This essay summarises a framework for understanding education systems by specifying the system’s components and the ways that those components interact to cultivate or undermine learning for children. Since education systems are complex and involve complex interactions, a structured framework for characterising their features can help identify problems and the way towards solutions to overcome them.

The RISE Education Systems Diagnostic is a tool to support local actors in selecting high-level strategic priorities to improve student learning based on the latest education systems research. The Diagnostic aims to generate a shared understanding among actors about the challenges the education system faces, and to facilitate the identification of priorities for intervention. Accordingly, the process is highly participatory. As of 2022, the Diagnostic has been implemented in seven field-based studies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, led by diverse teams spanning NGOs, think tanks, consultancies, academic researchers, and government counterparts. These teams have used the Diagnostic for a range of objectives, including policy prioritisation, programme design and retrospective policy analysis. The RISE Diagnostic Toolkit is made up of eight sections, divided into three parts. Part 1, “Overview”, comprises an introduction to the Diagnostic and to the toolkit, along with brief descriptions of the Diagnostic pilot studies conducted between 2019 and 2022. Part 2, “Implementation”, comprises a section that lays out the conceptual framework of the Diagnostic, an implementation guide that gives practical guidance on each phase of the Diagnostic, and a set of planning and analysis tools for implementing the Diagnostic. Part 3, “Resources”, comprises a glossary, a set of training materials, and a set of example materials from the Diagnostic pilots.

“Are private schools better than public schools?” This ubiquitous debate in low- and middle-income countries is the wrong one to have. The foreword and three essays collected in this Forum each explore how to move past the stuck “public vs. private” binary. Jason Silberstein is a Research Fellow at RISE. His foreword is titled “A Shift in Perspective: Zooming Out from School Type and Bringing Neighborhood Education Systems into Focus.” It summarizes the current state of the “public vs. private” debate, outlines an alternative approach focused on neighborhood education systems, and then synthesizes key findings from the other essays. Jishnu Das has conducted decades of research on school systems in low-income countries, including in Zambia, India, and Pakistan. His essay is titled “The Emergence and Consequence of Schooling Markets.” It describes exactly what schooling markets look like in Pakistan, including the incredible variance in school quality in both public and private schools within the same village. Das then reviews the evidence on how to engineer local education markets to improve learning in all schools, including polices that have underdelivered (e.g., vouchers) and more promising policies (e.g., finance and information structured to take advantage of inter-school competition, and a focus on the lowest performing public schools). Das’ research on Pakistan is available through leaps.hks.harvard.edu, which also houses the data and documentation for the project. Lant Pritchett writes from a global lens grounded in his work on systems thinking in education. His essay is titled “Schooling Ain’t Just Learning: Controlling the Means of Producing Citizens.” It observes that governments supply, and families demand, education for many reasons. The academic emphasis on one of these reasons, producing student learning, has underweighted the critical importance of other features of education, in particular the socialization function of schooling, which more persuasively explain patterns of provision of both public school and different kinds of private schools. With this key fact in mind, Pritchett argues that there is a strong liberty case for allowing private schools, but that calls for governments to fund them are either uncompelling or “aggressively missing the point”. Joanna Härmä has done mixed-methods research on private schools across many cities and rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa and India, and has also founded a heavily-subsidized private school in Uttar Pradesh, India. Her essay responds to both Das and Pritchett and is titled “Why We Need to Stop Worrying About People’s Coping Mechanism for the ‘Global Learning Crisis’—Their Preference for Low-Fee Private Schools”. It outlines the different forces behind the rise of low-fee private schools and asserts that both the international development sector and governments have failed to usefully respond. Policy toward these private schools is sometimes overzealous, as seen in regulatory regimes that in practice are mostly used to extract bribes, and at other times overly solicitous, as seen in government subsidies that would usually be better spent improving the worst government schools. Perhaps, Härmä concludes, “we should leave well enough alone.”

There are many different potential roles that parents and communities can play within education systems. This essay reviews the different ways that parents and communities can exercise their individual and collective voice within local schools. It develops a typology to distinguish between three different forms of voice, and explores the enabling conditions in the wider system that each form of voice requires to improve student learning outcomes. The dominant form of voice in many current education systems is “school management”, which is commonly exercised through school management committees. The essay diagnoses how other parts of the system – the state, the bureaucracy, and teachers - have constrained school committees into playing a limited “school management” role. Because they are generally granted circumscribed responsibilities related to the day-to-day running of the school, school management committees have failed to make consistent, significant improvements to either school accountability or student learning. “School governance” is an alternative, stronger form of voice. “School governance” entails giving parents and community members greater latitude to determine the kind of education offered in local schools, somewhat analogous to how a board sets a vision and is owed justifications against results for major decisions made by an organization’s management. This would necessitate giving school governing bodies greater responsibility over setting the curriculum and choosing school leadership. Furthermore, since parents do not always or necessarily prioritize student learning from among other competing educational goals, focusing “school governance” on learning would also require strengthening the central state’s capacity to fulfill key responsibilities such as setting and measuring progress against learning standards. “School governance” would therefore face steep political and implementation challenges, and would have to be accompanied by parallel, government-led reform to other parts of the education system. The system conditions for parents and communities to play an effective “school governance” role are exacting. “School support” is a more modest but potentially more workable form of voice in many current systems. Where “school management” and “school governance” ask parents and communities to hold local schools accountable, the “school support” paradigm emphasizes actions that individual parents and community members can take in collaboration with teachers to directly support children’s learning. However, there are many cases where more parent and community involvement is not necessarily better. Parents and community members need specific, structured opportunities that complement good teaching in the classroom for “school support” to translate into improved learning outcomes.

In recent years, scholars associated with the RISE Programme have analysed learning trajectories using a variety of global datasets to shed light on the global learning crisis and diagnose what might help address it (Crouch, Kaffenberger, and Savage, 2021). For those who may want to build and analyse learning trajectories, this note acts as a methodological guide for doing so using an important new dataset on foundational learning, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys Round 6 (MICS6). We have applied the methods described in this note and, in partnership with the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR), developed a tool to showcase the results. The resulting “Learning Trajectories” webpage serves as an interactive introduction to learning trajectories and related policy simulations, and features a flexible data explorer for those who want to conveniently build, analyse, and apply learning trajectories and policy simulations to their own work and context.