A Symposium on Girin Beeharry’s Manifesto for Global Education

Earlier this year, Girin Beeharry stepped down as the inaugural director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global education program. But he’s not going quietly. His recent essay, “The Pathway to Progress on SDG 4,” is essentially a manifesto for international actors in the education sector. In it, Girin diagnoses deep failures in the sector he’s helped shape in recent years, and lays out his vision for what needs to change to get back on track toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of quality education for all (SDG4).

Here, the sector responds. We’re delighted that 20 education leaders, researchers, and practitioners have contributed their reflections on, challenges to, and support for Girin’s essay. And Girin has contributed a postscript to his essay, where he responds to some of the challenges and alternative proposals. There’s a lot to digest, so here we offer a brief reading guide:

Several contributors are firmly on Team Girin, and some talked about specific ways to act out his agenda

In particular countries:

• Ashish Dhawan describes how his Central Square Foundation works with state governments in India to act out Girin’s call to prioritize foundational literacy and numeracy.

• Nompumelelo Mohohlwane of South Africa’s Department for Basic Education reflects on why tertiary education has been prioritised in South Africa, but foundational literacy has not, positing a lack of political demand and misperceptions about the scale of the problem.

• Youdi Schipper, Risha Chande, and Aidan Eyakuze of Twaweza East Africa provide a civil society perspective, describing how Twaweza’s KiuFunza program in Tanzania embodies Girin’s “three-legged stool of setting priorities, measuring progress, and instituting accountability” to advance learning.

And among international actors:

• Luis Crouch, Senior Economist at RTI, shares Girin’s urgency and priorities but is a little more optimistic. He retains hope that countries do recognise the problem and that there are donor agencies ready to help.

• Laura Savage, Senior Education Adviser at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, endorses Girin’s ambition and offers four “yes, buts” to supplement his proposals.

• Caitlin Baron, CEO of the Luminos Fund, urges the donor community to stop seeking silver bullets. There are nongovernmental organizations with well-evidenced education models, ready and waiting to scale—let’s help them do it, she says.

• Oliver Sabot, Director at Nova Pioneer, draws lessons from the health sector urging us to do one thing really well, monitor progress relentlessly, and measure outcomes obsessively.

Others noted that weak monitoring data and the wrong kind of accountability are limiting progress

• Benjamin Piper, Senior Director at RTI, draws on his experience of running large-scale foundational literacy programs in Kenya and elsewhere to stress the importance of getting usable learning outcomes data into the hands of mid-level bureaucrats.

• Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, argues reliable data on learning outcomes are a prerequisite for reform, and diagnoses failures in the “market” for learning assessments and prescribes ways to fix them.

• Lant Pritchett of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government decries accounting-based accountability and the culture of compliance that pervades education systems which are content with children not learning anything.

A common challenge to Girin’s manifesto is the problem of top-down priority setting by the global education community

Although those writers are still very much in support of the foundational literacy agenda:

• Moses Ngware of the African Population and Health Research Center, argues foundational literacy and numeracy could become an organizing principle for education systems and even budgets—but urges us to make sure the government is at the center of reforms.

• Jaime Saavedra, the World Bank’s Global Education Director, discusses the politics of education reform and asks that the international community work in service to national priorities to support countries to eliminate learning poverty.

• Anton De Grauwe of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning notes that global certainties may be in conflict with local realities. He suggests that defining a global priority like foundational literacy could undermine country priority setting and ownership.

• Karen Mundy at the University of Toronto thinks focusing on top-down messages about “what works” won’t work. She challenges the Gates Foundation to form a stronger coalition with civil society and teachers.

In fairness, Girin doesn’t ask that foundational literacy is forced on countries. And his postscript acknowledges many of these challenges, suggesting a reframe to his essay that starts with what needs to happen at the classroom level to improve literacy and numeracy, continuing to whether domestic actors are poised to take the actions needed to enable these changes, and then what the global community needs to do to support them.

Here at CGD, we pushed back on whether test scores can trump other goals around access, safety, and equity

• Lee Crawfurd and Susannah Hares suggest other things matter too. They argue that it’s not clear foundational literacy should be an unambiguously higher priority than, say, preventing violence in school or providing access to secondary education.

• Similarly, Justin Sandefur argues that tests scores alone are too narrow a guide to foreign aid in education and proposes three additional principles to Girin’s essay: do no harm; let countries choose; and invest in policies that are hard to get wrong, not hard to get right.

But, even if you believe learning should be the priority, perhaps it takes all of SDG4 to help kids learn

• Hugh McLean of the Open Society Foundations argues against narrowing SDG4 down to foundational literacy and numeracy. It takes a village to raise a child, he says, and it takes all of SDG4 to raise foundational learning.

• Manos Antoninis of the GEM Report stands ready to collaborate to realize Girin’s vision but notes that making foundational learning better needs the rest of the SDG4 targets to be better too. He warns that the donor perspective should not be front and center of education reform.

Woven through every single essay in this collection are two common threads: a deep respect for the impact Girin has had on the sector, and a sense of obligation to answer the challenge he has laid down. You may wholeheartedly agree with his manifesto or you may challenge parts of it. Either way, it is hard not to admire his impatience with the current pace of progress.