Good governance and the education sector

Md. Sirajul Islam, Harun Or-Rashid & Md. Atique Rahman

As Bangladesh ushers in the 39th Independence Day celebrations, it is an opportune moment to pause and review and reflect on what the future augurs for our young generation: Present Continuous or Future Perfect? What ails the primary education sector? How could these enabling profiles of progress coexist with the disheartening extreme vulnerabilities? We use the lens of governance to probe these issues further and suggest possible roadmaps. Our analysis focuses on some key cornerstones of governance, which we believe are extremely critical to correct existing anomalies and set the sector on a virtuous path to progress.

Resourcing the sector
Money matters. Governance cannot be improved on mere rhetoric or noble intentions. An under-funded budget is a sure recipe for systemic and programmatic failures. Bangladesh's education budget has been meager over the years with respect to its requirement particularly in improving quality of education.

A comparative picture for south Asia based on latest available figures (data for Afghanistan and Sri Lanka are not available) reveals that Bangladesh has some catching up to do to emerge as a frontrunner.

The other issue is of consistency in allocation. Over the last 15 years, the share of primary education in the total budget shows no regular pattern it has increased, decreased, or remained constant over time.

Ensuring equity in access
Since 1990, Bangladesh has enacted laws and implemented innovative programs that are seen as pioneering initiatives in the region but inequities stand out, especially along economic lines. As a recent paper by Al-Samarrai notes , primary net enrolment rates were 14 percentage points lower for the poor compared to the non-poor in Bangladesh. Inequality in enrolment widens as children move up the education system with children in non-poor households twice as likely to be enrolled in secondary school as their poor counterparts.

The report also captures other disconcerting trends as well. For one, government recurrent spending on education is biased towards the non-poor; 50% of the primary school age population is classified as poor but they only receive 47% of public primary recurrent expenditure, and at higher secondary level only 11% of public spending goes to the poor despite the poor representing 31% of the higher secondary school age population.

Why do the budget priorities go wrong? Budget allocations, both recurrent and development, have been largely based on an incremental budgeting process that uses past allocations as its starting point. The planning and budgeting process is further complicated by the existence of two ministries of education; Secondary schools and madrasas with primary sections are funded and regulated by the Ministry of Education (MoE) whereas the remainder of the primary system is funded through the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education (MoPME). This leads to a lack of coordination in terms of budget prioritization but also in levels of funding for primary schools that are financed and regulated by both ministries. For example, per student government funding in registered non-government schools controlled by the Ministry of Education were more than twice as high as those funded by the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education.

Quality & reliability of education
A major problem for quality evaluation is lack of good achievement data. Linked to the shortage of good achievement data is the absence of awareness among teachers and guardians of the importance of students' achievements. Modern information technology can be used to store data of students' achievements. In the Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) there is an education management information system (EMIS) but it does not have up-to-date data and their publication is not regular. Such a poor EMIS is not yet potential to provide effective input in the policy and strategy formulation.

In Bangladesh some 200,000 teachers educate about 18.5 million students across 37,672 government primary schools, thus resulting in a very high student-teacher ratio. Here again, government primary schools fare worse as the following table illustrates:

An overview of regional profiles shows that Bangladesh is clearly lagging behind in this respect with the highest pupil teacher ratio in south Asia.

Further, Students get only 500 hours annually to interact with the teachers in grades one and two whereas the international standard is 900 contact hours per year for grades 1-5. This contact hour is grossly inadequate and forces them to depend on private tuitions, which incidentally are beyond the means of most poor families.

There is also the strange case of multiple curricula for primary education; there are at least five curricula in Bangladesh which drastically hampers standard of education. Add to this the fact that Bangladesh has 11 types of primary level educational institutions.

The improvement of quality of teaching requires intensive and periodic teachers' trainings. Baseline Survey 2005 of PEDP-II revealed that 28.1 per cent teachers did not receive one year foundation training i. e. 'Certificate in Education' (C-in-Ed) training. One-thirds of female teachers are yet to receive this training as compared to one-fourths of male teachers. At the same time, the scope for building the capacity of primary school teachers is limited as merely 54 Primary Training Institutes (PTIs) serve more than 80 thousand primary education institutions. Moreover, PTIs are under staffed and under-utilized and training program is theory based and does not develop specific skills of instruction.

Government established Upazilla Resource Centers (URCs) at the upazilla level for subject-wise professional development of the teachers. However, a Transparency International Bangladesh report on 'Primary Education Administration and Management: Problems and Way of Prevention' in 2008 identified that as many as 73 per cent of government primary teachers and 70 per cent of other registered primary school teachers are yet to receive subject-based training.

Transparency & accountability
The education policy failed to create effective supervision mechanism, training and motivation for the teachers. Two key institutions of accountability are the School Management Committees (SMC) with certain well defined functions and Parent Teachers Associations (PTA) for playing a supportive role in building favorable teaching-learning environment in schools. However, ground level audits reveal that most members of these SMC are inactive. In most of the cases, these committees lack funds to arrange SMC meetings, guardians' meetings and mother's gatherings.

This inactivity of SMCs, therefore create an environment of discretionary acts performed by teachers. Further, the teachers are paid out of from the national budget, and are not accountable to this local representative body. Teacher absenteeism is a worrying factor in primary schools. In Bangladesh teacher absenteeism is 16% (ERD Policy Brief no 46, 2006).

It is expected that openness and sharing of information at school and upazila education offices will lead to accountability for quality education. The introduction of “Citizen's Charter” is a positive step to inform citizens the performance of schools.

Moreover, according to the Article 6 of the Right to Information Act, 2009, the schools and education management offices are legally bound to disclose all relevanty information.

Teachers of government primary schools, being state employees, remain accountable to the DPE. There is no say of SMC and the community in their performance. Before independence community leaders used to monitor the running of schools and account the teachers for their performance. In 1973 all schools were brought under the authority of the national government and thereby this sort of accountability was shifted from community to the government hierarchy

John F. Kennedy once remarked, “Modern cynics and sceptics see no harm in paying those they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.” Teachers' poor performance is also linked to low pay and benefits for them. They tend to make up the poor pay by taking part-time jobs like tutoring. Therefore, government could consider formulating a separate pay scale for teachers in order to involve skilled and meritorious people towards the teaching profession. The salary raise should be tied to clearly teachers' performance.

From symptoms to reforms: The way forward
This quick governance review of the education sector has highlighted some key areas of concerns. This compilation has revealed the symptoms that indicate a larger malaise. The need of the hour is to design concerted and well directed efforts that would result in changed policies and practices.
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The authors are researchers with the Institute of Governance Studies, BRAC University