Education and economy
There’s a crucial link between economic growth and education that don’t always come to mind when we talk about education. Or economic prospects.
This week, the World Bank reemphasised this link in its latest biannual Pacific Economic Update released via media conference on Wednesday in Samoa, in which it presented its assessment on the economies of 11 countries in the Pacific.
Titled: Back on Track? The Imperative of Investing in Education, the report projects slower growth for the Pacific in 2024 and 2025 “as the boost from the pandemic recovery fades and fiscal policies gradually tighten.”
“...shifts in global economic growth, trade and international tourism pose significant challenges to economic prospects and poverty reduction, risks that could heighten due to geopolitical tensions,” it stated in its Summary & Key Findings.
“Despite the ongoing economic recovery, Pacific island countries still face formidable challenges. Medium-term growth prospects have worsened, with output significantly below the pre-pandemic trend. More than half of the Pacific countries in the report are projected to see slower per capita growth than advanced economies, leading to widening income gaps and deteriorating prospects for poverty reduction.”
In the world of numbers, the scenario is doom and gloom. However, even World Bank economists admit the proxies for benchmarking economic wellbeing don’t always capture the cultural realities that work behind the scenes to provide safety nets for those in the community facing hardships.
“We can measure GDP well, but these surveys that are required to get a sense of more broad based well-being, which is cultural heritage, you know traditional practices and the like which are hugely important for your spiritual and general well-being, we can’t measure,” World Bank lead economist for the Pacific and Papua New Guinea, David Gould said in response to press questions during the launch. But getting back into the numbers lane, amid the bleak economic growth scenario and its spectre of poverty, education is put forth as a way to turn things around.
Investing in people
“Investing in people and developing their skills through education will allow Pacific countries to find solutions to economic challenges and make the most of available resource,” the report stated.
“Education contributes to higher growth because it increases people’s income and employability, improves economic mobility and enables families to escape poverty.”
Sounds good on paper. The reality however is more complex as a lot depends on the quality of the educated workforce.
In order to make education work for the economy, the rationale is to have more individuals with a secondary education or even higher, who would be able to “propel these economies to much higher levels of development.”
According to Lars Sondergaard, a lead economist in the Education Global Practice’s East Asia and Pacific Region of the World Bank, who co-wrote the special section on education, “many children are not acquiring the basic literacy and numeracy skills by Grade 6, so even before the pandemic hit, our analysis shows that in nine out of 11 countries, more than half of students were not meeting international benchmarks in reading.”
“Specifically, more than half of 10-year-olds in nine of the 11 Pacific island countries cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text,” Mr Sondergaard said.
“This is known as ‘learning poverty’. In some countries (Kiribati, Tonga, and Tuvalu) more than two-thirds of children cannot read with understanding. A noticeable exception is Palau, where only 10 per cent of 10-year-olds cannot read with understanding. By comparison, in high-income Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, learning poverty is only about three to four percent. And COVID related school closures made the situation even worse in most countries.”
Alarming statistics
In Fiji, the figure is slightly lower than Pacific neighbours at 41 per cent but still alarmingly translates to almost half of 10year olds in the country who “cannot read and understand age-appropriate text”. What exactly does that mean? “We estimate that 41 per cent of children at age 10 in Fiji are not yet reading at international benchmarks,” Mr Sondergaard said in an interview with The Fiji Times.
“Our knowledge of how well Fiji’s primary students are reading is from the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) which is a regional assessment of year 4 and 6 students’ literacy and numeracy skills, and UNESCO data on how many primary students are out of school (we assume that the children who are out of school are not reading at international benchmarks).
“We combine these two measures to come up with an estimate of how many children ‘are not reading with understanding’.”
As he pointed out in the report, “children need to be able to read and write and do basic math to be ready to acquire those more advanced skills that will be needed to adopt new technologies to innovate and meet tomorrow’s economic challenges.”
And this is a deficiency that Pacific economies must tackle if they want a well-educated workforce to drive economic growth.
In the report, much of the lag in the learning ability of 10 year olds has been blamed on the quality of teaching.
“Indeed, our key message is that, once children are in school, teachers and teaching quality are the most important factors to improve the quality of student learning,” Mr Sondergaard said.
Proposed solutions
To improve teaching, the authors are proposing taking action on three front:
■ Strengthen teacher selection to get better people into the profession
■ Enhance the capacity of teachers already in the system;
■ Encourage existing teachers to exert greater effort.
“And, for each of these, we provide more details suggestions on what countries could do,” Mr Sondergaard said.
“For instance, we point out that there is a growing body of evidence that shows exactly what countries could do and how they could do it to improve teaching — and thereby student learning.
“One such example is called ‘Come Let’s Read and Write’ (CLRW) and it was implemented in Tonga.
“The training focused on strengthening teachers’ content knowledge, and it also provided follow up coaching to teachers.
“The program was rigorously evaluated so we know what happened to students who benefitted from better trained teachers.
“In a 2nd grade with regular teachers only 18 per cent of students are good readers. But for the 2nd graders who had teachers who had been well trained, 29 per cent of students had become good readers.
“These are big improvements in learning, and these programs are affordable. As such, they are great buys for public resources. The program’s per student cost was $116. And when we estimate the economic benefit, they are more than 12 times higher.
“So well-designed training clearly offers a source of hope to improve teacher effectiveness, and student learning,” Mr Sondergaard said.
... many children are not acquiring the basic literacy and numeracy skills by Grade 6, so even before the pandemic hit, our analysis shows that in nine out of 11 countries, more than half of students were not meeting international benchmarks in reading
– Lars Sondergaard