Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
26
most.113 Teachers’ attitudes towards students, teaching at the right level, and incentives to
increase teachers’ motivation are also found to positively affect student learning.114
For improving access to schools and school quality, making the schools accountable of the
results could improve learning outcomes. Increased funding for the education system does
not necessarily lead to improved results directly. To make the education system work more
efficiently community participation and public-private partnerships could also be used.
Encouraging participation of parents and the community in order to improve the quality of local
schools is one way to make a school more accountable to families. This could be done through
providing more information to parents about the schools. In Pakistan a school report card
intervention was found to increase learning outcomes of children while also lowering school
fees.115 Another resource that could be tapped is the private sector. Engaging in public-private
partnerships to increase the number of schools could be a good solution and could make schools
more accountable to the government and to parents. Public-private partnerships have been
adopted in a number of countries including India, Colombia and Chile with varying impact on
learning outcomes of children.116
Box 3 Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) PLUS Liberia: Teacher pedagogy
intervention using EGRA results
Liberia applied an Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) in 2008 in a nationally
representative sample of primary schools and the results pointed out to low levels of
achievement. EGRA results suggested that at the end of the second grade 35 percent of the
students could not read a single word.117 In response to this outcome Ministry of Education
of Liberia together with USAID designed an intervention programme that is applied as a
randomized controlled trial. The schools were selected into three groups:
 a “full” treatment group in which children were assessed and afterwards teachers
received training on how to continually assess children’s learning. Teachers also
received pedagogic support, books and materials while parents were informed about
the achievements of their children,
 a “light” treatment group in which only parents are informed about their children’s
progress through report cards
 a control group where none of these interventions are applied
The baseline test took place in November and December 2008, the midterm test took place in
May and June 2009 and the final test took place in May and June 2010.
113 (K Muralidharan & Sundararaman, 2010), (Murnane & Ganimian, 2014), (Evans & Popova, 2015b)
114 Evans & Popova (2015a)
115 (Andrabi, Das, & Khwaja, 2015)
116 (B; Snilstveit et al., 2016)
117 (Gove & Cvelich, 2010)