Wednesday, January 23, 2019

What’s Really Keeping Pakistan’s Children Out of School?

The demand for education is already high. Pakistan’s education crisis is a supply-side problem created by Government regulation.



"Less than half of third graders in Pakistan can read a sentence in Urdu or local languages. Thirty-one percent can write a sentence using the word “school” in Urdu, and 11 percent can do it in English.

Children in government schools report that teachers have them clean, cook, massage their feet and buy them desserts. Children are categorized as smart or stupid as soon as they start school. Corporal punishment is severe. Parents will send their kids to a private school if they can afford a few dollars a month, but they do not see government schools as worth it.

Since 2010, Pakistan has more than doubled what it budgets for education, from $3.5 billion to $8.6 billion a year. The budget for education now rivals the official $8.7 billion military budget. The teaching force is as big as the armed forces.

But Pakistan has a learning crisis that afflicts its schoolchildren despite much debate and increase in funding for education because policy interventions by the government and foreign donors misdiagnosed what is keeping children out of school.

Although aid programs of the United States and Britain contribute a mere 2 percent of the education budget, those countries and the local elite, whose own children go to high-end private schools, have emphasized that Pakistanis demand education and that more children should be enrolled in school.

But the demand for education is already high, evidenced by the mushrooming of low-cost private schools that now enroll 40 percent of students in the country and charge as little as $2 a month."

Pakistan’s education crisis is a supply-side problem. Enrollment rates are used as the measure for progress because Pakistan has the second-largest population of out-of-school children in the world. But the proportion of 5- to 9-year-olds in school is the same as it was in 2010: 57 percent. With teachers chronically absent from school at a rate of 20 to 30 percent and most of the education budget going into their above-market salaries ($150 to $1,000 a month), doubling the budget was never the solution to Pakistan’s education crisis.

"The problem is that donors have created too much noise. Convinced by their own solutions and backed by foreign expertise and international consensus, foreign donors have run high-profile advocacy campaigns and monopolized the attention of bureaucrats, party leaders and the version of civil society that Pakistan has developed in response to them."

"But to turn schools into places that provide education will require a local constituency asking the right questions. The hottest issue regarding education in Pakistan right now is limiting the fees that high-end private schools charge. If elites mobilized as effectively around issues that affect the majority of Pakistanis, we would see faster and more meaningful change."

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Excerpted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/opinion/pakistan-education-schools.html

(Emphasis added)

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