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Another case of resource scarcity is poor teacher pay. In many OIC countries, teachers are paid
poorly compared to other occupations or infrequently (Asadullah 2006). In the case of
Indonesia, the government therefore introduced a number of reforms including increased
allocations to teachers. In the recent education budget, 52% has been allocated for teachers.
Recent salary reforms permanently doubled base teacher pay. Yet, in spite of the huge
percentage of the education budget being spent on teachers including salary increase, their
performance remains unsatisfactory. Evidence indicates that it did not improve teacher effort
and student learning outcomes even after two and three years of the pay rise. This again
highlights the limits of expenditure-focused reforms to improve student learning even when
expenditure is targeted to teachers (de Ree, Muralidharan, Pradhan, and Rogers, 2015).
Another commonly perceived driver of low quality is the lack of emphasis on literacy and
numeracy in school education inmany OIC countries. Inmany of themember countries, religious
and modern education still operates in parallel, often without any significant overlap. The large
presence of Islamic schools in the relatively poorer members of the OIC such as Bangladesh,
Indonesia and Nigeria is a major policy issue and creates numerous challenges to deliver of
quality education. In many instances, these schools remain outside the purview of the state and
rely on non-standardized curricula. Learningmaterials are not regularly updated. The education
received, while focused on moral and religious values, allegedly does not impart functional
numeracy and literacy skills. Even in instances where governments have recognized madrasah
education and has invested heavily, quality remains less than satisfactory. There are additional
concerns of gender exclusions with female teachers and students discouraged or subject to
restrictive socialization processes. These are serious concerns given the fact that Islamic schools
have higher presence in locations where the availability of government schools is limited
(Asadullah, 2016a). Madrasah children also disproportionately come from poorer economic
backgrounds (Asadullah and Chaudhury, 2016; Asadullah and Maliki 2018). However, research
comparing the relative performance of students attending Islamic schools in the OIC is almost
non-existent. There is burgeoning evidence from one member country, Bangladesh, which has
arguably the second largest Islamic schooling system in the Muslim world. These schools are
indeed found to help build social capital in rural communities. Compared to students from non-
religious schools, students of state recognized madrasahs are more trusting of others (Asadullah
2016b). At the same time, empirical analysis based on multiple rounds of detailed nationally
representative survey data confirm that children from state-recognized secondary madrasahs
are behind those from government owned non-religious secondary schools (Asadullah,
Chaudhury and Dar 2007; Asadullah, 2016c). However, one important finding is that the quality
of government schools in rural areas is not sufficiently high. In other words, the learning gap
between Islamic and non-religious government school is not large. This conclusion is supported
bymore recent research using data fromhousehold based assessment of learning outcomes. The
level of learning is found to be low across all types of providers (Asadullah and Chaudhury
2015). This highlights the fact that madrasahs per se are unlikely to be the main challenge.
Muslim countries, similar to many other developing nations, face various structural challenges
that limit the impact of schooling (Kuran 2018). Many OIC countries still suffer from negative
attitudes toward girls’ schooling and textbook contents lack gender balance (Islam and
Asadullah 2018; Asadullah, Amin, Chaudhury 2018). The emphasis on memorization also
undermines critical thinking skills and creativity which are key ingredients for innovation.
One major structural challenge facing developing countries is the lack of institutional capacity
to use inputs efficiently. Apart from resource related factors, low level of accountability is a
challenge. A key mechanism for holding teachers accountable in terms of teaching and learning