Many education systems in low- and middle-income countries are experiencing a learning crisis. Many efforts to address this crisis do not account for the system features of education, meaning that they fail to consider the ways that interactions and feedback loops produce outcomes. Thinking through the feedback relationships that produce the education system can be challenging. The RISE Education Systems Framework, which is sufficiently structured to give boundaries to the analysis but sufficiently flexible to be adapted to multiple scenarios, can be helpful. The RISE Framework identifies four key relationships in an education system: politics, compact, management, and voice and choice; and five features that can be used to describe these relationships: delegation, finance, information, support, and motivation. This Framework can be a useful approach for characterising the key actors and interactions in the education system, thinking through how these interactions produce systems outcomes, and identifying ways to intervene that can shift the system towards better outcomes.

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In recent decades, education systems in most low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) have rapidly expanded access to schooling, but learning has lagged behind. There are many reasons for low learning in LMICs. Proximate determinants (such as insufficient financing or poor school management) receive much attention, but focus on these often ignores underlying system drivers. In this paper, we use a systems approach to describe underlying system dynamics that drive learning outcomes. To do so, we first describe the RISE education systems framework and then apply it to two cases. In the case of Sobral, Brazil, the systems framework illustrates how a coherent package of reforms, improving upon multiple system components, produced positive outcomes. In the case of Indonesia, a reform that increased teacher pay, but did not change underlying system dynamics, had no impact on learning. The paper shows how a systems approach can help to understand success, diagnose failure, and inform action to bring about improvements to children's learning.

In recent decades, education systems in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have rapidly expanded access to schooling, but learning has lagged behind. There are many reasons for low learning in LMICs. Proximate determinants (such as insufficient financing or poor school management) receive much attention, but focus on these often ignores underlying system drivers. In this chapter we use a systems approach to describe underlying system dynamics that drive learning outcomes. To do so, we first describe the RISE education systems framework and then apply it to two cases. In the case of Sobral, Brazil, the systems framework illustrates how a coherent package of reforms, improving upon multiple system components, produced positive outcomes. In the case of Indonesia, a reform that increased teacher pay, but did not change underlying system dynamics, had no impact on learning. The chapter shows how a systems approach can help to understand success, diagnose failure, and inform action to bring about improvements to children’s learning.