the platform Tutor.com. What is worse, recent testimonies and investigations are shedding light on the frantic business dynamics of companies like Paper, which has a monetary incentive to make a tutor responsible for more students than it can meaningfully manage or teach subjects they don’t know well. 

School leaders are facing this situation by changing the contract incentives and demanding more accountability from remote tutoring companies. In an interview with the Hechinger Report, Terry Grier, former superintendent of Houston, said it was “immoral” for schools to sign “blank contracts” without strings attached. He said he tried online tutoring, but it didn’t work well. “Kids wouldn’t use it,” Grier said.

“It is ‘immoral’ for schools to sign ‘blank contracts’ without strings attached.” — Terry Grier quoted in “Proof Points: Many schools are buying on-demand tutoring but a study finds that few students are using it”

To address these issues, some school districts have designed contracts that promote vendor accountability. Ector County, Texas, developed a pilot of outcomes-based tutoring contracts in 2020 before the pandemic. The school leaders scaled up the model over the summer of 2020, recognizing that academic recovery would require a significant investment. Their goal was to provide intensive virtual tutoring to 6,000 students under a contract, tying the vendor’s revenue to the rate of learning growth on the NWEA MAP assessment administered three times during the school year. 

Still, districts are paying significant sums to on-demand tutoring programs that may not be as cost-effective as they look. A Hechinger Report article explains that Varsity Tutors charges a flat fee of $40 to $80 per student (depending on school district size). This price may look attractive compared to resource-intensive high-dosage tutoring programs that cost roughly $4,000 per student yearly. However, if a 10,000-student district buys a remote tutoring program for $800,000, an average take-up rate of 20% elevates the cost per student from $80 to $400. Furthermore, the students who participate in these programs tend to be high achieving students rather than the low achieving students for whom the program was intended.

What barriers to providing effective tutoring need to be addressed?

Along with the challenges of engaging students, high dosage tutoring is a resource-intensive strategy and costs and scalability remain big concerns. As a recent meta-analysis concluded, optimizing quality without increasing costs serves as a key challenge for policymakers. Furthermore, school districts across the US have been scrambling to find effective teachers – much less tutors – because of the difficult conditions and burnout endured by educators post-pandemic. The shortage of teachers means that some tutoring plans have had to scale back significantly, with one study of mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states in 2021 showing that some  districts that had planned to offer 90 tutoring sessions ended up offering 13 sessions throughout the year. The tight labor markets may also prevent some districts, particularly those with fewer resources available, from providing tutoring from the teachers who could be most effective. Not surprisingly, some districts have turned to cheaper substitutes, which partly explains the popularity of remote opt-in tutoring platforms. 

Discrepancies in how the schools provide tutoring, low student and parental engagement, and lack of technological resources have also diminished the impact of online tutoring. Thus, when remote tutoring options are available, the youngest students face a steeper learning curve as they spend additional time learning how to navigate the interactive platform that connects tutors and students. On top of that, the need for high-speed internet means that students living in rural areas with low parental support or lacking Wi-Fi have additional barriers to receiving academic assistance. Consequently, even the most easily scalable remote tutoring options may not reach many of the students and districts who need the most support, reinforcing existing inequalities.

Next steps? 

Tutoring alone cannot address the many issues that make it difficult to improve learning at scale for all students, and an overreliance on tutoring can take time and attention away from needed investments in support for student wellbeing and other aspects of their development. But, taken together, the latest news and research on high-dosage tutoring in the US both confirms that it is one of the most promising strategies for improving students’ academic performance in areas like reading and math and demonstrates that it is also very difficult to put into practice at scale.

[T]he latest news and research on high-dosage tutoring in the US both confirms that it is one of the most promising strategies for improving students’ academic performance in areas like reading and math and demonstrates that it is also very difficult to put into practice at scale.

As an Aspen Institute report puts it, tutoring may be one of the best ways “to teach anyone anything,” but scaling tutoring programs will continue to be challenging given limited money and a limited labor supply of tutors on top of the difficulties of modifying school’s “standard operating procedures” to find time in school schedules to  incorporate tutoring and to get students to participate on a regular basis. Adding to the challenges, as federal COVID relief funding ends, many states, like Tennessee, Connecticut, and Texas, are scrambling to find new ways of financing their tutoring efforts. Under these conditions, it is easy to predict that the surge in popularity of tutoring programs will subside without some progress in addressing the high costs, significant demands and capacity problems that come along with high-dosage tutoring. 

Still to come: “Promising innovations? Scanning the news on the emergence of tutoring programs after the school closures”.

In this week’s post, Jordan Corson shares some of the experiences and research with “youth on the move” that are captured in his latest book, Reconceptualizing Education for Newcomer Students (Teachers College Press, 2023). Corson is an assistant professor of education and affiliated faculty member of the M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University. He is also a co-author with Thomas Hatch and Sarah Gerth van den Berg of The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021). Corson’s previous posts include: Who and What Counts in Education? A Conversation with Jordan Corson. A previous version of this post appeared on the Teachers College Press Blog.

As schools tell it, the history of immigration and schooling in the U.S. is a story of two paths: exclusion or assimilation. From the 19^th century and early 20^th century  to present day, schools have commonly operated as places of oppression for immigrant students. Success—or perhaps educational survival—here depends on a capacity to conform to inherently oppressive structures. In beautiful instances, though, schools can realize the dream of making public, democratic places that serve communities. That cherish students’ voices. That nurture and care, making schools a welcoming refuge. That provoke intellectual curiosity bound up in dynamic linguistic and cultural practices. Such places center students’ identities. Joy bursts from their walls. Here, language is not something to acquire but something to do. Even as students struggle, these schools find ways of better including youth and helping them succeed.

Schools can realize the dream of making public, democratic places that serve communities. That cherish students’ voices. That nurture and care, making schools a welcoming refuge. That provoke intellectual curiosity bound up in dynamic linguistic and cultural practices.

For youth “on the move” – a term that highlights the importance of rethinking migration, nationality, and the borders we researchers and policymakers place on immigrant youth — this kind of educational structure can be found in newcomer schools. Newcomer schools are a model of public school specifically designed to affirm the linguistic and cultural identities of youth on the move who have recently arrived to a new place. In recent years, researchers and educators have attended to and championed this school model as one of educational possibility.

This kind of cherished educational environment sits at the center of my book, Reconceptualizing Education for Newcomer Students: Valuing Learning Experiences Inside and Outside of School.  Building on the work of scholars and educators like Monish Bajaj, Daniel Walsh, Lesley Bartlett, and Gabriela Martínez aims to champion affirmative forms of schooling and to show the powerful educational possibilities born of supporting youth on the move. At the same time, though, the questions I pose, wander from asking how schools might improve or how school systems might better include youth on the move to ask: Why are youth on the move considered educational “problems” in the first place? Why have policymakers and researchers historically framed kids, especially those from marginalized communities, as “problems” for schools to solve? Why has the solution been to make of school a rigidly bordered place where students “access” education? Along with these questions about youth on the move in schools, I also explore educational life beyond the boundaries of schooling.

Why are youth on the move considered educational “problems” in the first place? Why have policymakers and researchers historically framed kids, especially those from marginalized communities, as “problems” for schools to solve?

To explore these questions, I look at the history of immigration and schooling in New York City. Beyond the mountainous history of oppressive education, a history of including and “solving the problem” of educating youth on the move shows the way education systems have made sense of youth on the move and created different systems to include them with the “melting pot” or “kaleidoscope” of the United States. This history is also bundled up in critiquing how school has both come to be a place of borders and have a monopoly on education. I explore these histories from an institutional perspective, but histories of communities building schools, demanding policy changes, and challenging oppressive orders puncture a smooth, institutional narrative.

Along with this historical inquiry, I veer from school entirely by presenting an ethnographic study of education in everyday life with nine youth from a newcomer school in New York City. Even in culturally and linguistically affirmative schools, youth still become marginalized, labeled “at-risk” of dropping out, and their educational lives become defined by what happens in school. Of course, education is always happening. Learning, creating, and figuring out the world happen outside of school and often without school as a reference point. Therefore, I asked: What might happen if we moved with youth into everyday life, leaving behind the language and logics of school? Instead of thinking about something like academic outcomes, what if we studied within everyday educational practices themselves? What if the only understanding of learning was the pleasure experienced in the learning process?

What might happen if we moved with youth into everyday life, leaving behind the language and logics of school? Instead of thinking about something like academic outcomes, what if we studied within everyday educational practices themselves?

To that end, I spent a year with the youth who participated in this project, hanging out in school, clubs, and museums. We wandered New York City, riding subways, exploring parks, checking out summer basketball games, or chatting in cafes. Whether inside of school or outside of school, youth and I explored wondrous educations that were not concerned with school or dominant systems. They lost themselves in memory as they described learning photography in the Dominican Republic. Or, they navigated their own form of language education while creating plurilingual rap lyrics. Youth participants asked themselves and each other what kind of people they wanted to become and what they owed each other. Education is not, as they regularly demonstrated, something concerned with access or outcomes, but about living and changing the world.

I started research for this book in the middle of the Trump presidency. Even in the “sanctuary” of New York City, danger permeated every corner of everyday educational life. As much as this project was filled with laughter and play, the carceral systems that define the U.S. made it dangerous for youth participants to simply learn or express themselves in public places. A few years later, U.S. policy and xenophobic action entwine and continue along an infuriatingly predictable trajectory. The current “migrant crisis” is only the latest moment in a long history of a country that chooses to impose violent borders, think of people on the move as “problems,” and considers education through this same bordering logic.

Understanding these relentless issues, I hope to contribute to the kinds of work that center youth voices and challenge deficit narratives that overwhelm conversations about immigration and immigration. Moreover, I hope to does so in a way that does not bolster educational research or school systems but  disrupts them at their very roots. Youth on the move should not have to prove that they deserve to belong to schools or any other institution in the U.S. As one participant told me, “I should get these things because I’m a human.” Instead, researchers and policymakers should question the borders we have made in schools and elsewhere.

In the second part of this two-part interview, Melanie Ehren talks with Thomas Hatch about the five “waves of funding” designed to help the Dutch education system respond to the learning challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. The first part of this interview focused on the initial school closures and the suspension of exams in the Netherlands. Ehren is Professor and Director of Research of LEARN! at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This interview is one in a series exploring what can change in schools after the pandemic? Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Vietnam. Other blog posts from Melanie Ehren include A view from the Netherlands: Melanie Ehren on school closures and the pandemic; Lead the Change Interview with Melanie Ehren; A call to action in the Netherlands: Addressing rising inequality in a decentralized system.

Thomas Hatch (TH): You and your colleagues spent a considerable amount of time studying how the Dutch government has used a series of funding initiatives to help schools and students in the Netherlands recover from the pandemic. Can you give a sense of these “waves” of funding and how schools and school networks used them?

Melanie Ehren (ME): The Dutch government provided funding to help schools respond to COVID pandemic in five different “waves,” with the first wave in July, 2020, after the initial school closures. At first, consistent with the decentralized Dutch system, schools and local school boards could decide on the type of “catch-up” approach to pursue and which pupils were eligible for the additional support. However, after the first round of funding there was considerable negative press about the unfocused nature of the approaches and the fact that some of them had little, if anything, to do with instruction. For example, in one meeting, I heard some people complaining about a school that used the funds to take their students on a trip to an amusement park (like Disney-land), with the rationale that children had experienced such socio-emotional suffering that they needed a break and a chance to re-establish their relationships with peers and their teachers.

After the initial round, the requirements for the funding were tightened and schools had to use student achievement results to target students with “learning loss” and to choose from a ‘menu of effective interventions’ to help them catch-up.  This menu was modelled directly on a “Toolkit” developed in England to ensure that schools used “catch up” approaches that had some “evidence of effectiveness.” The first version of this was what the Dutch called a “menu card,” which was essentially the English toolkit translated into Dutch.

The “Toolkit” created by the Education Endowment Foundation used in England and the Dutch version based on the English model

I think this move was made because the government felt that schools were not very evidence informed in their thinking about what interventions and programs to implement in the first wave. In fact, when we interviewed schools that had applied for funding about why they picked a particular intervention – asking things like “why are you thinking that this program might lead to improved outcomes for this particular groups?” – many of them had a hard time answering. In some cases, the decisions appeared to be based on professional expertise and their previous experiences of what had worked or didn’t work well for their students. But some schools also told us they were choosing these programs out of convenience or building on partnerships with external agencies that were already in place. For example, they might say “this is a tutoring agency we’ve worked with before; we’ve had good results with them, so we thought that that might be a good way to use the funding” or “this is something that we know we can organize for our school.”

For this second wave of funding, we studied the applications of schools and found that the schools planned to focus mainly on three types of outcomes:

1. School performance (primary education: language and arithmetic; secondary education: core subjects)
2. Well-being/social-emotional development of pupils
3. Learning skills

Despite these plans, we found that many schools actually ended up using the funding quite differently. For example, a school might have planned to spend the funds on after school tutoring; on providing additional remedial instruction at the start of the school day; or on having additional teachers in the classroom.  But then when it came time for implementation, another issue or need might have emerged or  they might have found they couldn’t secure additional teachers. Overall, schools were really struggling to organize these programs as planned because of the constant disruptions to in-person teaching and then there was a second lockdown so they were constantly changing and revising. I also had many conversations with school leaders who said “we did not apply for this funding, because we need more time to actually think about what makes sense for our kids.” We detailed some of this at the time in a blog post “Catch-up and support programmes in primary and secondary education.”

Overall, schools were really struggling to organize these programs as planned because of the constant disruptions to in-person teaching and then there was a second lockdown so they were constantly changing and revising.

Over time, the government did add more background information and context to the menu to help schools to use the information to make choices. For example, the new version produced by the Ministry of Education, Culture & Science (which they referred to as an “Intervention card improving basic skills“) included links to guidance and support for choosing and using the guidance and urged the schools to consider the demands of their own context, stating: “it is important how your school implements a chosen intervention. For a concrete step-by-step plan, you place each approach in the context of your school: does this approach suit the education you provide, your students and the issues you face? The professionalism and autonomy of the teacher are paramount here.” All of this has led to much more emphasis on evidence-based and evidence-informed work in schools, and particularly how the government can support that. That’s another consequence of the pandemic in the Netherlands, I think: A belief that we need to build more capacity in schools for using research evidence to improve education.

TH: What’s happening now and what’s likely to happen in the future? 

ME: Building on the catch-up schemes, the national government has developed a broader funding scheme – the National Program for Education – that is continuing to help schools, particularly schools with a high level of deprivation, to improve reading, writing, and literacy. This program provides an additional investment of 8.5 billion for 2.5 years for the entire education system. This National Program offers funding to improve education in these basic areas, and schools are expected to use the same approach as under the catch-up funding: the schools have to identify children who need additional support and use the menu card to decide on what kind of interventions are effective. But the national program of education has a much wider infrastructure to improve basic skills, including support teams that are initiated by the Ministry of Education to work with schools, but all around this idea of evidence-informed interventions.

“Get started with the NP Education” [translated] a graphic depicting how Dutch schools should select, implement and monitor “catch-up” programs.

Despite the huge amount of funding there have been a lot of critiques of the national government, given the short time span in which the money has to be spent, which doesn’t allow schools to implement more sustainable solutions to improve education and learning outcomes. The funding for example doesn’t allow schools to hire additional staff as these would have to be offered permanent employment which cannot be guaranteed with temporary funding.

Given that the most pressing problems in our education system are teacher shortages, high inequality and a decline in student outcomes in literacy and numeracy, there is an understanding that a long-term investment and program of reform is required to improve education. The short-term catch-up programs seem to have done relatively well in getting students back on track, but they have not been able to buck the wider trends in declining outcomes and increasing shortages of teachers.

In some ways, all of this a natural consequence of problems coming out of the school closures, but it’s reinforced by the fact that the Netherlands’ performance has been declining in international surveys like PISA at the same time that inequality has been increasing. That’s also something that the Dutch Inspector of Education has reported on in their annual reports. All of these reports have been alerting people to the facts that children are not reading at home and that reading scores are declining, and that’s having an effect on other outcomes. All of these things come together in the drive towards trying to improve basic skills.

TH: Can you talk a little about how the response in NL compares to those in other systems you’re familiar with, particularly the UK? 

ME: During the pandemic, the Netherlands had a decentralized approach to allow schools to choose a contextually appropriate response to school closures within a centralized funding framework. This is different from other countries such as the UK that saw a highly centralized roll-out of a tutoring programme. Now, however, we are seeing a much more centralized approach to improving education. Recently an ‘interdepartmental investigation into education (IBO Koersen op kwaliteit en kansengelijkheid) was published with a range of proposals for stronger governmental coordination/control over education to reduce inequality and enhance learning outcomes, including more centralized coordination of the curriculum, compulsory assessments, more inspection, enhancing evidence-informed work in schools (including through an application for funding to hire a school support team to work with a school). Given the Netherlands’ tradition of high autonomy and freedom of education, this is being described as ‘a committed and responsible government’, but it is essentially a move towards greater centralized control.

Now, however, we are seeing a much more centralized approach to improving education... Given the Netherlands’ tradition of high autonomy and freedom of education, this is being described as ‘a committed and responsible government.’

TH: Have you seen any particularly innovative or promising new practices or policies that have grown out of the COVID response? 

ME: Schools are much better equipped to move to online learning when needed. With the train strikes we had in some regions last year, schools closed again but they have been able to take advantage of the new infrastructure and teachers’ skills to teach online. In Higher Education there is some discussion of having a COVID-generation of students (who also talk about themselves in these words) who sometimes find it difficult to engage in on-campus education and feel they should have more support.

Teacher shortages are also increasing and this is partially attributed to the high levels of stress and workload during the pandemic and reduction of the status of teachers in society and the cost of living in relation to teachers’ salaries. Our most recent research also suggests that there may be an increase in the number of teachers working on private contracts (through recruitment agencies). The amount of temporary funding for catch-up programmes and the National Education Program may also lead to an increase in private agencies and what some are calling “edubusinesses,” but I have not yet seen the evidence on this.

Related Resources & Articles:

Subsidie en basisteams voor scholen om basisvaardigheden te verbeteren [English: Subsidies and basic teams for schools to improve basic skills], Rijksoverheid

Eerste inzichten over inhaalprogramma`s in het po en vo [English: Catch-up and support programmes in primary and secondary education], LEARN!

Informatie voor onderwijsprofessionals [English: Information for Professionals], LEARN!

Rapport De Staat van het Onderwijs 2021 [English: Report on The State of Education 2021], Inspectie van het Onderwijs

Rapport De Staat van het Onderwijs 2022 [English: Report on The State of Education 2022], Inspectie van het Onderwijs

This week, IEN scans the headlines of stories reporting on OECD’s Education at a Glance for 2023. Trends in high quality Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs were in focus for this year’s report. OECD’s Education at a Glance provides an annual overview of comparative education statistics. The headlines shared below reflect aspects of the report emphasized by media outlets around the world. See IEN’s Education at a Glance 2022 Scan, Education at a Glance 2021 Scan, Education at a Glance 2019 Scan for comparison.

44% of upper school students are enrolled in VET programs across countries, yet work-based programs–in which students can gain practical skills during vocational programs–remain rare. Less than half of students within VET programs (45%) participate in this type of work-based learning, that’s the conclusion of OECD’s latest Education at a Glance report. Other topics featured in the 2023 report include trends in early childhood education and care enrollment, declines in teacher wages and professionalism, and notable variation in spending per student among OECD countries. Continued learning for Ukrainian refugees forcibly displaced around the world was also featured as a special issue. 

Corresponding to this year’s theme, many of the headlines from articles discussing the report highlighted VET trends within specific countries. Shares of domestic spending on education, as well as issues related to teacher payment and retention, were also featured in this year’s headlines. In-line with past years, nearly all of the headlines focused on problems revealed in the report (Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, South Korea, Turkey), while only a few emphasized the report’s positive findings (Finland, Hungary, Spain).

Global

The Launch of Education at a Glance 2023: OECD Indicators, OECD

“Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director of Education and Skills, presents data and reveals insights from the 2023 Education at a Glance report, which includes a special feature on Vocational Education and Training, with the aim of empowering educators, policymakers, and stakeholders with the data and analysis to shape their education systems.”

Expand vocational education and training, demands OECD, University World News

“OECD analyst Viktoria Kis told University World News their data clearly shows that ‘young people who benefited from work-based learning while pursuing VET have better employment outcomes’ and that ‘apprenticeships or internships are a powerful way of connecting VET to labor market needs.’ She said: ‘Some countries have a strong tradition of extensive use of apprenticeships, like Germany and Switzerland. The Norwegian VET system is mostly composed of ‘2+2’ apprenticeships: two years spent at school, followed by two years in workplaces.’”

Australia 

OECD report amplifies calls to boost public school funding, The Educator Australia

“The OECD’s latest ‘Education at a Glance’ report, released on Wednesday 13 September 2023, found Australia spends just 1.5% of total government expenditure on upper secondary school education, 28.6% lower than the OECD average of 2.1%. This is despite spending more than twice as much as the OECD average on funding private schools.”

Brazil

Brazil invests less in education than OECD countries, Agência Brasil

“Investment in Brazil fell between 2019 and 2020. In the OECD, total government spending on schooling grew 2.1 percent between 2019 and 2020 on average, at a slower rate than total government spending on services, which was up 9.5 percent. In Brazil, total government spending on instruction went down 10.5 percent, while spending on all services increased 8.9 percent. According to the study, this may have been due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

European Union

OECD Education at a Glance 2023 – How Europe’s Business Leaders Can Help Widen Access to Education for Europe’s Underserved Youth, EU News – Business

“The OECD report found that 44 per cent of all upper secondary students are enrolled in vocational education and training across the OECD; they also note that these programmes are still seen as a “last resort” to many countries. European policymakers have a role to play in shifting this narrative and highlighting the unique benefits of vocational learning to bridge the gap between privilege and potential. Vocational training is also a viable way to attract underserved youth, who may feel rejected or discouraged from mainstream education.”

Finland

Education at a Glance: Vocational education and training is more popular in Finland than in other OECD countries, Finnish Government 

“In Finland, 68% of all those in upper secondary education are enrolled in vocational education and training, whereas in OECD countries the corresponding figure is 44% on average. The high figure in Finland is explained by the number of adult students. A total of 44.8% of 15-19-year-old upper secondary school students in Finland are enrolled in vocational education and training, which is slightly higher than the OECD average (37.4%).”

Hungary

Hungarian vocational training 3rd in OECD rankings, The Budapest Times

“38% of 24-34 year-olds obtain a vocational diploma and are less exposed to the risk of unemployment than those with general secondary education, and can expect a 31% higher salary, the ministry said in a statement.” 

Ireland

Ireland ranks last in spending on education ‘as a percentage of GDP’, study finds, The Irish Times

“Ireland ranked last in a league table of 38 countries based on education expenditure as a percentage of GDP with 3.2 per cent in 2020. It compared to an average of almost 5 per cent for OECD countries.”

Israel 

OECD education report shows Israel’s investment in public education lower than average, Y Net News

“According to the report, which refers to data from 2020-2022, the total government expenditure on public education in Israel (excluding higher education institutions) was significantly lower than the OECD average in 2020 – $8,865 per year compared to $10,949.”

New Zealand 

How does New Zealand’s education system compare? OECD’s Education at a Glance 2023, Education Counts

How Aotearoa’s education compares with other OECD countries, The Post

“While the share has declined, the actual increase in government education expenditure in 2020 was significant, amongst the top five, in percentage terms, across OECD countries.”

Portugal

Portugal spending less on students, The Portugal News

“Portugal spent an amount similar to the average of OECD countries on Education, but expenditure per student is 14% lower in Portugal, at around €10,000 compared to the OECD average of €11,700.”

South Korea

Entry-level teachers’ wages below OECD average, The Korea Herald 

“Korea had the highest percentage of people aged 25-34 who had completed higher or tertiary education — at 69.6 percent in 2022 — among the OECD member countries and 11 others, ranking No. 1 for four consecutive years.”

Spain

Almost 88% of Spaniards aged 15-19 years are in school, six points more than a decade ago, La Moncloa

“In the case of the adult population aged 25-64 years, 41.1% have tertiary education (40.4% in OECD and 37.7% in EU25), 8.5 points more than a decade ago. At the other extreme, the percentage with less than upper secondary education has reduced by 9.5 percentage points, from 45.3% in 2012 to 35.8% in 2022.”

Turkey

Turkey spent less money on education than the OECD average in 2020: report, Turkish Minute 

“The report further revealed that the cumulative spending on each student between the ages of six and 15 adds up to a total of around $112,000 on average across OECD countries, while the figure is less than $50,000 in Colombia, Romania and Turkey.”

United States

From Education Week

U.S. Teachers Work More Hours Than Their Global Peers. Other Countries Are Catching Up, Education Week

“U.S. elementary school teachers’ work hours haven’t changed much since 2019, but at more than 1,000 a year on average, American educators work more than 200 more hours than their peers worldwide. U.S. elementary and high school teachers work more hours than those in any OECD country but Costa Rica, and middle school teachers work more hours than their peers everywhere but Costa Rica and Mexico.”

In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Minahil Asim shares her work regarding educational reform in low and middle income countries. Asim currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Education Leadership and Program Evaluation at the University of Ottawa. She previously completed her Ph.D. in Educational Policy at the University of California, Davis, and an M.A. in International Comparative Education at Stanford University. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LTC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.”  This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call? 

Minahil Asim:  I am a scholar based in North America, and my scholarship is primarily in low- and middle- income country (LMIC) contexts. I have projects in Pakistan and Ghana, both post-colonial states, that have strongly emphasized education reforms to address a wide range of educational challenges related to disparities in access to, and quality of, basic education. In my view, racial injustice is inextricably linked to imperialism – whether that manifests in global politics, through international aid organizations, or through scholarship originating from academia in the Global North. 

Minahil Asim

Piper (2016) describes scholars based in Western academic institutions and working in the Global South as those who “…place too much faith in their own knowledge rather than that of local education experts, and where development practitioners rarely appreciate the privilege of working in countries which are not their own” (p.1). In light of this, I believe that educational change scholars based in the Global North have two responsibilities. First, they must understand what injustice looks like in the contexts they study without imposing their ideals of what injustice is in the contexts in which they live. This includes critically looking at their own scholarship and questioning what is being produced and for whom. Second, they are responsible to actively build partnerships in the contexts being studied that are not extractive. These may include collaborations with academics in the Global South (with the caveat that local academic institutions can be elite spaces with power hierarchies and removed from local realities), or practitioners working in the space of educational change in communities.  

As a former development practitioner with training in quantitative social sciences, my work has mostly drawn on theoretical frameworks focused on individual behavior change to improve outcomes in education, for example, principal-agent models (Eisenhardt,1989), Pygmalion effects (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968), accountability and incentives (The World Bank, 2003). I have used tools such as randomized control trials and quasi-experimental research methods to understand the effectiveness of policies aimed at improving student outcomes. This scholarship can be dangerous as it presumes models of behavior that may be detached from local realities, overlook complexity in the way organizations and systems function, and think of “outcomes” in narrow, and quantifiable ways. I have taken a few steps to change this in my scholarship. I have developed and continue to foster relationships with academics, policymakers, and organizations in Pakistan and Ghana, where our collaborations serve as a steppingstone to understand the complexities in the context, the priorities that drive reform and change, and the ways local expertise can be leveraged to drive change. I have also expanded my theoretical and methodological repertoire to take an interdisciplinary approach towards addressing policy questions. This includes collaborating with researchers across disciplines and actively using mixed methods in my research. I still have a long way to go. 

LTC: In your work, you examine the effects of different education policies on under-served students’ access and engagement both in local and international contexts. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?  

MA: The questions I grapple with as I work in policy and program evaluation in Pakistan to improve educational outcomes for students are 1) What is it that we are trying to change, and where are the priorities for change/reform coming from? 2) How can our scholarship facilitate that change, such that it sticks? In other words, how do we ensure sustainability of programs and policies that are truly transformational?  

“How do we ensure sustainability of programs and policies that are truly transformational?”

Both these questions are complex and context dependent. In my work with school councils or school management committees (SMCs) in Pakistan, I draw on the idea of isomorphic mimicry. Prichett (2013) explains that in the context of India, reforms can serve to provide the organizations with legitimacy, support, and resources from key stakeholders, but may not align with the goals of the organization. Reforms may end up becoming tools of compliance for the bureaucracy. In the program I studied, SMCs in Pakistan’s largest province were given funds to spend on school improvement (including improvements in enrollment, infrastructural changes, hiring of contract teachers) and were reminded through an information campaign of the process of spending the money and fulfilling their roles and responsibilities.

We found improvements in enrollment and attendance of students in the pilot project (Asim & Dee, 2022); however, there were no changes to any outcomes, including learning, once the program was scaled up (Asim, 2023). I concluded that the program led the SMC to perform their job well for a short period of time and comply with the bureaucratic processes (as seen in other contexts too (e.g., Aiyar, 2015)), but the changes did not stick. This is because the priorities were top-down i.e., the SMCs or school teachers were not consulted on what they wanted to change; priorities were measurement centric (i.e., focused on reporting of enrollment and attendance numbers; and priorities were not aligned for learning within the system (Prichett, 2015)). 

For any kind of change to be transformational, it is important to understand what communities are looking to change and what change looks like in particular contexts. From my research, I understand that transformation cannot solely rely on process-focused mechanisms. It may require, for example, questioning the power structure within the SMC membership to understand how decisions are being made, democratizing the process to choose outcomes that they would like to change (e.g., female attendance in schools, as opposed to, or in conjunction with, improved overall enrollment), and then establishing routines beyond measurement systems that help achieve those priorities. 

For any kind of change to be transformational, it is important to understand what communities are looking to change and what change looks like in particular contexts.

LTC: In some of your recent work, you explore how scholars understand and study district-level leadership and its role in student outcomes. How might your findings inform the future of district-level research both in North America and abroad?

MA: In LMIC contexts, we know very little about middle-tier leadership and management, and even less about how that influences school improvement and student outcomes. My colleagues and I systematically review the role of subnational actors and organizations in LMICs and highlight the disciplinary divide in how the middle-tier is conceptualized (Asim et al., 2023). In economics and development studies, subnational actors are discussed as agents, with capacity to deliver change (Beg et al., 2020; Cilliers et al., 2022). While in public/education administration or organizational sociology, actors are discussed in the context of their agency within organizational units (Bantwini & Moroosi, 2018). While the former studies the role of subnational actors in monitoring and ensuring school-based accountability using quantitative methods, the latter discusses networks and feedback loops that exist between middle-tier organizations and schools to improve teaching and learning using qualitative research methodologies. I advocate for more conversations across these disciplinary and methodological divides to better understand how the middle-tier actors and organizations can be leveraged to improve educational outcomes for students. 

In our current work in Ghana, and future projects in development, we use this two-pronged approach to examine both the bureaucratic structure and the work of bureaucrats at the district-level. Our interdisciplinary team of economists, sociologists and scholars of education administration has employed a variety of research methods to understand management practices of district staff, along with the role of the subnational level in improving teaching and learning at the school level. My colleagues conducted a large survey, adapted from the Development-World Management Survey (D-WMS) (Scur et al., 2021) to describe actors’ management practices and their interactions with schools (Boakye-Yiadom et al., 2023). Coupled with a qualitative process tracing methodology, we describe that policy and regulation, authority for decision making, and organizational routines as well as the skills, actions, capacities, and constraints of a range of professional managers shape districts’ ability to set and reach goals (Asim et al., 2023). While preliminary, our work has theoretical and methodological implications for future work on district level research in LMICs. First, we highlight ways the middle-tier of education hierarchy can be conceptualized – in a technical or accountability-focused way that focuses on performance management of the actors, or a problem-solving approach that relies on relational trust, feedback loops and networks within the education administration hierarchy (Williams et el., 2021). How effective this dichotomy is in understanding district-level leadership, is an empirical question. Second, we have attempted to use mixed methods that combine quantitative and qualitative data and methodologies. We are inspired by Darling-Hammond’s work in California (Podolsky et al., 2021) that effectively uses an explanatory mixed methods design to study “positive outliers.” I anticipate future district-level research bridging disciplinary and methodological divides in creative ways. 

LTC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes? 

MA: In LMIC contexts, one paradigm for improving public bureaucracies or changing schooling systems is described as a form of “control” or “accounting” based accountability in which actors are held accountable by their supervisors for meeting quantifiable targets through regulation, monitoring, and evaluation systems (Anderson & Cohen, 2015; Gruening, 2001). Described as Route X (Honig, 2022) or Pathway A (Williams et al., 2021), this type of accountability-based management reform manifests in a set of management practices focused on performance review, managerialism, and standardization, which recent research suggests may lead to a culture of compliance and performativity within the bureaucracy (Aiyar, 2015; Anderson & Herr, 2015; Honig & Prichett, 2019). 

A second paradigm posits that instead of “accounting” or “control” based accountability, public sector bureaucracies can leverage a “Route Y” (Honig, 2022) or “Pathway B” approach (Williams et al., 2021). In this paradigm, accountability is characterized by partnerships, professionalism, shared responsibility, collegiality, and feedback loops within educational organizations (Schultz & Ravitch, 2013). It fosters relationships characterized by guidance, support, and trust between different actors (Ehren & Baxter, 2020; Bryk, 2010). It provides opportunities for bottom up, horizontal, as well as top-down accountability (Leithwood, 2013; Williams et al., 2021). 

As a field committed to deep and transformative change, it would be a shame if we let schools and schooling systems in LMICs focus on one of these approaches, or worse let one approach be applied at the expense of the other. As discussed previously, I would also fear that we let these scholarly conversations continue in silos and widen the theoretical divide in conceptualizing change in schools.

“I fear that we let these scholarly conversations continue in silos and widen the theoretical divide in conceptualizing change in schools.”

LTC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

MA: I am always inspired and humbled by the brilliant scholarship being produced in this field and beyond which truly cares about improving the lives of students around the world. I am very excited by the methodological and theoretical diversity with which educational change is being pursued – in terms of the scholarship on technical/rational and relational paradigms to understand change within educational organizations, the emphasis on the importance of bridging the divide between these paradigms and research traditions, and pursuit of more “emergent” approaches in the study of districts and schools in North America (e.g., Costanza-Chock, 2020; maree brown, 2017; Podolsky et al., 2021; Yurkofsky & Peurach, 2023).

However, in my understanding of this literature, scholars have not always engaged with questions of equity and social justice in the field. I do see conversations opening up towards a more critical perspective, such as the role of districts in sustaining racial inequities, or obstacles managers face as they navigate racism in districts (Farrell et al., 2022; Shah et al., 2023; Shah & Grimaldos, 2022). However, there is a lot more work that needs to be done to understand structures of power in LMICs, challenging those structures, and pursuing questions of equity and social justice that are relevant to the reality of the contexts. In the future, I hope to see scholarship that is more generative than prescriptive, and I hope to find my own place within it.

References: 

Aiyar, Y., Dongre, A., & Davis, V. (2015). Education Reforms, Bureaucracy and the Puzzles of Implementation: A Case Study from Bihar [Report]. International Growth Centre.

Anderson, G., & Herr, K. (2015). New public management and the new professionalism in education: Framing the issue. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23, 84–84. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v23.2222

Anderson, G., & Cohen, M. I. (2015). Redesigning the identities of teachers and leaders: A framework for studying new professionalism and educator resistance. Education policy analysis archives, 23(85), n85.

Asim, M., & Dee, T. S. (2022). Mobile phones, civic engagement, and school performance in Pakistan. Economics of Education Review, 89, 102254.

Asim, M. (2023). Local governance of schools, a double-edged sword.

Asim, M., Mundy, K., Manion, C., & Tahir, I. (2023). The “Missing Middle” of education service delivery in low-and, middle-income countries. Comparative Education Review, 67(2), 353-378.

Asim, M., Bell, S., Nudzor, H., Boakye-Yiadom, M., Mundy, K., (2023). Management Practices and Implementation Challenges in District Education Directorates in Ghana

Bantwini, B. D., & Moorosi, P. (2018). The circuit managers as the weakest link in the school district leadership chain! Perspectives from a province in South Africa. South African Journal of Education, 38(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.4314/saje.v38i3 

Beg, S., Fitzpatrick, A., & Lucas, A. (2020). Successful interventions at scale: The importance of managers.

Boakye-Yiadom, M., Leaver, C., Mansoor, Z., & Iocco, M.P., (2023). Management and performance in mid-level bureaucracies: Evidence from Ghanaian education districts.

Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Easton, J. Q., & Luppescu, S. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Cilliers, J., Dunford, E., & Habyarimana, J. (2022). What do local government education managers do to boost learning outcomes?. The World Bank Economic Review, 36(3), 629-645.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press. 

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Agency theory: An assessment and review. Academy of Management Review, 14(1), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1989.4279003

Ehren, M., & Baxter, J. (Eds.). (2020). Trust, accountability and capacity in education system reform: Global perspectives in comparative education. Routledge.

Farrell, C. C., Singleton, C., Stamatis, K., Riedy, R., Arce-Trigatti, P., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). Conceptions and practices of equity in research- practice partnerships. Educational Policy, 37(1), 200-224. https://doi/10.1177/ 08959048221131566 

Gruening, G. (2001). Origin and theoretical basis of New Public Management. International public management journal, 4(1), 1-25.

Honig, D. (2022). Managing for motivation as public performance improvement strategy in education & far beyond. CID Faculty Working Paper Series.

Honig, D., & Pritchett, L. (2019). The limits of accounting-based accountability in education (and far beyond): Why more accounting will rarely solve accountability problems. Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE). https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-WP_2019/030

Leithwood, K. (2013). Strong districts and their leadership. Toronto, Ontario: Ontario Institute of Education Leadership.