12
Conceptualizing Quality Education
There is significant disagreement among scholars on the determinants of student achievement.
Existing factors influencing student performance can be organized in three main categories: (1)
supply-side interventions and inputs such as better physical and human resources, and learning
materials; (2) policies that shape incentives and influences behaviour and preferences of
teachers, parents, and students; (3) participatory management interventions such as
decentralisation reforms, information provision, and community participation in the
management of schools (Masino and Niño-Zarazúa 2016).
An additional reason for unsatisfactory progress is the implementation failure. Many developing
countries, particularly those affected by conflicts, lack administrative capabilities to effectively
deliver education services (Pritchett, Woolcock and Andrews 2013). According to the WDR
2018, governments have to think beyond piecemeal policies and programs. Therefore, entire
education systems need to be organized around the goal of progress in learning. Children are
being deprived of learning opportunities not only because of problems in the classroom. There
are other factors limiting their learning experience at the school and community level. Equally,
school principals may be constrained by the scarcity of inputs at the school level as much as by
the lack of say over how inputs are to be used to boost learning among children. Therefore, it is
not sufficient to study the proximate determinants of student learning with a focus on child,
family and classroom specific factors. A clear understanding of the system-wide determinants
of learning outcome is equally important. This is true not just for generating evidence on what
works in the delivery of quality education. A system-wide approach is also critical in identifying
potential cases of implementation failure. A program with clear scientific evidence may fail,
when scaled up, because the community and political leaders are not aligned with the goal of
prioritizing learning.
The WDR 2018 organizes the correlates of low learning into four groups: (a) lack of good
teachers (b) lack of school readiness among children (c) school inputs that don’t affect teaching
and learning and (d) unsupportive school management. However, many of these correlates also
affect learning indirectly by determining the time spent in school. Indeed the battle for achieving
SDG 4 for many developing countries is being fought in three fonts: Intake, completion and
learning. In many countries, the opportunities to learning are limited for children are not often
in school. Elsewhere, those in school are forced to prematurely leave the system before
mastering basic literacy skills. Therefore, according to UNICEF (2015), the probability that a
child will have the full benefits of her or his education is equal to the multiplicative product of
intake (the % of children who enter school), completion (the proportion among entrants who
reach the end of primary or lower secondary education) and learning (the probability of
receiving a full learning experience). For instance, children from poor families suffer in all three
aspects: they are less likely to enroll, more likely to drop out early and less likely to attain basic
competencies when in school because they are deprived of critical pre-school inputs. Therefore,
in this study, these two conceptual frameworks to guide the analysis of trends in education
quality in the OIC countries are combined.