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Transforming education systems: Why, what, and how

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Rebecca winthrop and rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop the hon. minister david sengeh the hon. minister david sengeh minister of education and chief innovation officer - government of sierra leone, chief innovation officer - directorate of science, technology and innovation in sierra leone @dsengeh.

June 23, 2022

Today, the topic of education system transformation is front of mind for many leaders. Ministers of education around the world are seeking to build back better as they emerge from COVID-19-school closures to a new normal of living with a pandemic. The U.N. secretary general is convening the Transforming Education Summit (TES) at this year’s general assembly meeting (United Nations, n.d.). Students around the world continue to demand transformation on climate and not finding voice to do this through their schools are regularly leaving class to test out their civic action skills.

It is with this moment in mind that we have developed this shared vision of education system transformation. Collectively we offer insights on transformation from the perspective of a global think tank and a national government: the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings brings years of global research on education change and transformation, and the Ministry of Education of Sierra Leone brings on-the-ground lessons from designing and implementing system-wide educational rebuilding.

This brief is for any education leader or stakeholder who is interested in charting a transformation journey in their country or education jurisdiction such as a state or district. It is also for civil society organizations, funders, researchers, and anyone interested in the topic of national development through education. In it, we answer the following three questions and argue for a participatory approach to transformation:

Why is education system transformation urgent now? We argue that the world is at an inflection point. Climate change, the changing nature of work, increasing conflict and authoritarianism together with the urgency of COVID recovery has made the transformation agenda more critical than ever.
What is education system transformation? We argue that education system transformation must entail a fresh review of the goals of your system – are they meeting the moment that we are in, are they tackling inequality and building resilience for a changing world, are they fully context aware, are they owned broadly across society – and then fundamentally positioning all components of your education system to coherently contribute to this shared purpose.
How can education system transformation advance in your country or jurisdiction? We argue that three steps are crucial: Purpose (developing a broadly shared vision and purpose), Pedagogy (redesigning the pedagogical core), and Position (positioning and aligning all components of the system to support the pedagogical core and purpose). Deep engagement of educators, families, communities, students, ministry staff, and partners is essential across each of these “3 P” steps.

The Evolution of Education: Past, Present and the Future

May 6, 2022, editor(s): jade chen, writer(s): hirushi muthukumarana, jana chalhoub, stanley chen.

Introduction

Education has evolved drastically over time. Humanity began storing and transmitting knowledge through word of mouth, passing down information about animals, plants and the land to each succeeding generation. Formal education is said to have begun in Greece at around 4 BCE. In fact, the word “school” comes from the Greek word “schole”, which means “leisure”. This provides insight into how education was perceived back then; as an enjoyable activity rather than a chore. Today, the likes of Elon Musk have criticised formal education, deeming college degrees as a means of “prove(ing) that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning” (Aratani, 2020). Educational tools have advanced. Wax tablets were amongst the earliest learning instruments used by the Romans. Today, digital tablets and an electric stylus fill our classrooms and have almost completely replaced pen and paper. Digital technology, comprising computers and the internet, represents the second main wave of disruptive technology since the printing press. Such technology has completely revolutionised the potential for learning and teaching in more engaging and accessible ways, paving the way for “leisurely learning” as the Greeks intended it to be. Journey with us as we travel through time to uncover the evolution of education and glimpse into the exciting future of pedagogy.

A Brief History of Education

As humankind settled down from nomadic life, our ancestors began to specialise. Rather than performing generalist roles, hunter-gatherers adapted to occupations that went beyond meeting food requirements (National Geographic Society, n.d.). To manage a society growing in complexity and scale, the Egyptians began a form of education similar to that observed in modern-day society, teaching typically wealthy, elite children mathematics, language and other subjects (Facts and Details, n.d.). This naturally transpired at a social centre rather than at home, though royalty may have received private tuition to prepare them for their roles in society. These early, rudimentary forms of education also served as a barrier to the lower classes. Only the elite would be granted access to the prestigious roles requiring education.

While schooling served a very functional purpose in Egypt, Greek education had a different aim. Maintaining traditional pathways for specialised careers, tutoring occurred individually, with students being provided with the care of a mentor (Zaphir, 2019). The consequence of this was Greek philosophy; thinkers used education to inform their values and principles to help them understand the world (Mark, 2020). For those able to join the ranks of thinkers, education served to advance the collective knowledge of Greece.

Source: Greek Philosophy Tours

Nonetheless, such advanced tutor-tutee forms of education were still reserved for the wealthy of Greece. Education for those fulfilling other societal roles would have been far more general and practical. So why was education made so much more available and abundant in the West? The answer lies in the advancement of human society. Occupations continued to grow more and more labour intensive. Biddulph (2004) notes that this trend led to children spending more and more time away from their families, going into life without the social structures that made them good citizens. The cynic viewed schooling as a way to repress the resulting rising crime rates, with education becoming developed to favour the interests of the church, the business owner, and the national leader. In particular, to keep children occupied on task, draconian measures like corporal punishment were transferred from the work children were once expected to do and on into schools (Gray, 2008). Nonetheless, idealists also supported education as a means of improving social mobility.

In Australia, post-settlement education was imported from the British schooling system. Education ostensibly served as a method to broaden opportunities for the public. At the time, however, it consisted of private imported British tutors for the wealthy and ex-Convict teachers for the poor or rural (Heffernan, 2021). Such rural schools were believed to be substandard compared to urban schools or tutoring.

Source: Australian Education Research Organisation

Over time, the Australian schooling system became more formalised. As it transitioned away from a fully privatised system, the government established a relationship with various churches to facilitate more modern schooling. The later creation of non-secular teaching divided education in Australia into two classes: public schools and private schools. This remains a contemporary issue of contention in Australia, with private, religiously affiliated schools remaining popular for their perceived more superb standard (Caldwell, 2010). Specifically, the inequality between rural and urban areas has carried on, with many perceived better quality private schools placed in urban areas. Concurrently, information gathered by Caldwell (2010) indicates how this may have exacerbated class divisions in education, with economic hardship anticipating lower-income families migrating to areas with lower educational opportunities to meet other basic necessities. Nonetheless, Heffernan (2021) depicts that schooling allowed the middle class in Australia to grow as students took advantage of different pathways that education can provide.

Issues in Present Day Education

Nowadays, education is perceived as a fundamental human right and a duty for governments to ensure access to basic education for all children regardless of background or financial well-being. Furthermore, global literacy rates have climbed steadily over the last two centuries (Roser, 2016). The international average length of schooling is now drastically higher than it was a hundred years ago as more students obtain their secondary and even tertiary education. Considering Australia, the nation’s education system is regarded as one of the finest in the world by many, with a comprehensive curriculum and highly qualified teachers catering equally for domestic and international students (Australian Education System, 2021). Indeed, it is the third-largest provider globally of education for international students.

Source: Medium

Although the above discussion portrays a relatively positive view of education both globally and locally, there are two sides to each coin, and the opposite is rather bleak. Often obscured behind the wealth-fueled curtain of thousands of students flocking to prestigious, expensive universities and private schools in first-world nations, the truth is that even today, education remains inaccessible to millions of children in less privileged parts of the world. More than 72 million children of primary education age are not in school whilst the staggering statistic of 759 million adults are illiterate (Right to Education, 2018). Their illiteracy also separates them from the awareness necessary to improve their living conditions or send their children to school so the future generation may improve theirs.

The most substantially affected regions in the world are Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Eastern Asia, and the Pacific. With uneducated children, the additional problem of extreme poverty patterns perpetuates in families, causing stagnation and no hope of improvement unless drastic measures are taken (Hillman & Jenker, 2004). In Australia, too, regional inequities in educational rights have been discovered, with students in remote access or rural areas struggling to attain the same level of secondary school education as their peers in metropolitan areas (Jenkins, 2020). Moreover, a lack of education creates a repetitive and vicious cycle of being denied the most basic rights and conditions within a ruthless modern economy. Hence, these alarming statistics must be investigated further to distinguish causes, and policies must be examined to mitigate these issues.

Currently, the two main problems causing the widespread shortage of education are poverty and marginalisation. Poverty is a crippling hindrance to education because many emerging countries cannot grant the financial resources necessary to create schools, provide schooling materials or recruit and pay teachers’ wages (Right to Education, 2018). Similarly, another significant issue is the lack of political will in developing countries to fund education, perhaps due to corruption or other motives. Moreover, as schools in developing nations cannot pay or train teachers properly, any education students receive may often be inadequate or of poor quality because of poorly trained, underpaid teachers and overcrowded classrooms.

Furthermore, the marginalisation of students is very troubling, especially when it comes to gender inequality. The continually low statistics of female children receiving adequate education robs economies severely because education for girls renders striking social benefits. Notably, higher incomes, lower maternal and infant mortality rates and educated women also have more personal autonomy for decision-making. However, according to UNESCO, an estimated 130 million girls between the ages of 6 and 17 are currently out of school. Those from the poorest families are more likely to be out of the classroom than more affluent peers. Alarmingly, even in Australia, many indigenous girls from remote rural areas do not attend school; one reason is the shame and outdated social stigmas of acquiring pads/tampons and the lack of fundamental health education ( Wahlquist, 2017) . The lack of infrastructure, poverty, overcrowding and segregation also impact the education of aboriginal children, both girls and boys (Korff, 2021).

Source: Australian Institute of International Affairs

Additionally, more problems include irregular school safety, harsh disciplinary policies enacted on students who are black or from ethnic backgrounds and even the burgeoning distraction of technology on the learning experience (Major Issues in Education, 2021). In the wake of these rampant issues, there must be policies enacted by governments to mitigate these faults. Ideally, states should bear the cost of education, especially for children from poorer backgrounds. More affluent nations or institutions should provide economically challenged countries with funds and aid for this endeavour because it develops human capital. Communities must be made aware of the importance of educating girls and boys. In particular, awareness workshops and government programs must be catered to especially in rural areas to help uplift education for women. Moreover, minorities must not be neglected; states should pay attention to these regions as only equality in education will guarantee a sustainable future.

The Future of Education

Thankfully, with the onset of “edtech” (educational technology), the future of educational equality is looking optimistic and less location-dependent. Schools in third world countries are working around infrastructure constraints by leveraging free online Youtube videos, like that of Khan Academy. The African School of Excellence (ASE) is one such example and is building a reputation as one of the most affordable schools globally (Khan Academy Blog, 2011). For regions that lack a quality internet connection, wireless technology and offline apps are promoting accessibility (World Economic Forum, 2022). Furthermore, technology such as dictation software, text to speech, electronic magnifiers and even software that converts musical scores into braille has revolutionised the ease with which students with a disability can access education.

Additionally, edtech has made education more interactive. Augmented and virtual reality are adding gaming elements to text-book material. For example, “Virtuali–tee” is an app that enables users to learn about the human body by wearing a unique t-shirt which allows them to explore inside the body via an Augmented Reality app (World Economic Forum, 2022). Artificial Intelligence is making homework more interactive and providing virtual feedback, thereby tailoring material to suit the individual to work at their own pace. Finally, 3D printing is looking to further fuel the creative process and drive engagement in the classroom. Future scientists, mathematicians and engineers will be able to hold the actual model they built in their hands.

There is a general misconception that technology reduces face to face engagement between teachers and students. Nevertheless, edtech aims to do the complete opposite. The “flipped classroom model” utilises technology to ensure that passive learning is done at home via videos and other digital resources, while homework is done at school, with the teacher available to assist those who need it. Classroom time is also dedicated to hands-on activities and interactive, personalised learning and discussions. In one study, students reported a significant difference in their higher-order thinking skills and perception of the importance of the contribution of their teachers when learning through flipped classroom model (Polat & Karabatak, 2022).

The collective knowledge of humanity has always been transferred from one generation to the next. As education gradually formalised into the classroom, we instinctively recognise that the system’s biases and flaws were passed down alongside an increasingly standard curriculum. This has split the world into those privileged enough to effectively supply their students with high-quality teaching, and those who cannot afford or cannot do so for various reasons. The emergence of edtech offers the opportunity to provide a high-quality education for those who traditionally would not have been able to access it. While still a developing system that has yet to be formally integrated into a widespread fashion, edtech’s ability to overcome wealth gaps and even connectivity issues places it as the pathway opener education itself is intended to be.

Bibliography:

Aratani, L. (2020, March 10). Elon Musk says college is ‘basically for fun and not for learning’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/10/elon-musk-college-for-fun-not-learning

Biddulph, S. (2004). Manhood . Vermilion.

Caldwell, B. J. (2010). Is Private Schooling Becoming the Preferred Model of School Choice in Australia? Journal of School Choice, 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.1080/15582159.2010.526840

Economic Issues No. 33 – Educating Children in Poor Countries . (2004). International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/issues/issues33/

Facts and Details. (n.d.). Ancient Egyptian Education. Retrieved April 24, 2022. https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub404/item1929.html

FutureLearn. (2021, November 14). Explore: The Australian education system . FutureLearn. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from: https://www.futurelearn.com/info/futurelearn-international/australia-education-system

Gray, P. (2008). A Brief History of Education. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/freedom-learn/200808/brief-history-education

Heffernan, T. (2021). The History of Education in Australia. Oxford Research Encyclopedia. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1459

Jenkins, S. (2020, November 12). Government must address barriers to education in rural and remote areas, inquiry finds . The Mandarin. https://www.themandarin.com.au/144887-barriers-to-education-in-rural-and-remote-areas/

Khan Academy Blog. (2011, December 13). Making education more accessible around the world . Khanacademy.org. https://blog.khanacademy.org/making-education-more-accessible-around-the-world/

Korff, J. C. S. (2021, August 19). Barriers to Aboriginal education . Creative Spirits. https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/education/barriers-to-aboriginal-education

Mark, J. J. (2020). Greek Philosophy. https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Philosophy/

National Geographic Society. (n.d.). Civilisations . Retrieved April 24, 2022. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/civilizations/

Polat, H., & Karabatak, S. (2022). Effect of flipped classroom model on academic achievement, academic satisfaction and general belongingness. Learning Environments Research, 25(1), 159–182.

Publisher. (2021, November 11). Major Issues in Education: 20 Hot Topics (Covering Every Level) . Trade-Schools.Net. https://www.trade-schools.net/articles/issues-in-education

Right to Education : Situation around the world . (2018, February 22). Humanium. https://www.humanium.org/en/right-to-education/#:%7E:text=Today%2C%20education%20remains%20an%20inaccessible,and%20those%20of%20their%20children .

Roser, M. (2016, August 31). Global Education . Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/global-education

Wahlquist, C. (2017, September 20). Indigenous girls in remote areas skip school because they lack pads and tampons . The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/03/indigenous-girls-in-remote-areas-skip-school-because-they-lack-pads-and-tampons

World Economic Forum. (2022, May 3). Education technologies are making learning more accessible. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/education-technology-accessibility-learning/#:~:text=AR%2C%20VR%20and%20AI%20technologies

Zaphir, L. (2019). What’s the point of education? It’s no longer just about getting a job. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/whats-the-point-of-education-its-no-longer-just-about-getting-a-job-117897#:~:text=For%20much%20of%20human%20history,forced%20to%20change%20with%20it .

The CAINZ Digest is published by CAINZ, a student society affiliated with the Faculty of Business at the University of Melbourne. Opinions published are not necessarily those of the publishers, printers or editors. CAINZ and the University of Melbourne do not accept any responsibility for the accuracy of information contained in the publication.

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I am a Third Year Commerce student majoring in Accounting and Finance. I am extremely keen to expand my knowledge beyond these disciplines at CAINZ and thus, report on contemporary issues in the current economic climate to make a contribution to society!

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Transforming lives through education

Transforming education to change our world

UNESCO provides global and regional leadership on all aspects of education from pre-school to higher education and throughout life. It works through its Member States and brings together governments, the private sector and civil society to strengthen education systems worldwide in order to deliver quality education for all. As a thought leader it publishes landmark reports and data for policy-makers, implements programmes on the ground from teacher training to emergency responses and establishes and monitors norms and standards for all to guide educational developments.

Right to education in a ruined world

Southern Italy, 1950. Three children are huddled around a makeshift desk made out of reclaimed wood, scribbling in their notebooks. The classroom has an earthen floor and roughly clad walls. The children’s clothes are ragged. They are wearing home-made slippers because shoes and the money to buy them are rare commodities in the war-ravaged south.

Although World War II ended five years earlier, the scars of conflict are still visible in this black and white photo from a report commissioned by UNESCO from legendary photojournalist David Seymour.

At the time when the photograph was taken, less than half of Italy’s population could read and write and just a third completed primary school. 70 years later, these children’s grandchildren enjoy an over 99% literacy rate. In the wake of the war, UNESCO led a major education campaign in Europe to respond to the education crisis, to rebuild links between people and to strengthen democracy and cultural identities after years of conflict. The emphasis then was on the fundamental learning skill of literacy.

Immediately after World War two UNESCO led a major education campaign in Europe to respond to the education crisis, fix and rebuild links between people and strengthen cultural identities after years of conflict. David Seymour’s images show the extent of the fight against illiteracy led by the post-war Italian government and non-governmental organisations backed by UNESCO.

Looking back at the deprived surroundings Seymour captured in his photo essay, one can see the extent of success. Seventy-one years later, those children’s grandchildren enjoy a 99.16 per cent literacy rate.

Similar programmes were held across the globe, for instance in devastated Korea where UNESCO led a major education textbook production programme in the 1950s. Several decades after, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Korean citizen Ban Ki-Moon expressed the importance of such a programme for the country's development:

The flowering of literacy

In a Korea devastated by war and where UNESCO led a major education textbook production programme in the 1950s, one student, Ban Ki-Moon, now Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, saw the world open up to him through the pages of a UNESCO textbook. Several decades after, he expressed the importance of such a programme for his country's development on the world stage.

Reaching the remote villages perched atop the Andes in Peru during the early 1960s wasn’t without its challenges for UNESCO’s technical assistance programme to bring literacy to disadvantaged communities. While Peru’s economy was experiencing a prolonged period of expansion, not all Peruvians were able to benefit from this growth which was limited to the industrialised coast. Instead, Andes communities were grappling with poverty, illiteracy and depopulation.

Today, the number of non-literate youths and adults around the world has decreased dramatically, while the global literacy rate for young people aged 15-24 years has reached 92 %. These astonishing successes reflect improved access to schooling for younger generations.

Photojournalist Paul Almasy has left us the poignant image of a barefoot older man while he’s deciphering a newspaper thanks to his newfound literacy skills.

The classroom at the UNESCO mission in Chinchera, in the Andean highlands of Peru, had allowed the old man to discover the world beyond his tiny village.

However, there are still huge obstacles to overcome. Data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics shows that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 it is still the case that globally more than 450 million children - six out of 10 - have failed to gain basic literacy skills by the age of 10. And beyond literacy programmes, massive investments in skills for work and life, teacher training, and education policies are needed in a world that is changing ever faster.

Global priorities

Africa, home to the world’s youngest population, is not on track to achieve the targets of SDG 4. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to account for 25% of the school-age population by 2030, up from 12% in 1990, yet it remains the region with the highest out-of-school rates. Girls are more likely to be permanently excluded from education than boys. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated inequalities, with 89% of learners not having access to computers and 82% lacking internet access to benefit from distance learning. The lack of trained teachers further jeopardizes progress towards SDG4: pre-pandemic only 64% of whom were trained at the primary level and 58% at the lower secondary level.

As part of its Priority Africa Flagship 2022 – 2029 , UNESCO has launched Campus Africa: Reinforcing Higher Education in Africa with the objective to build integrated, inclusive, and quality tertiary education systems and institutions, for the development of inclusive and equitable societies on the continent.

Gender

There are immense gender gaps when it comes to access, learning achievement and education, most often at the expense of girls and women. It is estimated that some 127 million girls are out of school around the world. For many girls and women around the world, the classroom remains an elusive, often forbidden space. UNESCO monitors the educational rights of girls and women around the world and shares information on the legal progress toward securing the right to education for women in all countries. Despite important progress in recent decades, the right to education is still far from being a reality for many girls and women. Discriminatory practices stand in the way of girls and women fully exercising their right to participate in, complete, and benefit from education. And while girls have difficulty with access, boys face increasing challenges, and particularly disengagement , from education at later stages. Globally only 88 men are enrolled in tertiary education for every 100 women. In 73 countries, fewer boys than girls are enrolled in upper-secondary education.

UNESCO's Her Atlas analyzes the legal frameworks of nearly 200 states to track which laws are enabling---or inhibiting---the right to education for girls and women. This interactive world map uses a color-coded scoring system to monitor 12 indicators of legal progress towards gender equality in the right to education.

Monitoring the right to education for girls and women

What makes me proud is that soon I will finish building a new house. I have already been able to buy a cow and I will soon be able to have another pond

Madagascar’s coastal Atsinanana region is known for its lush rainforests and fish breeding.

The country has a young population, but only one out of three children can complete primary education. Among those who are able to finish primary school, only 17% have minimum reading skills, while just a fifth of them have basic maths competencies. Once they leave school, children face a precarious labour market and unstable jobs, just like their parents.

Natacha Obienne is only 21 years old, but she is already in charge of a small fish farm, a career that is usually pursued by men. As one of the many out-of-school women in her area, she was able to set up her own business after vocational training taught her the basics of financial management and entrepreneurship, as well as the practicalities of breeding fish.

She understood that fish feeding depends on the temperature of the water. If it’s well managed, a higher number of fish is produced. ‘I immediately applied everything I learnt’ she says.

The classroom she attended changed the course of her life and she hopes other young people will follow in her footsteps.

I no longer depend on my parents and I am financially independent

She’s not alone. Around 3,000 youths in Madagascar have been trained since the start of the UNESCO-backed programme, some of whom have set up their own business and achieved financial independence. Education was the best way to ease people's emancipation.

Like Emma Claudia, 25, who after her vocational training started a restaurant with just a baking tray and a saucepan.

What does my family think? They are surprised and amazed by my evolution because I haven’t been able to complete my studies. I don’t have any school diplomas.

While Natacha and Emma Claudia have been able to transform their world through education, millions of children out of school around the world are still denied that dream.

Discrimination against girls remains widespread and nearly one billion adults, mostly women, are illiterate. The lack of qualified teachers and learning materials continues to be the reality in too many schools.

Challenging these obstacles is getting harder as the world grapples with the acceleration of climate change, the emergence of digitization and artificial intelligence, and the increasing exclusion and uncertainty brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

We resumed school a while ago and it’s been stressful. We are trying to retrieve what we lost during quarantine, the worst thing about not being in school is the number of things you miss. Learning behind a screen and learning in person are incomparable.

Aicha is lucky to be able to continue her education. Her country has the highest rate of out-of-school children in the world – 10.5 million – and nearly two-thirds are women. To compound the problem, Nigeria’s northern states suffer from the violence that targets education.

In Russia, too, Alexander and his school friends had to cope with virtual learning and the lack of interactions.

All Russian students were moved to online studying. Needless to say, it was a rough year for all of us, several friends were struggling with depressive moods. They were missing their friends and teachers. So did I.

To protect their right to education during this unprecedented disruption and beyond, UNESCO has launched the Global Education Coalition , a platform for collaboration and exchange that brings together more than 175 countries from the UN family, civil society, academia and the private sector to ensure that learning never stops.

Building skills where they are most needed

Crouched over a pedal-powered sewing machine, Harikala Buda looks younger than her 30 years. Her slim fingers fold a cut of turquoise brocade before deftly pushing it under the needle mechanism.

Harikala lives in rural Nepal, where many villagers, particularly women, don’t have access to basic education. Women like Harikala rely on local community UNESCO-supported learning centres to receive literacy and tailoring skills. In a country where 32% of people over 15 are illiterate, particularly women and those living in rural areas, education is the only route to becoming self-reliant.

I have saved a small amount. My husband’s income goes towards running the house, mine is saved. We must save today to secure our children’s future

Having access to a classroom is the first step to creating a better world for the student, the student’s children and the student’s community. This is a lesson that matters a lot to

Kalasha Khadka Khatri, a 30-year-old Nepali mother. She grew up in a family of 21, with no option to go to school. Two of her children didn’t survive infancy because she was unable to pay for medical treatment. After acquiring sewing skills at her local community learning centre, Kalasha can now provide for her family.

Harikala and Kalasha were able to learn their skills through the support of the UNESCO’s Capacity Development for Education Programme (CapED), an initiative that operates in some 26 least-developed and fragile countries.

Reimagining the future of education

As the world slowly recovers after the COVID-19 crisis, 244 million children and youth worldwide are still out of school. And a 2022 survey by UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank and OECD finds that one quarter of countries have yet to collect information on children who have and have not returned to school since the pandemic started.

Rebuilding how and where we learn requires policy advice, stronger education legislation, funds mobilisation, advocacy, targeted programme implementation based on sound analysis, statistics and global information sharing. Quality education also calls for the teaching of skills far beyond literacy and maths, including critical thinking against fake news in the digital era, living in harmony with nature and the ethics of artificial intelligence, to name a few of the critical skills needed in the 21st century.

UNESCO captured the debate around the futures of education in its landmark report from 2022 entitled Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education.

The Transformative Education Summit , that took place during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022, as well as the Pre-Summit hosted by UNESCO to forge new approaches to education after the COVID-19 crisis, address the toughest bottlenecks to achieving SDG 4 and inspire young people to lead a global movement for education. World leaders committed to put education at the top of the political agenda. UNESCO has been mobilizing and consulting all stakeholders and partners to galvanize the transformation of every aspect of learning. UNESCO launched a number of key initiatives such as expanding public digital learning, making education responsive to the climate and environmental emergency, and improving access for crisis-affected children and youth.

The two children sitting at their makeshift desk in Italy in 1950 could not have imagined what a modern learning space might look like or how a modern curriculum or the tools and teacher training to deliver it might have been thought out and shaped to offer them the most from education. They could not have imagined the global drive to ensure that everyone was given a chance to learn throughout life. The only thing that has not changed since the photo was taken is the fact that education remains a fundamental and universal human right that can change the course of a life. To the millions still living in conditions of poverty, exclusion displacement and violence it opens a door to a better future.

Explore all the work and expertise of UNESCO in education

How technology is reinventing education

Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

Additional Chapters

The learning process.

A male teacher holds up a small glass or plastic container resembling a petri dish. Two students (one male, one female) stand beside him watching. The male student is wearing black gloves and is hand is extended touching the dish.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. —Audre Lorde, writer and civil rights activist

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the stages of the learning process
Define learning styles, and identify your preferred learning style(s)
Define multimodal learning
Describe how you might apply your preferred learning strategies to classroom scenarios

Stages of the Learning Process

Consider experiences you’ve had with learning something new, such as learning to tie your shoes or drive a car. You probably began by showing interest in the process, and after some struggling it became second nature. These experiences were all part of the learning process, which can be described in the four stages:

Unconscious incompetence : This will likely be the easiest learning stage—you don’t know what you don’t know yet. During this stage, a learner mainly shows interest in something or prepares for learning. For example, if you wanted to learn how to dance, you might watch a video, talk to an instructor, or sign up for a future class. Stage 1 might not take long.
Conscious incompetence : This stage can be the most difficult for learners, because you begin to register how much you need to learn—you know what you don’t know. Think about the saying “It’s easier said than done.” In stage 1 the learner only has to discuss or show interest in a new experience, but in stage 2, he or she begins to apply new skills that contribute to reaching the learning goal. In the dance example above, you would now be learning basic dance steps. Successful completion of this stage relies on practice.
Conscious competence : You are beginning to master some parts of the learning goal and are feeling some confidence about what you do know. For example, you might now be able to complete basic dance steps with few mistakes and without your instructor reminding you how to do them. Stage 3 requires skill repetition.
Unconscious competence : This is the final stage in which learners have successfully practiced and repeated the process they learned so many times that they can do it almost without thinking. At this point in your dancing, you might be able to apply your dance skills to a freestyle dance routine that you create yourself. However, to feel you are a “master” of a particular skill by the time you reach stage 4, you still need to practice constantly and reevaluate which stage you are in so you can keep learning. For example, if you now felt confident in basic dance skills and could perform your own dance routine, perhaps you’d want to explore other kinds of dance, such as tango or swing. That would return you to stage 1 or 2, but you might progress through the stages more quickly this time on account of the dance skills you acquired earlier. [1]

Kyle was excited to take a beginning Spanish class to prepare for a semester abroad in Spain. Before his first vocabulary quiz, he reviewed his notes many times. Kyle took the quiz, but when he got the results, he was surprised to see that he had earned a B-, despite having studied so much.

Identifying Learning Styles

Many of us, like Kyle, are accustomed to very traditional learning styles as a result of our experience as K–12 students. For instance, we can all remember listening to a teacher talk, and copying notes off the chalkboard. However, when it comes to learning, one size doesn’t fit all. People have different learning styles and preferences, and these can vary from subject to subject. For example, while Kyle might prefer listening to recordings to help him learn Spanish, he might prefer hands-on activities like labs to master the concepts in his biology course. But what are learning styles, and where does the idea come from?

Learning styles are also called learning modalities . Walter Burke Barbe and his colleagues proposed the following three learning modalities (often identified by the acronym VAK):

Kinesthetic

Examples of these modalities are shown in the table, below.

Neil Fleming’s VARK model expanded on the three modalities described above and added “Read/Write Learning” as a fourth.

The four sensory modalities in Fleming’s model are:

Visual learning
Auditory learning
Read/write learning
Kinesthetic learning

Fleming claimed that visual learners have a preference for seeing (visual aids that represent ideas using methods other than words, such as graphs, charts, diagrams, symbols, etc.). Auditory learners best learn through listening (lectures, discussions, tapes, etc.). Read/write learners have a preference for written words (readings, dictionaries, reference works, research, etc.) Tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to learn via experience—moving, touching, and doing (active exploration of the world, science projects, experiments, etc.).

The VAK/VARK models can be a helpful way of thinking about different learning styles and preferences, but they are certainly not the last word on how people learn or prefer to learn. Many educators consider the distinctions useful, finding that students benefit from having access to a blend of learning approaches. Others find the idea of three or four “styles” to be distracting or limiting.

In the college setting, you’ll probably discover that instructors teach their course materials according to the method they think will be most effective for all students. Thus, regardless of your individual learning preference, you will probably be asked to engage in all types of learning. For instance, even though you consider yourself to be a “visual learner,” you will still probably have to write papers in some of your classes. Research suggests that it’s good for the brain to learn in new ways and that learning in different modalities can help learners become more well-rounded. Consider the following statistics on how much content students absorb through different learning methods:

10 percent of content they read
20 percent of content they hear
30 percent of content they visualize
50 percent of what they both visualize and hear
70 percent of what they say
90 percent of what they say and do

The range of these results underscores the importance of mixing up the ways in which you study and engage with learning materials.

Activity: Identifying Preferred Learning Styles

Define learning styles, and recognize your preferred learning style(s)
Now it’s time to consider your preferred learning style(s). Take the VARK Questionnaire here .
Review the types of learning preferences.
Identify three different classes and describe what types of activities you typically do in these classes. Which learning style(s) do these activities relate to?
Describe what you think your preferred learning style(s) is/are. How do you know?
Explain how you could apply your preferred learning style(s) to studying.
What might your preferred learning style(s) tell you about your interests? Consider which subjects and eventual careers you might like.
Follow your instructor’s guidelines for submitting your assignment.

Defining Multimodal Learning

While completing the learning-styles activity, you might have discovered that you prefer more than one learning style. Applying more than one learning style is known as multimodal learning. This strategy is useful not only for students who prefer to combine learning styles but also for those who may not know which learning style works best for them. It’s also a good way to mix things up and keep learning fun.

For example, consider how you might combine visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles to a biology class. For visual learning, you could create flash cards containing images of individual animals and the species name. For auditory learning, you could have a friend quiz you on the flash cards. For kinesthetic learning, you could move the flash cards around on a board to show a food web (food chain).

The following video will help you review the types of learning styles and see how they might relate to your study habits:

The next assignment can help you extend and apply what you’ve learned about multimodal learning to current classes and studying.

Activity: Applying Learning Styles to Class

Apply your preferred learning styles to classroom scenarios
Review the three main learning styles and the definition of multimodal learning.
Identify a class you are currently taking that requires studying.
Describe how you could study for this class using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic/tactile learning skills.
Follow your instructor’s guidelines for submitting your activity.
Mansaray, David. "The Four Stages of Learning: The Path to Becoming an Expert." DavidMansaray.com . 2011. Web. 10 Feb 2016. ↵
The Learning Process. Authored by : Jolene Carr. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
Learning Styles. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
SU13_KentLeach_MT_Edit (29 of 65). Provided by : UC Davis College of Engineering. Located at : https://www.flickr.com/photos/ucdaviscoe/9731984405/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
The Process of Learning - Kristos. Authored by : calikristos. Located at : https://youtu.be/G1eQ6JWAi9Q . License : All Rights Reserved . License Terms : Standard YouTube License
Discover Your Learning Style and Optimize Your Self Study. Authored by : Langfocus. Located at : https://youtu.be/dvMex7KXLvM . License : All Rights Reserved . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

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Innovation in education means solving a real problem in a new, simple way to promote equitable learning.

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UNICEF works with communities, schools and Governments to build strong, innovative education systems that enhance learning for all children.

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Jerome Bruner and the process of education

Picture: Group project by Brande Jackson. Sourced from Flickr and reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licence

Jerome Bruner and the process of education. Jerome Bruner has made a profound contribution to our appreciation of the process of education and to the development of curriculum theory. We explore his work and draw out some important lessons for informal educators and those concerned with the practice of lifelong learning.

contents : introduction · jerome s. bruner – his life · the process of education · the culture of education · conclusion · further reading and references · links

It is surely the case that schooling is only one small part of how a culture inducts the young into its canonical ways. Indeed, schooling may even be at odds with a culture’s other ways of inducting the young into the requirements of communal living…. What has become increasingly clear… is that education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise. (Jerome S. Bruner 1996: ix-x)

Jerome Seymour Bruner (1915-2016) is one of the best known and influential psychologists of the twentieth century. He was one of the key figures in the so called ‘cognitive revolution’ – but it is the field of education that his influence has been especially felt. His books The Process of Education and Towards a Theory of Instruction have been widely read and become recognized as classics, and his work on the social studies programme – Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) – in the mid-1960s is a landmark in curriculum development. More recently Bruner has come to be critical of the ‘cognitive revolution’ and has looked to the building of a cultural psychology that takes proper account of the historical and social context of participants. In his 1996 book The Culture of Education these arguments were developed with respect to schooling (and education more generally). ‘How one conceives of education’, he wrote, ‘we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of the culture and its aims, professed and otherwise’ (Bruner 1996: ix-x).

Jerome S. Bruner – life

Bruner was born in New York City and later educated at Duke University and Harvard (from which he was awarded a PhD in 1947). During World War II, Bruner worked as a social psychologist exploring propaganda public opinion and social attitudes for U.S. Army intelligence. After obtaining his PhD he became a member of faculty, serving as professor of psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.

Beginning in the 1940s, Jerome Bruner, along with Leo Postman, worked on the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations (or ‘mental sets’) influence perception. Sometimes dubbed as the ‘New Look’, they explored perception from a functional orientation (as against a process to separate from the world around it). In addition to this work, Bruner began to look at the role of strategies in the process of human categorization, and more generally, the development of human cognition. This concern with cognitive psychology led to a particular interest in the cognitive development of children (and their modes of representation) and just what the appropriate forms of education might be.

From the late 1950s on Jerome Bruner became interested in schooling in the USA – and was invited to chair an influential ten day meeting of scholars and educators at Woods Hole on Cape Cod in 1959 (under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation). One result was Bruner’s landmark book The Process of Education (1960). It developed some of the key themes of that meeting and was an crucial factor in the generation of a range of educational programmes and experiments in the 1960s. Jerome Bruner subsequently joined a number of key panels and committees (including the President’s Advisory Panel of Education). In 1963, he received the Distinguished Scientific Award from the American Psychological Association, and in 1965 he served as its president.

Jerome S. Bruner also became involved in the design and implementation of the influential MACOS project (which sought to produce a comprehensive curriculum drawing upon the behavioural sciences). The curriculum famously aimed to address three questions:

What is uniquely human about human beings? How did they get that way? How could they be made more so? (Bruner 1976: 74)

The project involved a number of young researchers, including Howard Gardner , who subsequently have made an impact on educational thinking and practice. MACOS was attacked by conservatives (especially the cross-cultural nature of the materials). It was also difficult to implement – requiring a degree of sophistication and learning on the part of teachers, and ability and motivation on the part of students. The educational tide had begun to move away from more liberal and progressive thinkers like Jerome Bruner.

In the 1960s Jerome Bruner developed a theory of cognitive growth. His approach (in contrast to Piaget) looked to environmental and experiential factors. Bruner suggested that intellectual ability developed in stages through step-by-step changes in how the mind is used. Bruner’s thinking became increasingly influenced by writers like Lev Vygotsky and he began to be critical of the intrapersonal focus he had taken, and the lack of attention paid to social and political context. In the early 1970s Bruner left Harvard to teach for several years at the university of Oxford. There he continued his research into questions of agency in infants and began a series of explorations of children’s language. He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in 1979 and then, two years later, joined the faculty of the new School for Social Research in New York City. He became critical of the ‘cognitive revolution’ and began to argue for the building of a cultural psychology. This ‘cultural turn’ was then reflected in his work on education – most especially in his 1996 book: The Culture of Education .

The process of education

The Process of Education (1960) was a landmark text. It had a direct impact on policy formation in the United States and influenced the thinking and orientation of a wide group of teachers and scholars, Its view of children as active problem-solvers who are ready to explore ‘difficult’ subjects while being out of step with the dominant view in education at that time, struck a chord with many. ‘It was a surprise’, Jerome Bruner was later to write (in the preface to the 1977 edition), that a book expressing so structuralist a view of knowledge and so intuitionist an approach to the process of knowing should attract so much attention in America, where empiricism had long been the dominant voice and ‘learning theory’ its amplifier’ ( ibid. : vii).

Four key themes emerge out of the work around The Process of Education (1960: 11-16):

The role of structure in learning and how it may be made central in teaching . The approach taken should be a practical one. ‘The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer… If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible’ ( ibid .: 12).

Readiness for learning . Here the argument is that schools have wasted a great deal of people’s time by postponing the teaching of important areas because they are deemed ‘too difficult’.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. ( ibid. : 33)

This notion underpins the idea of the spiral curriculum – ‘A curriculum as it develops should revisit this basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them’ ( ibid. : 13).

Intuitive and analytical thinking . Intuition (‘the intellectual technique of arriving and plausible but tentative formulations without going through the analytical steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions’ ibid. : 13) is a much neglected but essential feature of productive thinking. Here Bruner notes how experts in different fields appear ‘to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution to a problem’ ( ibid. : 62) – a phenomenon that Donald Schön was to explore some years later – and looked to how teachers and schools might create the conditions for intuition to flourish.

Motives for learning . ‘Ideally’, Jerome Bruner writes, interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage’ ( ibid. : 14). In an age of increasing spectatorship, ‘motives for learning must be kept from going passive… they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression’ ( ibid. : 80).

Bruner was to write two ‘postscripts’ to The Process of Education : Towards a theory of instruction (1966) and The Relevance of Education (1971). In these books Bruner ‘put forth his evolving ideas about the ways in which instruction actually affects the mental models of the world that students construct, elaborate on and transform’ (Gardner 2001: 93). In the first book the various essays deal with matters such as patterns of growth, the will to learn, and on making and judging (including some helpful material around evaluation). Two essays are of particular interest – his reflections on MACOS (see above), and his ‘notes on a theory of instruction’. The latter essay makes the case for taking into account questions of predisposition, structure, sequence, and reinforcement in preparing curricula and programmes. He makes the case for education as a knowledge-getting process:

To instruct someone… is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind. Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process not a product. (1966: 72)

The essays in The Relevance of Education (1971) apply his theories to infant development.

The culture of education

Jerome Bruner’s reflections on education in The Culture of Education (1996) show the impact of the changes in his thinking since the 1960s. He now placed his work within a thorough appreciation of culture: ‘culture shapes the mind… it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of our selves and our powers’ ( ibid. : x). This orientation ‘presupposes that human mental activity is neither solo nor conducted unassisted, even when it goes on “inside the head” ( ibid. : xi). It also takes Bruner well beyond the confines of schooling.

Jerome S. Bruner has had a profound effect on education – and upon those researchers and students he has worked with. Howard Gardner has commented:

Jerome Bruner is not merely one of the foremost educational thinkers of the era; he is also an inspired learner and teacher. His infectious curiosity inspires all who are not completely jaded. Individuals of every age and background are invited to join in. Logical analyses, technical dissertations, rich and wide knowledge of diverse subject matters, asides to an ever wider orbit of information, intuitive leaps, pregnant enigmas pour forth from his indefatigable mouth and pen. In his words, ‘Intellectual activity is anywhere and everywhere, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom’. To those who know him, Bruner remains the Compleat Educator in the flesh… (Gardner 2001: 94)

To be completed

Paulo Freire: An educator of the present and the future

Research note
Published: 22 April 2024

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Afonso Celso Scocuglia ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1002-5047 1

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This research note is based on the premise that Paulo Freire is an educator of the present and the future. Contrary to research that has confined him to the past, the author emphasises the construction of Freire’s thought-action in five historical periods, noting the timeliness and foresight of his ideas for the 21st century. From his first books ( Educação e atualidade brasileira [1959] and Educação como prática da liberdade [1965]) to the last ones published during his lifetime ( Pedagogia da esperança: um reencontro com a Pedagogia do oprimido [1992] and Pedagogia da Autonomia [1996]), the author of this research note discerns reconstructions of concepts, arguments and paradigms that bring Freire up to date and continue to impact educators and specialists around the world. The emphasis, here, is on the inseparability between education and politics and his radical humanism as central axes of his pedagogy. The relevance of dialogic-communicative action in the learning process and the valuing of the learners’ knowledge as the starting point for elaborated knowledge enhance the choice of freedom, autonomy and democracy. Freire’s defence of the pedagogy of the question and research against the pedagogy of belief and the deposit of knowledge, among other crucial proposals, remain current and are forward-looking. These and other theses, articles, speeches, courses and works recorded over 50 years of Freire’s career (1947–1997) justify his inclusion today among the most-cited thinkers in the human sciences, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed among the 100 most-read books in the English language. After the centenary of Paulo Freire’s birth (2021), references to his political-pedagogical legacy (both practical and theoretical) continue to grow, encourage dialogue with other current thinkers and reaffirm his hope for the work of educators of the present and the future.

Paulo Freire : un pédagogue du présent et du futur – La présente note de recherche part de l’idée que Paulo Freire est un pédagogue du présent et du futur. Contrairement à la recherche qui a relégué Freire au passé, l’auteur met en relief l’élaboration de sa pensée-action en cinq périodes historiques et fait remarquer l’opportunité et le caractère prospectif de ses idées pour le 21 e siècle. Dans l’œuvre de Freire, de ses premiers ouvrages ( Educação e atualidade brasileira [1959] et Educação como prática da liberdade [1965]) aux derniers publiés de son vivant ( Pedagogia da esperança: um reencontro com a Pedagogia do oprimido [1992] et Pedagogia da Autonomia [1996]), l’auteur de la présente note de recherche distingue des restructurations de concepts, de raisonnements et de paradigmes qui font de Freire un auteur d’actualité qui exerce toujours une influence sur les enseignants et les spécialistes du monde entier. Il insiste ici sur l’indissociabilité de l’éducation et de la politique, et sur son humanisme radical, les axes centraux de sa pédagogie. La pertinence de l’action dialogique et communicative dans le processus d’apprentissage et la valorisation du savoir des apprenants comme point de départ pour acquérir des connaissances élaborées encouragent à faire le choix de la liberté, de l’autonomie et de la démocratie. Défendre la pédagogie du questionnement et de la recherche, en refusant par-là la pédagogie de la croyance et le dépôt de savoir, fait partie des recommandations cruciales de Freire, aujourd’hui encore d’une actualité tournée vers l’avenir. Celles-ci ainsi que d’autres thèses, articles, discours, ouvrages et cours, fruits d’une carrière longue de plus de 50 ans (1947-1997) justifient que l’on inclue Freire parmi les intellectuels les plus cités dans les sciences humaines et que l’on classe la Pédagogie des opprimés parmi les 100 ouvrages les plus lus en anglais. Après le centième anniversaire de la naissance de Paulo Freire (en 2021), les références à son héritage politico-pédagogique (tant pratique que théorique) continuent de se multiplier, encourageant le dialogue avec d’autres intellectuels contemporains et réaffirmant l’espoir que Freire nourrissait à l’égard du travail des enseignants d’aujourd’hui et de demain.

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The arguments discussed in this research note are elaborated in more detail in my published work indicated throughout the text and listed in the bibliography at the end.

In addition to these established themes, the 2nd International Meeting of the Paulo Freire Forum, held 29 March–1 April 2000 at the University of Bologna, focused on “The Paulo Freire Method and New Technologies”. Its discussions formed a precursor to a new set of contributions to the body of Freire-related literature which introduced the issue of digital tools and the challenges of education. These contributions are underpinned by Freire’s sense of dialogue and collectivism, as opposed to exacerbated individualism, and the importance he always attached to horizontal educator–student relationships. Adult education, for example, would struggle if the “digital age” gave rise to even more individualism, the absence of greater human interaction and the existential “cancellation” of adult education practitioners. It is essential to emphasise that Freire’s approach and the Freirean legacy are committed to all digital learning tools which encourage dialogue, critical awareness, learners’ raison d’être as the driving force behind social-collective knowledge, and respect for the civil, social and political rights that make up democracy and cognitive justice.

A significant part of the research into Paulo Freire’s work is limited to reading Education: The Practice of Freedom (Freire 1965 , 1976 ) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 1974 [1968], 1970 ). These books are considered as encompassing the totality of Freire, as if the author had not subsequently further developed and modified his concepts and themes. In this way, they situate Freire in the 1960s, considering him part of the “dead” past and not part of the history of education today. In this sense, his reconsiderations based on his experiences in Africa and throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are not emphasised or even taken into account. Some examples of these reconsiderations which are worth engaging with can be found in the book Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire and Freire 1992 , 1994 ). The subtitle of the Brazilian edition uses the term “ um reencontro ” [a re-encounter]. So why “re-encounter” his most widely read book? Because Freire (almost 25 years after publishing Pedagogy of the Oppressed ) reconsidered various ideas from the 1960s, working with other concepts and new themes included in what he called “progressive postmodernity”. It is precisely this foresighted quality of Freire’s critical review of his own ideas which prompts me to defend the need to read Freire as a whole and not just in terms of his early works, as this would trap him in the past and disregard his relevant presence today and in the future. It is not a question of disregarding his early writings, but rather of considering them as part of a long trajectory (50 years, 1947–1997), during which various stages of his practical-theoretical production are evident. This is discussed in greater detail in my book Paulo Freire na história da educação do tempo presente [Paulo Freire in the history of education today] (Scocuglia 2006 ).

Members of this movement propagated their ideas for educational transformation in their Manifesto of the Pioneers of New Education (Azevedo et al. 2006 [1932]).

This proposal, entitled “ Conscientização e Alfabetização – uma Nova Visão do Processo ” [Awareness and literacy: A new vision of the process] was published as the first item in the April–June issue of the University of Recife’s journal Estudos Universitários (Freire 1963 ), followed by articles by Jarbas Maciel and Aurenice Cardoso, among others.

In the same issue of Estudos Universitários (founded by Freire), Jarbas Maciel, a member of the team of the Cultural Extension Service (also founded by Freire) at the University of Recife (CES-UR), explained that “[l]iteracy should be – and is – a link in a long chain of stages, no longer a method for literacy but a system of integral and fundamental education. Thus, alongside the Paulo Freire Adult Literacy Method, we saw the Paulo Freire Education System emerge, whose successive stages – with the exception of the current adult literacy stage – are already beginning to be formulated and, some of them, applied experimentally, leading smoothly to an authentic and coherent People’s University” (Maciel 1963 , p. 26; translated for the purposes of this research note). Briefly, the six stages Freire proposes are: (1) facilitating child literacy; (2) facilitating adult literacy; (3) piloting a rapid primary school-level literacy cycle; (4) developing cultural extension (at popular, secondary, pre-university and university levels) (5) creating an Institute of Human Sciences at the University of Recife; and (6) creating a Centre of International Studies at the University of Recife (ibid., pp. 26–28).

In particular, I would like to highlight Pedagogy of Indignation (Freire 2000 , 2004 ), Pedagogy of Solidarity (Freire et al. 2009 , 2014 ), Daring to dream: Toward a pedagogy of the unfinished (Freire and Freire 2001 , 2007 ), Pedagogia da tolerância [Pedagogy of tolerance] (Freire and Freire 2005 ) and Pedagogy of Commitment: Latin America and Popular Education (Freire and Freire 2018 , Freire 2014 ).

The acronym IDAC derives from the institution’s French name “ Institut d’action culturelle ”. Freire founded IDAC as a nonprofit organisation in Geneva under Swiss law in 1971 with other Brazilian exiles, including Claudius Ceccon, Miguel Darcy de Oliveira and Rosiska Darcy de Oliveria. IDAC was affiliated to the WCC and served as a platform for dialogue between Freire’s ideas and experiences and other socio-educational realities.

According to Elliot Green, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, who conducted a survey via Google Scholar, Paulo Freire is the third-most-cited thinker in the social/human sciences, preceded only by Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996, an American historian and philosopher of science) and Everett Rogers (1931–2004, an American sociologist) (Green 2016 ).

Translator’s note: In Portuguese, the original concept is “ amorosidade ”, which can also be translated as “amorosity” or “caring empathy”.

Learning: The treasure within (Delors et al. 1996 ) was published in Brazil as Educação – um tesouro a descobrir (Delors et al. 1998 ).

Ever since he put forward the proposals (Freire 1963 ) which gave rise to what became known as the “Paulo Freire Method” of adult literacy, Freire advocated for “research into the learners’ vocabulary” and learning from the culture, words and everyday issues of their lives. This emphasis is present in Education as the Practice of Freedom (Freire 1965 , 1976 ) and became a constant throughout his subsequent work. Freire went on to emphasise problematising (and therefore questioning and researching) and dialogical education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed ( 1974 [1968], 1970 ). In turn, the published transcription (“talking book”) of his conversation with Antonio Faundez, Learning to question: A pedagogy of liberation (Freire and Faundez 1985 , 1989 ), is explicit in this sense. In this book, Freire attacks the pedagogy of the answer (and the practice of “banking” education) as a vertical pedagogy that seeks to transmit/deposit knowledge. Subverting this top-down approach, Freire advocates for investing instead in the pedagogy of the question, of research – in short, in problematisation. Furthermore, the need for educators to be researchers in everyday school/education settings, without separating the pedagogical/educational processes from research (which feeds back into these processes), is repeated by Freire right up into his last writings, for example in Pedagogia da autonomia [Pedagogy of autonomy] (Freire 1996 ). For further discussion, see my book A teoria só tem utilidade se melhorar a prática educativa: as propostas de Paulo Freire [Theory is only useful if it improves educational practice: Paulo Freire’s proposals] (Scocuglia 2013 ).

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Delors, J., Mufti, I.A., … & Nanzhao, Z. (1996). Learning: The treasure within. Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century. Paris: UNESCO.

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Freire, P., & Freire, A. M. A. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the oppressed. Transl. R. R. Barr. New York: Continuum.

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Acknowledgement

The author wrote this research note in Portuguese. The guest editors are very grateful to Timothy Ireland for translating it into English for the purposes of this special issue.

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Scocuglia, A.C. Paulo Freire: An educator of the present and the future. Int Rev Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-024-10083-9

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Chapter 19 – How Can Education Promote Social Progress?

Coordinating Lead Authors : [1] Christiane Spiel, Rob Reich

Lead Authors : [2] Marius Busemeyer, Nico Cloete, Gili Drori, Lorenz Lassnigg, Barbara Schober, Simon Schwartzman, Michele Schweisfurth, Suman Verma

Contributing Authors : [3] Bilal Bakarat

Word count: 20,411

Abstract : [Abstract 200 words]

There are many reasons to believe that increased educational opportunity and achievement lead to social progress. The aim of this chapter is to examine how educatıon can promote social progress. Answering this question is not straightforward. Education has multiple aims, and the way in which education is provided – educational governance, educational institutions, educators, curriculum, and pedagogy – all matter a great deal. We cover each of these topics in this chapter, looking at trends across the globe and seeking ascertain what scholars know about better and worse forms of educational provision.

To understand the connection between education and social progress, we distinguish among four distinct aims of education: economic , civic , humanistic , and equity promotion .

Each of these goals can be understood from an individual and collective perspective.

Education develops productive skills, and this is valuable for the individual, to advance in the labor market and for society, to improve and maintain prosperity and compete in a globalized economy.
Education develops civic skills, and this is valuable for the individual, to allow for meaningful participation in civil society and political life, and for society, to benefit from an informed and engaged citizenship.
Education develops human talents and interests, and this is valuable for the individual, allowing for personal flourishing, and for society, since the expansion of knowledge and human achievement are valuable for their own sake.
Education can be a vehicle for equity and greater social inclusion, or when absent, poorly delivered or unfairly distributed, a vehicle for injustice and greater social exclusion.

These distinct purposes of education connect in multiple ways to the definition of social progress provided in chapter 2. Some of these connections are obvious. The basic values of human progress include well-being, freedom, solidarity, social relations, esteem and recognition, and cultural goods. The humanistic purpose – developing human talents and interests – facilitates well-being (some might say actually constitutes well-being), cultivates capacities essential to freedom, promotes esteem and recognition, and contributes to cultural goods. The civic purpose – developing civic skills and dispositions – help establish the basis of social relations, develop bonds of solidarity among citizens, and encourage esteem and recognition. And insofar as education is a vehicle for equity and social inclusion, it is an essential mechanism for nearly every value on the list.

Overall, education is about the unleashing of human capabilities: economic, civic, and humanistic. When education is successful, it enables individuals not merely to exercise their agency in participating in economic, civic, and humanistic activity but also to shape or re-shape economic, civic, and humanistic life. When we think about the relationship between education and justice, we reach two additional conclusions. First, justice demands that every individual be afforded equitable educational opportunities. Second, the provision of educational opportunity, across all four goals, is essential to social progress and the advancement of justice. This includes access to education, experiences within it, and outcomes from it.

In the first part of the chapter, we present a broad view of education in the world today, showing how formal education has expanded in the last decades, and emphasizing how it relates to citizenship, growing opportunities for social mobility, economic development and equity. We take stock of what has been achieved and is still to be done to improve access to quality education in the poorer parts of the word, through the Sustainable Developed Goals fostered by global community, which is mostly concerned with initial and mandatory education; and take a closer look at the special roles played by vocational and tertiary education. Each of these dimensions are subject to controversies, which we try to take into account, while emphasis the overall positive effects of education for social progress.

The crucial role education can play in promoting social progress obviously depends on the governance of education, on educational institutions and educators, as well as on the content and pedagogy of education. Consequently, it is necessary to consider at least three levels of effects, which are strongly interconnected: the level of concrete instruction in class (microlevel). Educators are the main actors at this level; the level of institutions (schools, pre-schools, kindergartens, universities, etc.; the mesolevel). Here principals have a substantial influence; and the level of the educational system (the macrolevel). Educational policymakers and authorities are the central actors here.

In the second part of the chapter we discuss facilitators and barriers to education as a means for social progress in three subsections. The first subsection focuses on governance of education and therefore the macrolevel. Here we discuss how modes of governance affect the potential of education to contribute to social progress. The second subsection targets institutions and educators. That means it focuses the meso- and microlevel. This subsection describes characteristics of successful educational institutions and competencies educators and principals should have to contribute to the four goals of education. The third and final subsection focuses on content of education and pedagogy and targets all three levels. Concretely, it discusses the core curriculum for the 21st century and especially identity formation as an important basic theme in education, as well as two important trends in pedagogy: learner-centred education and the role of technology. All three subsections provide final recommendations.

A final cautionary note: Education can be studied from a vast array of disciplinary approaches, the issues and priorities for education policies vary enormously among developed and developing societies and social groups, different cultural contexts and philosophical orientations, and are often controversial. This chapter cannot expect account for this enormous variety, nor gloss over the different and opposing views that may exist. It can, however, provide a broad view of the relevance of education for social progress, what has been achieved, what are the pending issues in different contexts, and identify some of the main issues raised by the social sciences to make education more accessible and meaningful for all.

1. Introduction

The twentieth century witnessed a major growth in the provision of educational opportunity across the globe, which is a good thing. Landmark multinational agreements such as the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights and the more recent United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) put forward a right for all children to be educated.

There are many reasons to believe that increased educational opportunity and achievement lead to social progress. The aim of this chapter is to examine how can educatıon promote social progress.

Answering this question is not straightforward. Education has multiple aims, and the way in which education is provided – educational governance, educational institutions and educators, curriculum, and pedagogy – all matter a great deal. We will cover each of these topics in this chapter, looking at trends across the globe and seeking ascertain what scholars know about better and worse forms of educational provision.

To understand the connection between education and social progress, we must first distinguish among four distinct aims of education: economic , civic , humanistic , and equity promotion .

Education develops civic skills, and this is valuable for the individual, to allow for meaningful participation in civil society and political life, and for society, to benefit from an informed and engaged citizenship.

The definition of social progress also includes a list of basic principles. Once again, there are multiple connections to the distinct purposes of education. The most obvious connection is the identification of “educating and supporting citizens” as a basic principle. Here education is defended mainly for its essential civic role, preparing children for their participation in political life and in civil society and to assume the responsibilities of citizenship.

Two additional principles are important to mention, basic rights and distributive justice. Various United Nations declarations consider primary and secondary education as a basic right that must be guaranteed to every child. And since educational opportunity is not something that an individual can provide on his or her own, we must consider it within the scope of distributive justice. The task of a theory of distributive justice is to identify what principle or principles should structure the distribution of benefits and burdens in a society and to identify to whom -- what people or class of persons -- these benefits and burdens are to be distributed. The provision of schooling is a paradigmatic example of a good that is distributed in some manner or another by virtually every society. So to address the question of education as an important dimension of measuring social progress is to explore the question of how it should be distributed to people.

Overall, education is about the unleashing of human capabilities: economic, civic, and humanistic. When education is successful, it enables individuals not merely to exercise their agency in participating in economic, civic, and humanistic activity but also to shape or re-shape economic, civic, and humanistic life. Education for professional skills not merely prepares people for the workforce; it shapes the labor market itself. Education for citizenship not merely prepares people to participate in civic and political life; it enables social participation that shape political institutions. Education for human talents not merely develops the vast domain of human potential; it advances humanity’s storehouse of knowledge and cultural achievement.

When we think about the relationship between education and justice, we reach two additional conclusions.

First, justice demands that every individual be afforded equitable educational opportunities.

Second, the provision of educational opportunity, across all four goals, is essential to social progress and the advancement of justice. This includes access to education, experiences within it, and outcomes from it.

When we observe education across the world today, we see two clear patterns. First, educational opportunity is not everywhere provided to all. Equity is routinely violated. Second, educational policies often weight the economic purpose of schooling with comparatively little attention paid to civic and humanistic aims. Discussion of these observations constitutes the major part of the remainder of this chapter.

The chapter has three further sections. In section 2, we take stock of current conditions and challenges in educational provision and distribution on a global scale. In section 3, we consider facilitators and barriers to education as a means to social progress. We examine here three separate domains: (1) governance of education; (2) institutions and educators; and (3) content and pedagogy. In section 4 we provide our conclusions and recommendations.

2. Current conditions and challenges

In this section, we present a broad view of education in the world today, showing how formal education has expanded in the last decades, and emphasizing how it relates to citizenship, growing opportunities for social mobility, economic development and equity. We take stock of what has been achieved and is still to be done to improve access to quality education in the poorer parts of the word, through the Sustainable Developed Goals fostered by global community, which is mostly concerned with initial and mandatory education; and take a closer look at the special roles played by vocational and tertiary education. Each of these dimensions are subject to controversies, which we try to take into account, while emphasis the overall positive effects of education for social progress.

2.1 Education and social progress

Culture, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits" (Tylor 1870) is the most distinctive element of human societies, and in its broadest sense education is the process of facilitating learning or the acquisition of culture. Education takes place informally, starting with the interaction of children with their parents and relatives, but becomes to a large extent formal in complex societies, as it is codified (in primers, manuals, catechisms, handbooks) and provided by specialized institutions (churches, schools, universities, professional guilds, academies) according to specific methods (lecturing, memorization, demonstration, interpretation, collaboration, practice, experimentation).

In most societies, education is a valued asset: more education is expected to enhance specific dimensions of culture (religious beliefs, citizenship, professional skills, humanistic values, critical thinking), fostered by different institutions and sought by individuals and families as a means of achieving or securing social and economic standing and prestige. As the notion of social progress becomes entrenched, more and better education becomes considered one of its main instruments.

The expansion of formal education, which followed the emergence of the nation state and the modern economy, is one of the most visible indicators of social progress. Until the early 19th century, advanced learning was limited to a small elite of priests, bureaucrats and specialists, provided by universities and other prestigious learning centers, usually associated with the churches. The notion that all persons should be able to read the sacred books was part of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, but was never fully practiced and mostly limited to men (Hanna 2007, Vincent 2000, Gawthrop and Strauss 1984, Botticini and Eckstein 2012). This notion was adapted and spread out by the modern, industrialized Western nation states, and exported to some degree to their colonies and areas of influence. By the end of the 19th Century, the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand had already reached universal schooling, followed closely by Northern Europe. In Asia, expansion of primary education started in Japan, followed later by Taiwan, Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. In Latin American and Africa, it expanded first in areas with strong European immigration, such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Southern Brazil, as well as in South Africa and Zimbabwe (Benavot and Riddle 1988).

2.2 Education and citizenship

The initial drive for the expansion of public education in the modern era was a concern for the need to imbue the population with the knowledge, values and habits of citizenship. Thomas Jefferson believed that “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.” In Latin America, Andres Bello and Domingo Sarmiento established the first public school systems in the 1840s, arguing for the importance of public education for nation building and economic well-being (Jaksic 2006). The role of the schools, as expressed by Émile Durkheim in France, was to make the student to understand his country and his times, to make him feel his responsibilities, to initiate him into life and thus to prepare him to take his part in the collective tasks awaiting him, providing a link between the private life in the family and the public life in society; a fully educated citizen should be disciplined, attached to his social group, and endowed with autonomy and self-determination, provided by rationality (Durkheim 1922, Wesselingh 2002, Nisbet 1965). Sociologists developed the concepts of civic culture, social cohesion, social trust and social capital as key ingredients for the proper functioning of modern democracies and complex economies almond (Almond and Verba 1963, Putnam 2001, 2002, Harrison and Huntington 2000, Lipset 1960). Reactions to the conservative tone of the Durkheimian tradition, in the context of a changing world, led to alternative pedagogical approaches putting more emphasis on critical thinking, communitarian values, and individual liberation and self-determination (Peterson 2011, Biesta, De Bie, and Wildemeersch 2014, Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett 2007, Apple 1996, Freire 1970, Dalton and Welzel 2014).

Whether access to formal schooling actually develops citizenship, or any other goal of education, is an entirely different question. In the 1990s, the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement carried on a comparative survey of civic education in 38 countries, assessing to which extent 14-year-old students gained the knowledge, engagement and attitudes expected from citizenship in a modern society. One of their findings was that "in most countries, young people's views of political parties are relatively negative. In place of giving allegiance to parties and to what many perceive as hierarchical political organizations ruled by an older generation, they are instead gravitating to social movements as the arenas in which good citizenship can be manifested" (Torney-Purta et al. 2001 p. 189); it shows that the role of formal education to shape values and social participation is smaller than most educators would like it to be.

2.3 Expansion and increased access

In the last century, and especially after World War II, access to formal education expanded dramatically. In the same period, governments shifted their priorities from education for citizenship to education for productivity, with great consequence.

In 1950, about 47% of the children aged 5-14 in the world were enrolled in some kind of school. In 2010, 89.1% of the children were, varying from 98.7% in the European Union to 84.2% in the Middle East. Secondary education, which used to be mostly a preparatory stage for the universities, became part of the regular school system, starting with the "high school movement" in the United States and spreading later to Europe and other countries. Worldwide, the number of secondary school students went from 187 to 545 million between 1970 and 1910, a threefold growth, capturing 63% of the relevant age group worldwide. Higher education, once limited to a tiny elite for specialized universities, became a mass phenomenon in the second half of the 20th century, reaching 32 million students worldwide in 1970 and 182 million in 2010. (World Bank 2015, Trow 2000, Schwartzman, Pinheiro, and Pillay 2015, Schofer and Meyer 2005, Goldin and Katz 1997).

This extraordinary expansion of education resulted from a combination of factors. On the supply side, for the modern nation states, public education was considered a tool for social cohesion and citizenship, and a means to develop the human resources necessary for running the state and enhancing the economy. Religious organizations and churches continued to participate strongly in education, sometimes in partnership and sometimes in dispute with the nation states. Business sectors also got involved, either creating their own systems of vocational education or participating in the shaping of education policies.

It was also a response to expanding aspirations. For a growing number of persons, access to education was perceived as a channel for social mobility. More than a tool for access to public and private jobs, education came to be perceived as an individual right, expected to pave the way for other forms of participation, including the benefits of individual choice, good employment and income, as well as social prestige. After World War II, the right to education was enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and embodied in the work of international organizations such as UNESCO, that not only spread the gospel of expanding education, but also helped the countries to organize their school systems. In 1990 the Jomtien World Conference on Education for All set the target to provide free and compulsory primary education for all children in the world, with the financial and technical support of public and private donors. This was inscribed through UN Millennium Development Goal 2, which aimed to achieve universal completion of a full cycle of primary education by 2015, and by the new Sustainable Development Goal 4, with the headline ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’ Since the 1990s, different institutions started to implement worldwide assessments of student achievement in language, mathematics and science, with the assumption that, beyond the local languages and cultural traditions, all persons in the world were supposed to acquire the same set of broad cognitive and also non-cognitive competencies, required for full citizenship in modern societies (Spring 2008, Kautz et al. 2014a, OECD 2004, Mullis et al. 2003).

2.4 Education and the economy

As education expanded, the amount of public and private investments in education increased everywhere, reaching now between 4 and 10% of GDP in most countries.

The broad links between education and productivity are clear, but, when education keeps expanding and the economy changes or stagnates, millions of educated persons find themselves without jobs, and uncertain of their places in society. The expansion of education has been much more rapid and intense than the expansion of the economy and the reduction of social inequality, leading to issues in the global north of "over education" or "education surplus", in which persons with formal qualifications cannot find jobs or have to work in activities below their expectations, and countries that invest heavily in the expansion of education without reaping its expected benefits (Hersch 1991). One explanation is that, beyond its value in terms of skills and competencies, formal education is also a "positional good", meaning that individual benefits depend on one's position within the distribution of educational access and attainment, which results in intense pressure and competition for more education and credentials, regardless of the actual requirements or possibilities of the job market (Brighouse and Swift 2006, Brown 2003, Hollis 1982)

Education systems are stratified in terms of the prestige and opportunities provided by different types of schools and universities, and access and achievement are strongly correlated with the social conditions of the students and their families, leading some authors to argue that the main role of education is to reinforce existing social inequalities and the monopolies of social status through the administration of credentials (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970, Collins 1979, Wolf 2002). Even rich economies, such as the United States, cannot eliminate the achievement and opportunity gaps related to race and poverty, and the quality of most education in low income countries is extremely low by international standards, leading to the creation of small segments of highly selective schools for the upper classes (Coleman 1966, Jencks and Phillips 1998).

Economists coined the expression "human capital" to refer to their interpretation of education as a factor of production. Since the pioneering work of Schultz, Becker and Mincer, empirical research has shown again and again that individual investments in education leads to higher income, and that countries that expand and improve the quality of education are more likely to develop their economy (Becker 1973, Schultz 1970, Mincer 1974).

If education is an economic investment, it should be possible to measure its rate of return, both for individuals and for societies, and use this data to establish priorities in education policies, for instance by comparing the returns of investment in primary, secondary or higher education, as advocated by the World Bank until the 1990s and widely used since then (Leslie 1990, Psacharopoulos 1994). Thus, a recent study found that, across 140 countries, there has been a significant shift in the rate of private (individual) returns to education. Returns to schooling have declined from the early 1980s to post-2011 (from 13% to around 10%) and they ascribe this mainly to the unprecedented increase in schooling (three more years globally). The study also found that, with the exception of high-income economies, primary education has higher returns than secondary education and that tertiary education has the highest returns, in spite of the large increase in the number of students and graduates, with sub-Saharan Africa with the highest rates of return in the world ( (21% vs. 14.6%) (Montenegro and Patrinos 2014).

In spite of its intriguing finds, the use of rates of return for establishing priorities and assessing the quality of investments in education is controversial. The rates of return are calculated from the wages the individuals get in their life-time, compared with their investments to complete their education. In most countries, education is subsidized with public resources, and the measurement of the social benefits of these are usually calculated as private returns net of public costs. In an extensive discussion of the approach, British sociologist Alison Wolf argues that “wages reflect a great deal more than productivity. The amount paid to different groups and different individuals also depend heavily on the way in which a society is organized overall: how it runs services such as health and education; how much its public and civic culture values equality; how professionals’ fees are regulated” (Wolf 2002). The Mincer model used to measure rates of return has also been questioned by economists, who have shown that its general assumptions are untenable (Heckman, Lochner, and Todd 2006).

There are important differences in the ways the labor market is organized and relates to the education sector, depending in part on whether the countries have a tradition of market coordination or liberalization, and how they react to the technological changes related to deindustrialization and the expansion of the services sector (Thelen 2007, 2012). In the former Soviet Union, education was tightly linked to the productive sector and unemployment by definition did not exist, but this arrangement proved to be inefficient and did not survive the opening of the economy (Froumin and Kouzminov 2015, Soltys 1997). A usual pattern is for countries to protect the better organized sectors of the market with the legal benefits of job stability and unemployment benefits, while allowing other parts of the labor market to remain unprotected, with low salaries, in the "informal" economy or excluded from the labor market altogether, establishing segmented job markets enforced by legal and sometimes ethnic or social barriers (Carnoy 1978, Wilkinson 2013).

When the labor market is regulated, it also extends this regulation to education. A classic example is the link between the industrial sector and the apprenticeship system in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and the role played by the medical and legal corporations in defining the numbers, duration, resources and content of education in their respective careers, while other may be left unattended and unfunded (Rosenbaum 2001). In some countries, the regulation and protection of the job and professional markets and of education may be part of a broader political consensus on the values of social equity, implemented by the prevailing political parties; in other, the segmentation of the job market may derive from the political power of specific professional end economic groups.

2.5 Inequality

In its simplest form, inequality in education can be understood by measuring what ‘good education’ and ‘poor education’ are and how this is distributed across the population as a whole. This can then be debated through concepts such as ‘equality of outcomes’ and ‘equality of opportunity’. Schmidt and McKnight (2012) suggest that “the ultimate test of an educational system is whether it makes sure that every student, whatever their background, is exposed to the content they need to compete in today’s society”. But the very fact of having been admitted to school cannot be taken to represent the same opportunity to all in the classroom, as the burden to compensate for a home disadvantage is then placed on the student. This perspective complements the position that grade attainment (completing more and more grades) will not improve educational outcomes or downstream income earnings if little learning happens per grade. More schooling is therefore not necessarily equal to a better education.

Inequality is impacted by equity in access to distinct forms/types of schooling (public fee-paying, public no fee-paying, self-funded private or grant-funded private schools); by equity in provision in respect to dosage (class size, student-teacher ratios, teaching and learning time, ability to learn at home, language choice, technology, infrastructure); and by equity in quality (teaching standards, pedagogical methodology, materials, curriculum and curriculum coverage). More schooling does not automatically make a better education. Thus, reducing inequality does not necessarily correlate with universal enrolment (more children in schools) but in addressing the real challenge of how to ensure that the access to schools is matched by real learning happening in each classroom. It is therefore not necessarily about equalising resources, but rather concern for the core of schooling; that is, offering instruction in and coverage of academic content by teachers in a way that is meaningful to students. Educational governance, institutions (schools) and educators, curriculum and pedagogy – the concerns of the following section – all matter a great deal. Where students from poor or marginalised communities are exposed to less rigorous content or to a less engaging pedagogical method, the risk of inequality in the opportunity to learn is high. In other words, educational equality of opportunity (in the wide sense) of outcomes is necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving equity.

Some countries have developed highly differentiated systems, with general and vocation and university and non-university institutions, in an effort to respond to the perceived needs of the economy, but also to protect the traditional education institutions from the pressures of mass enrollments.

Piketty (2014) pairs climate change with educational access as two of the greatest challenges to the human race. Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (ibid.: 568). Furthermore, he argues that the best way to reduce inequality and increase “the overall growth of the economy is to invest in education” (ibid.: 307-308). To maintain a competitive edge in a rapidly transforming knowledge economy, countries need to invest more in quality education. Not even minimum wage schedules can “multiply wages by factors of five or ten: to achieve that level of progress, education and technology are the decisive factors” (ibid.: 313).

With a clear link between education and high private returns to investment, particularly at the tertiary level, there is a rational assumption – stronger in low-income than in high-income countries – that education in general and higher education in particular is the route out of poverty. For this constituency, the main aim of education is not economic development as such but poverty reduction and social mobility.

Access to tertiary education is regarded by the ‘haves’ as a means to maintaining privilege, and by the ‘have‐nots’ as a means of getting out of poverty. In the 1970s in the US, 10% of students from the lowest income quintile went to university in contrast to 40-50% from quintiles four and five. By 2010, still only 10% of quintile one went to university, but for quintiles four and five the percentage had increased to 80-90%. Higher education in the US has thus become part of the mechanism for maintaining privilege. Piketty points out that in the US, the level of wage inequality results directly from a failure to invest sufficiently in higher education. High tuition at both public and private universities keeps many individuals from receiving the training needed to shrink wage inequality and to make the country more equal and competitive globally. Given such trends, Piketty anticipates that social mobility will decline even further in the future as income increasingly determines access to American higher education.

2.6 The Millennium Goals of Education

For low income countries, where access to minimum levels of education has still not been achieved, the global consensus and targeted support for the Millennium Development Goals established in 2000 by the United Nations meant considerable progress was made, with numbers of out-of-school children dropping from approximately 115 to 57 million between 1999 and 2012. Among all regions, South Asia experienced the most accelerated progress. However, the rate of progress has significantly stagnated since 2007, with virtually no change in the global rate of number of out of school children (OOSC), while the percentage of OOSC in conflict-affected countries has increased. Almost 30% of low-and middle-income countries are off-track to meet goal of universal primary education and more than 20% are off-track to meet goal of gender parity (World Bank, 2012). Those remaining out of school are among the most disadvantaged: children in conflict-affected countries; children with disabilities; and children from the poorest families, where even apparently ‘free’ education comes with opportunity costs. In the majority of countries with data, disparities by wealth in primary school attendance have narrowed – with the greatest gains among children from the poorest quintile. However, in a number of countries, the wealth gap remains large, and disadvantages based on gender, disability and other markers persist. For instance, in West and Central Africa, children of primary school age from the poorest quintile are on average six times more likely to be out of school as those from the richest. Disparities are also seen in learning outcomes.

Progress was also made toward gender parity in terms of primary school enrolment, with approximately 70% of countries reaching this quantitative goal, but local cultural perspectives on the value of education to girls in some contexts have also led to exclusion. Providing girls with an education helps break the cycle of poverty: educated women are less likely to marry early; less likely to die in childbirth; more likely to have healthy babies; and more likely to send their children to school. Poverty and other forms of social disadvantage magnify gender disparities. In most sub-Saharan African countries, girls from the poorest households remain most disadvantaged in terms of school participation. The World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development draws attention to the fact that there are still 31 million girls out of school, nearly 4 million “missing” women annually (meaning the number of women in low-and middle-income countries who die relative to their counterparts in high-income countries) and, average wage gaps of 20%, along with gaps in labor force participation. The systematic exclusion of girls and women from school and the labor force translates into a less educated work force, inefficient allocation of labor, lost productivity, and consequently diminished progress in economic development. Children with disabilities are among the most disadvantaged in terms of missing out on education, being “invisible” in the data and being overlooked in responses to OOSC. Children with disabilities aged 6 to 17 years are significantly less likely to be enrolled in school than their peers without disability (UNESCO Institute for Statistics and UNICEF 2015, World Bank 2012)

Additionally, the emphasis on the metrics associated with access rather than the more nebulous issue of quality education has contributed to a ‘learning crisis’, with an estimated 250 million children not learning basic skills, even if they are in school (UNESCO 2014). Data reveal significant gaps in children’s learning performance between the richest households and the poorest. While the learning levels remain low – even among children of primary school age in the richer countries –, children from the richest households are far more likely to achieve minimum learning standards in reading than those from the poorest households (UNESCO 2015a, b, UNICEF 2015, OECD 2016).

2.7 Vocational education

Vocational education, expected to provide specific competencies for medium and high skilled workers, developed in Europe from a long tradition of professional guilds, expanded with industrialization, reached its zenith in the 1990s, and started to decline in numbers since then. In 1995, 32.6% of the secondary school students in the European Union were enrolled in vocational education; in 2012, only 24.1 did. The percentages in other regions of the world are much smaller: 10% in middle income countries, 6% in lower income countries, 10% worldwide (World Bank 2015). One of the reasons for it limited reach and recent decline is that European vocational education, and more specially the apprenticeship system adopted in German speaking countries, although very successful in developing the skills and providing jobs for the industrial sector, was from the beginning part of a socially stratified education system, with tracking systems through which the children of the working class would be sent to vocational schools to be prepared to work in industry, while the children of the middle and upper classes would go to general education schools with the expectation of getting middle class jobs and entering the universities. As the relative size of the industrial sector diminished and access higher education expanded, opportunities for good quality vocational education were reduced, and most students choose the general education path if they could. Vocational education changed in most places to adapt to the new circumstances, eliminating or postponing tracking to the end of compulsory education, creating paths from vocational to higher education, creating comprehensive schools, expected to combine general and vocational education, and putting more emphasis on general competencies, such as language and mathematics, in vocational schools. The United States never developed a distinctive vocational education sector, but, in practice, provided it to some extent within the high schools and community colleges, as an option for students unwilling or not able to follow the path to full college education. Less developed countries lacked the well-established industrial and business sectors that allowed for good quality vocational education in the richer countries. For them, vocational education remained at best very limited in size, and at worse a kind of second-class education for the poor.

The limitations of vocational education, associated with the dominance of general education and growing aspirations for higher education degrees, raises the issue of how to deal with the large number of students that, in most countries, never acquire the minimum competencies required by compulsory education. A recent study by OECD found that "one in four 15-year-old students in OECD countries have not attained a baseline level of proficiency in at least one of the three core subjects PISA assesses: reading, mathematics and science. In absolute numbers, this means that about 13 million 15-year-old students in the 64 countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012 were low performers in at least one subject; in some countries, more than one in two students were" (OECD 2016, 3). The situation in low income societies is much worse. There are many strategies to make education more attractive, meaningful and accessible for the students, but the fact remains that millions of students, in rich and mostly in low income countries, go through school without learning to read and understand a simple text, to solve a simple arithmetical problem, or to have a grasp of very simple scientific facts.

2.8 Tertiary education

There is widespread recognition that tertiary education is a major contributor to economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy, which has made high-quality tertiary education more important than ever in both industrialised and developing countries (World Bank 2007). As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2008) has pointed out, tertiary education contributes to social and economic development through four major missions:

The formation of human capital (primarily through teaching)
The building of knowledge bases (primarily through research and knowledge development)
The dissemination and use of knowledge (primarily through interactions with knowledge users), and
The maintenance of knowledge (primarily through inter-generational storage and transmission of knowledge).

Increasingly, tertiary education is also becoming more diversified, including new types of institutions such as polytechnics, university colleges, technological institutes and a plethora of private and distance (e-learning) providers. Facilities such as these have been created for a number of reasons: to develop a closer relationship between tertiary education and the external world, including greater responsiveness to labour-market needs; to enhance social and geographical access to tertiary education; to provide high-level occupational preparation in a more applied and less theoretical way; and to accommodate the growing diversity of qualifications and expectations of school graduates (Pillay 2011).

World Economic Forum (WEF) data measure education participation rates, primary school quality rankings (for secondary education, quality ranking includes maths and science scores), rate of return for tertiary education, and global competitiveness ranking. In its commentary on the relationship between unemployment as an indicator of the status of the country’s economic growth, the WEF report reflects on the complex relationship between unemployment and competitiveness, as well as on the underlying influence of the adequacy of the education system (from primary through secondary to tertiary education) and the efficiency of its labour market. In the most competitive economies, high rankings against most of the human capital-related indicators were observed, even in cases where unemployment had increased. Thus, while weaknesses in these economies may centre on issues such as higher education, the skills gap in the labour market and wage performance, lesser developed economies have weaknesses centred on issues such as health and basic schooling. This may be the case even where the participation rate in primary and secondary education is high but where the quality is low, lessening the efficiency of the labour market in absorbing the youth exiting these systems.

In one of the most comprehensive analyses of the relationship between tertiary education and economic development Bloom, Canning, and Chan (2006) support the idea that expanding tertiary education may promote faster technological catch-up and improve a country’s ability to boost its economic output. Their detailed study of sub-Saharan Africa found that a one-year increase in the tertiary education stock would raise the long-run steady-state level of African GDP per capita by 12.2%. The data suggest that a one-year increase in tertiary education stock may boost incomes by roughly 3% after five years and by 12% eventually. Considering that incomes have been falling in some African countries, such growth would be significant. It strongly suggests that tertiary education plays a recognisable role in promoting economic growth.

Where there are high-cost barriers associated with higher levels of education, and where economic resources are distributed with high inequality, this may contribute to inequality in educational outcomes. The finding that the wage gap between those with higher education and workers with low levels of education has widened in the OECD over the past decade, despite the fact that the wages of the former have stagnated, is because those of the latter group have declined in real terms. More recent evidence has also shown that there is some complementarity between home background and schooling; in other words, that children from higher status families may derive a greater benefit from a given school input.

3. Facilitators and Barriers to education as a means for social progress

The crucial role education can play in promoting social progress obviously depends on the governance of education, on educational institutions and educators, as well as on the content and pedagogy of education. Consequently, it is necessary to consider at least three levels of effects, which are strongly interconnected (Spiel, Reimann, Wagner & Schober, 2008): (A) the level of concrete instruction in class (microlevel). Educators are the main actors at this level; (B) the level of institutions (schools, pre-schools, kindergartens, universities, etc.; the mesolevel). Here principals have a substantial influence; and (C) the level of the educational system (the macrolevel). Educational policymakers and authorities are the central actors here.

In the following facilitators and barriers to education as a means for social progress are discussed in three subsections. The first one focuses on governance of education and therefore the macrolevel. Here we discuss how modes of governance affect the potential of education to contribute to social progress. The second subsection targets institutions and educators. That means it focuses the meso- and microlevel. This subsection describes characteristics of successful educational institutions and competencies educators and principals should have to contribute to the four goals of education. The third and final subsection focuses on content of education and pedagogy and targets all three levels. Concretely, it discusses the core curriculum for the 21st century and especially identity formation as an important basic theme in education, as well as two important trends in pedagogy: learner-centred education and the role of technology. All three subsections provide final recommendations.

3.1 Governance of education

While education is poised to play a crucial role in promoting social progress, any effective contribution of education very much depends on how exactly educational institutions are designed . On the one hand, education indeed can be, and has been, an effective instrument for social progress by promoting humanistic values, nurturing collective conceptions of democratic citizenship, providing skills with labor market value, as well as supporting educational and social equality if access to education is open and fair. On the other hand, education systems can also become, and historically often have been, instruments to reinforce or magnify socio-economic inequality across generations, to nurture nationalistic and autocratic tendencies by promoting exclusionary or hierarchical conceptions of citizenship, or to fuel labor market stratification by limiting access to higher levels of education. On the whole, the governance of education is the institutional mode designed to direct education by setting its goals and standards, to provide the necessary means for deliverance of education, and to monitor, assess and redraft policy with the aim of harnessing education for social progress.

In the following, we discuss how modes of governance affect the potential of education to contribute to social progress. We describe the complexity of education governance and review core topics in the study of educational governance. We continue by focusing on three broad trends that have dominated the agenda of policy-makers and scholars alike in recent years:

First : decentralization, privatization and marketization of education

Second : the rise of evidence- or research-based policy-making

Third : the ongoing educational expansion, now encompassing adult and further education

3.1.1 Educational governance around the world

The rise of formal education since the middle of the nineteenth century – with regulation of schooling and public policies pertaining to teachers, pupils and schools as well as the continued expansion of upper and post-secondary education – spurred debates about the governance of education worldwide. Initially in developed countries and since the mid-twentieth century internationally, education emerged as a principal policy and administrative domain for governments, as well as the principal agenda of a fast growing number of intergovernmental- and transnational nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the governance of education grew into a complex array of institutions, often with intersecting and overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities. The contemporary complexity of education governance is, therefore, both a strong engine and a constraint for the harnessing of education towards social progress: it is both a solid system of policy-making and operations and still an unmanageable maze of public and private, national and international governors. Nevertheless, education is currently formally enshrined in numerous international treaties as a human right guaranteed to all and policies are set – nationally, internationally and transnationally – in accordance with this spirit. And while over time education policies have oscillated between focusing on education’s skilling and economic benefits and its progressive and civic importance, education has been universally recognized as a critical social institution and thus as a major focus for policy-making (Drori 2016).

For instance, in Europe, the Bologna process, which started out as an effort of international coordination in higher education governance, has contributed to the establishment of a transnational governance framework, largely based on voluntary cooperation between governments. This framework both achieves some sort of coordination in higher education policy, such as the introduction of Bachelor and Master degrees throughout Europe and the establishment of common quality management procedures, while also respecting national peculiarities. Furthermore, according to Voegtle et al. (2011), it was largely driven by a process of transnational communication with the goal of joint problem-solving. Hence, it is a good example how complex governance arrangements in the global era are both necessary as well as possible.

This general vision of education has not tamed the vast variation in education governance across countries. The institutional design and capacity of education systems vary dramatically cross-nationally, among levels of government, and between sectors. As a corollary, political conflicts about the institutional design or the governance of education systems are often related to underlying material interests of those affected (Ansell 2010; Busemeyer 2015; Iversen/Stephens 2008). Furthermore, historical conflicts about the design of education systems have strong implications for the governance of education in the contemporary period, because once established, institutions create powerful path dependency effects, which reduce the leeway for large-scale change in the long term (Pierson 1993; Thelen 1999). The feedback effects of established institutions affect strategies, preferences, and power resources of individual and collective actors in the respective systems. The implication is that once political choices for the design of education systems have been made at critical junctures in historical policy development, large-scale change is unlikely thereafter.

This is why there is a huge variation in the governance of education systems nowadays. As already shown above, there is of course a significant cross-national variation in the extent to which different sectors of the education system are developed, which is to a certain extent related to the level of economic development in a given country. Broadly speaking, the higher levels of the education system (upper secondary, post-secondary and tertiary education) develop in line with economic demand and capacities, implying a gradual opening up of access for those formerly excluded. Access to tertiary education in non-democratic or developing economies, in contrast, is often restricted to the offspring of the countries’ elites, exemplifying the ambivalent character of education with regard to the promotion of citizenship and social progress (Stasavage 2005). Ideally, democracy, education and economic development can positively reinforce each other with education promoting both citizenship and economic skills, which promote the further development of democratic structures. These in turn can ensure a continued opening up of access to higher levels of education (Ansell 2008, 2010). And still, there is no deterministic association between the institutional structure of education systems and economic development. In the (post-)industrial democracies of the Western world with similar levels of economic development, there is still a huge variety of institutions.

For instance, countries differ with regard to the degree of institutional stratification in school structures, primarily at the secondary level. In some cases, there is a strong separation between academic and vocational tracks, which is often associated with students being sorted onto these different tracks very early on in their school careers (Germany or Switzerland are good examples for this type of systems). In contrast, in other countries such as Sweden, but also the United States and South Africa, all children from different backgrounds attend the same type of schools, namely comprehensive secondary schools. However, again depending on the exact design of educational governance, the formal equivalence in institutional design can go along with a strong degree of effective segregation: In the United States, the fiscal stance of individual schools (or school districts) very much depends on the wealth of the locality, mirroring existing socio-economic inequalities and thereby creating a clear stratified hierarchy of institutions in the respective educational sectors (Busemeyer 2006).

In general, research has shown that a higher degree of institutional stratification in secondary education is associated with higher levels of educational inequality, exacerbating class biases in access to education (Pfeffer 2008; Hanushek/Wößmann 2006). In other words: A strong separation between academic and vocational tracks in lower and upper secondary education delimits the potential contribution of education to promoting social equity (and progress). However, from a purely economic perspective, the strong separation between academic and vocational tracks might have beneficial effects (Hall/Soskice 2001), because it increases the supply of vocational skills in the economy, which can be beneficial for (some types of) employers. Furthermore, there is empirical evidence that levels of socio-economic , not educational, inequality are lower in countries with extensive vocational training systems (Busemeyer 2015; Estévez-Abe et al. 2001), because vocational training opens up access routes to well-paid and secure employment for those with few academic skills. These examples show that it is necessary to evaluate the effects of educational institutions from different perspectives as these might be very different and partly contradicting, depending on the viewpoint.

Questions of educational governance reach beyond the institutional design of educational institutions as such, including issues related to education financing and spending . First of all, countries differ with regard to how much they invest in education in total and how they distribute funding across the different sectors (Busemeyer 2015). However, there is no apparent association between the total level of investment on education and educational performance (Castles 2013). This is shown quite impressively in the OECD’s PISA studies, which compares educational attainment of 15-year old students in a large sample of rich and middle-income countries from Peru and Vietnam on the one hand to Luxembourg and Switzerland on the other. Even though there is certain association between economic well-being and educational performance with poorer countries clustering in the lower half of the ranking table and richer countries above, there are some notable exceptions: Vietnam, for example, with a GDP per capita of about 2,100 Dollar performs significantly better than Luxembourg with a GDP per capita of about 101,000 Dollar. [4] Hence, in order to promote educational opportunities, it is not sufficient to simply increase spending on education. This, again, points to the crucial role of governance as well as cultural, social and political contexts, because the institutional set-up of education systems determines how available resources are employed, and if they are employed in effective and efficient ways.

In addition to the total level of spending, there is significant cross-national variation in the division of labor between public and private sources of funding (Wolf 2009; Wolf/Zohlnhöfer 2009). Private sources of funding mostly include tuition and school fees, but also contributions from private foundations, employers and individuals. Even though the evidence on the impact of tuition fees on participation in and access to education is somewhat mixed, there are solid indications that high tuition fees effectively block students from low-income backgrounds from participating in (higher) education (Mettler 2014). Furthermore, high levels of private spending can also have feedback effects on citizens’ expectations vis-à-vis the welfare state: When individuals have invested a considerable amount of money in acquiring their education, they are less likely to support high levels of taxation and redistribution, since this would lower their returns on their educational investments (Busemeyer 2013).

In the context of developing countries, private schools (and financing) may play a different role. In a situation, when public schools are failing because of serious governance problems related to mismanagement, corruption and a lack of accountability, private schools may be considered as an attractive alternative, delivering a higher quality of teaching and better learning outcomes at lower costs, as a recent comprehensive report on private schooling in developing countries has shown (Ashley et al. 2014). In the long run, however, the establishment of a private school sector might also promote segregation and inequalities in the developing countries, when access is increasingly tied to parental background and resources. Hence, improving the governance of public institutions should be the prime goal in these contexts.

In addition to institutional stratification and spending, another important dimension in the governance of education is how different stakeholders in the system are included in decision-making (or not). There are several aspects related to this topic. The first is the question of how many different stakeholders are involved in decision-making about educational reforms as well as day-to-day management of education systems (this might be called the horizontal governance dimension). There are some countries, in which decision-making is centralized in the hands of governmental bureaucrats, whereas in others, different stakeholders are involved, e.g. parents and students in the running of local schools as well as representatives of trade unions and employers’ association in the administration of vocational training schemes.

The second aspect is how different competencies for the administration of the education system are distributed across levels of government (the vertical dimension of governance). Again, in some countries, decision-making competencies are concentrated on the national level (e.g. in France) with limited involvement of and autonomy for lower levels of government. In contrast, the financing and administration of education is very decentralized in other countries. In Scandinavian countries, for instance, municipalities have far-reaching competencies for the provision and financing of education. The local level is also important in Anglo-Saxon countries like the US or the UK. In federalist systems, the subnational levels play a crucial role in education policy, although this might often be associated with an actually lower degree of autonomy for the local level, since many competencies are then concentrated on the regional level.

With the onset of globalization, in particular since the mid-twentieth century, new international and transnational interdependencies have emerged with strong implications for educational governance. Education is currently promoted by a transnational advocacy network, which is composed of both intergovernmental- and transnational nongovernmental organizations. This diverse set of organizations, which have proliferated at an exponential rate for decades, has been instrumental in formulating transnational regulation, most notably the Global Campaign for Education and the Education for All agenda, as well as situating education as a pinnacle of the Millennium Development Goals. While intergovernmental organizations affect national education agendas through the activation of inter-state treaties, most other transnational organizations influence education agendas through “soft law” mechanisms, for example by setting standards for education in the form of comparative assessments for achievement (e.g., Kamens and McNeely, 2010; Wiseman, 2010; Meyer and Benavot, 2013). The rise of the private and for-profit transnational education sector further complicates the matrix of global education governance, introducing neo-liberal practices and therefore furthering the turn of public education systems worldwide toward so-called New Public Management models (e.g., Ball, 2012). Overall, this heterogeneous transnational advocacy network of organizations, which constitutes the global governance of education, operates as a diffuse policy regime, drawing legitimacy and authority from its financial and political capacities, the appreciation of expertise, and the geopolitical power of western governmental and nongovernmental actors.

This international and transnational education governance intersects with national and sub-national education policy-making in numerous ways and greatly and influences its trajectory. For one, this global governance regime constitutes what is taken to be “best practices” for education, defining universal standards for curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation and alike. For example, global organizations have imprinted curricula worldwide by introducing discourses of social sciences (Wong, 1991), environmentalism (Bromley, Meyer, and Ramirez, 2011) and human rights (Suárez, 2007) to textbooks in schools worldwide and by promoting programs for girls’ education (Vaughan, 2013) and lifelong learning (Jakobi, 2009). In these ways, the global transnational advocacy network for education formulated curricular, pedagogical and administrative isomorphism, regardless of varying national political cultures or local traditions. Also, this global governance regime is critical for the implementation of education policies worldwide, because it serves as the cadre for consultancy and expertise and as the source for sponsorship of education reforms. Through their evidence-based assessments and policy recommendations, which operationalize educational ideologies, the global governance regime spreads particular education practices and ideas (e.g., Mundy and Menashy, 2014). Overall, world polity, as the formal organizational backbone of world society, drove the rapid institutionalization of universal mass schooling (Boli, Ramirez and Meyer, 1985; Meyer, Ramirez and Soysal, 1992) and of tertiary education (Schofer Meyer, 2005), thus prescribing education agenda, especially in poorer countries with weaker national polities (e.g., McNeely, 1995; Steiner-Khamsi and Stolpe, 2006; Vaughan, 2013). And still, the worldwide isomorphism that resulted from the decades of policy borrowing and lending has nevertheless preserved cross-national differences in education capacities and outcomes (Baker and LeTendre, 2005).

3.1.2 Recent trends in educational governance and their implications for social progress

The complexity of the global governance regime for education thinly veils the overwhelming thematic coherence of education governance worldwide. In other words, in spite of the heterogeneity within the transnational advocacy network and the rapid growth of the constituents involved in this governance regime, the focus remains on conceiving of education as a means for societal development. This focus drives forwards several worldwide trends in the governance of education. Currently, three main trends are dominant worldwide: systemic mode of decentralization, administrative mode of research-based policy-making, and content mode of emphasis on lifelong learning.

Decentralization, privatization and marketization

The first such broad and worldwide, towards decentralization in the provision of education, is often accompanied and conditioned by a parallel trend towards privatization and marketization (Gingrich 2011). Decentralization of education governance means that competencies for the management, financing, curriculum design and personnel are delegated from the national to lower levels of government, such as subnational and local governments as well as schools themselves. Even though this is a powerful international trend, national contexts, of course, influence how it manifests itself in different countries. In cases such as the US and the United Kingdom, for instance, the governance of education had already been rather than decentralized before the 2000s, but many competencies had been centralized in the hands of “Local Education Authorities” (LEAs) or school districts. Thus, in this context, further decentralization amounts to the delegation of responsibilities down to the level of individual schools, which are independent from the local educational authorities (e.g., Charter Schools in the US or Academies in the British context). In other cases, for instance Germany, decentralization implied the delegation of autonomy to individual schools within existing governance structures, i.e. from the Land level to the school level. In Sweden, far-reaching reforms in the 1990s paved the way for the emergence of “independent schools”, which are run by private providers, though financed with public moneys (Klitgaard 2008). This represents a typical “Swedish” approach to decentralization in the sense that competition between schools is limited by public regulation on admission criteria and financing (Bunar 2010).

In the context of developing countries, we can also witness a similar process of marketization and privatization in the governance of education, but it plays out very differently as it is entangled with the ongoing expansion of educational opportunities, in particular at the level of higher education. In African countries, for instance, the recent wave of expansion in tertiary enrolment went along with a significant expansion of the role of private institutions in higher education (Varghese 2013). Private households were increasingly willing and able to pay for education, but state institutions often lacked the fiscal and administrative capacities to meet this increasing demand both from households as well as employers. Hence, private institutions increasingly played an important role filling this gap. As mentioned above, in the short run, this type of privatization can promote social progress by granting access to education to those who were formerly excluded, but in the long run, a continued failure of public institutions may promote segregation.

It is difficult to single out one specific driving factor of the trend towards decentralization, but there are several plausible candidates. First, in the Western world, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the public (i.e. mostly vocal parents from the middle and upper classes) in many countries became increasingly dissatisfied with the “one size fits all” model of educational governance and demanded a more differentiated and participatory model of governance. Second, central governments may also have developed an interest in offloading some responsibilities to lower levels of government, in particular in times when fiscal and budget constraints became increasingly binding so that unpopular decisions about cutbacks could be delegated to lower levels of governments. Furthermore, the mobilization of private sources of funding in the form of fees or the involvement of private educational providers could partly compensate for the lack of public funding, which may be a more important driving force of privatization and marketization in the developing and middle-income countries, where educational aspirations of the newly affluent middle classes are thwarted by public governance failures. Finally, the professionalization of education management went along with the emergence of New Public Management (NPM) as the dominant paradigm of administrative decision-making. From the perspective of NPM, promoting competition between schools, both within the public system as well as between public and private providers, is believed to increase the overall efficiency of the system.

What are the potential consequences of decentralization with regard to the potential of education to contribute to the social progress? This question is difficult to answer empirically, and it very much depends on the specific implementation of decentralization reforms. In the Western world, there are good reasons to believe that decentralization, privatization and marketization will and does already have negative consequences with regard to social and educational inequality as well as social progress in general. Furthermore, there is little evidence that decentralization has gone along with a significant increase in educational performance so far (Schlicht-Schmälzle et al. 2011). In the developing countries, in contrast, marketization may promote educational expansion in the short run, compensating for the lack of responsiveness on the part of the public education system. In the long run, however, the entrenchment of a private sector may contribute to segregation, as it has done in some rich-world democracies.

A crucial factor in this respect is the extent to which competition between schools and higher education institutions is constrained by public regulations. When a higher degree of institutional autonomy in resource management as well as pedagogical matters is accompanied by a decentralized system of education finance, decentralization can result in a growing heterogeneity between institutions. Wealthy schools would then increasingly be concentrated in wealthy districts, being able to attract better students and better teachers. Elitist private universities could close their doors to aspiring students from lower social backgrounds. Once an institutional regime is established – and in particular, once it has become entangled with housing and residential patterns as well as career choices – it can be very difficult to change politically, because public opposition against redistributing resources away from the wealthy to the poorer districts will be significant as households have adjusted their housing and lifetime financial choices accordingly.

On the positive side, it could be argued that the decentralization in the provision of education allows for a greater involvement of local stakeholders, in particular parents, teachers and students, in designing the pedagogical content of the curriculum. Granting schools more autonomy could also promote the embeddedness of schools in local contexts, nurturing civil society and social capital. Eventually, this might increase the commitment of individuals to “their” school. Also, in today’s diverse societies, a “one size fits all” model of education simply would not be able anymore to cater to the different educational needs and demands. In higher education, decentralization would allow universities to develop individual profiles, building on their respective strengths. In contexts, where the public system is plagued with management problems and governance inefficiencies, private (autonomous) institutions may be more effective and efficient.

The rise of evidence-based policy-making

Second, the governance of education globally and worldwide is turning towards research-based policy-making. Much along the reorientation of policy-making in the fields of healthcare and welfare, education policy-making too is increasingly anchored in methodical study and scientized evidence, which are accepted as providing a solid – namely, professional and value-neutral – basis for decision-making on matters of supervision, control, capacity, efficiency, operations and structure. This research-based governance mode is inspired by cultural trends towards scientization and quantification (see, Drori and Meyer, 2006; Espeland and Sauder, 2007) and expresses a high form of administrative rationalization (Drori, 2006). Applied to education, this research-based mode of governance has primarily introduced practices of assessment of various aspects of education provision (such as education outcomes, also of comparative performance) and of administrative capacity (such as financial and human resources). Globally, most evident is the policy fascination with internationally comparative testing, such as PISA and TIMSS, under the assumption that curricula and student achievements are indeed universal and comparable (Kamens and McNeely, 2010). Indeed, the rise of this international assessment regime has encouraged the diffusion of practices for the assessment of education also at the national and sub-national level, bringing the mode of “governing by numbers” to all world regions (e.g., Grek, 2009) and many countries (e.g., Feniger, Livneh, and Yogev, 2012; Sung and Kang, 2012). Moreover, this impulse for research-based governance furthers the privatization of policy-making: with preliminary research required for each policy initiative, much of this research is subcontracted, or outsourced, to experts and think tanks. Few governmental policy agencies, most notably the intergovernmental OECD, maintain the capacity for the extensive research that is required to substantiate policy-making. Overall, the dramatic growth of international and national educational testing and the dramatic expansion of education assessment practices signal the rise of a rationalized governance regime for education. This governance mode steers education towards administrative-focused regime and is often criticized as diverting attention away from content-specific and context-specific policy-making.

Continuing educational expansion

Third, whereas global and cross-national education policies focused until the 1980s on mass schooling and, with the advent of the global knowledge economy, also on tertiary education and innovation, the contemporary substantive focus for education governance is on lifelong learning. The orientation towards education as a continuous, and often also self-motivated, learning and skilling is spurred by the rapid changes of the global economy and the labor force. Such changes include the longevity of individuals, which extends the employability of working adults; they also introduce great uncertainty as to the competencies that are required for future gainful and productive employment. These uncertainties, and the “over the horizon” planning that they impose, call not only for promotion of continuous learning but also for change to the content of education. Indeed, contemporary education policies globally and cross-nationally advocate a paradigm shift in pedagogy – towards flexible and non-formal education, towards digital literacy, and towards agentic learners. This global governance regime regarding lifelong “and lifewide” learning is formalized in such intergovernmental initiatives as the 2010 Belém Framework for Action, coordinated by such intergovernmental programs as the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, and advocated by the European coalition of nongovernmentak organizations known as The Lifelong Learning Platform (formerly, EUCIS-LLL). Here too we see evidence for the complexity and heterogeneity of global, international and transnational advocacy networks of organziations, creating a global mode of education governance.

3.1.3 Conclusions and recommendations

Over the course of the globalization of education policy-making, formally since the mid-nineteenth century until today, there is a consistent and unwavering commitment to the vision that education is a means for societal development. Nevertheless, the definition of what accounts for development and of the mechanisms by which education is to contribute to development have varied over time and across polities. In this way we observe a sustained definition of education’s social role and still considerable variety in the operationalization of education’s contribution to development. This tension is expressed clearly in policy documents, which on the one hand proclaims the universal importance of knowledge and learning and the virtues of erudition while, on the other hand, specify particularistic (national, ethnic, or religious) conditions and goals for designing education and for harnessing it towards human wellbeing.

Given the diverse background conditions that different countries are facing, it is difficult to come up with policy recommendations that would hold independent of context. In fact, a first and foremost recommendation would be that in considering and devising governance reforms, policy-makers need to take into institutional, political and social contexts as well as policy legacies and path dependencies. There is no “one size fits all” model of educational governance, which could be transferred from one country to another. A complementary recommendation would be to pay more attention to the cultural foundations of educational governance, which have implications for the effectiveness of how governance works in different countries.

In spite of these considerations, there is certainly a lot of potential to learn from each other: Thus, a second recommendation is to engage in transnational processes of communication, which can be enhanced by input from evidence-based research and the systematic involvement of a diverse set of governmental and non-governmental stakeholders. In order to create lasting and legitimate policy solutions, evidence-based policy-making needs to be connected to processes of societal mobilization and organization. Furthermore, a transnational process of problem-oriented policy learning should respect national (and subnational) diversity in addressing governance problems in education (and beyond), while striving for a common understanding of problems and challenges at the same time.

3.2 Institutions and educators

While section 3.1 focuses the macrolevel, in this section we mainly focus on the two levels considered to be decisive in creating the proximate environment for development and learning: the microlevel and the mesolevel. We summarize central insights gleaned from research on (1) characteristics of educational institutions that facilitate learning and (2) relevant attitudes and competencies of educators (esp. principals and teachers). The section mostly focuses on facilitators of education as means of social progress at the level of institutions and educators, the most relevant barriers are described in the final part.

In line with the four goals of education as means for social progress, educational institutions and educators should contribute to the promotion of …

…skills, abilities, knowledge and competencies in learners that allow them to be successful with regard to objective standards of achievement and therefore participate in the labor market and workforce (economic),
...social responsibility as a basic personal attitude among learners (civic),
…interest and motivation in learning that goes beyond a purely economic rationale, with learners having the self-efficacy to make this a reality and thus being open for personal development (humanistic),
…equal opportunities for all learners, which involves providing support for learners at risk and contributing to a reduction in the influence of factors such as SES that are outside individuals’ control (equity).

The section focuses on key educational objectives/ targets that are assumed to be the fundamental basis of all of the goals mentioned above and apply to all individuals. We are describing the necessary qualities of institutions and competencies of educators from a psychological perspective. This was chosen as the psychological perspective can address basic motivations, attitudes, and competencies that are considered to be universal and decisive for all individuals. Concerning institutions we primarily deal with preschool/kindergarten and school, as they are obligatory or at least key educational institutions in most countries. Additionally, these levels of education have been shown to have a high and sustainable influence on personal and finally societal developments (cf. Campbell et al., 2002, OECD, 2013). As the mission of universities is not purely an educational one, and only a select group of students come into contact with these institutions, we will give them only the occasional mention here.

3.2.1 Characteristics of successful educational institutions

Research on institutional quality typically identifies three broad quality areas, which need to work in tandem with one another if institutional success is to be achieved: process quality (= learners’ direct interactions in the group setting, with the educator, and with the physical environment), structural quality (= the framework surrounding concrete interactions, including characteristics such as group size, student-teacher ratio, teacher qualifications and spatial and material conditions), and quality of orientation (= curriculum, institutional-specific concept, educational approach, staff goals and values). These three quality areas are linked to the three levels discussed above: process quality corresponds with the microlevel, quality of orientation with the mesolevel, and structural quality with the macrolevel. The classification scheme of qualities is primarily used in research on early childhood education (cf. Tietze, Roßbach & Grenner, 2005), but – even if labelled different - can also be found in research on classroom instruction and school effectiveness (cf. Scheerens, 2000). Thus, the three quality areas repeatedly come up when examining the characteristics of effective educational institutions in line with our goals in the following sections. Kindergartens There is a growing body of research recognizing that early childhood education and care brings a wide range of benefits, both social and economic: better child well-being and learning outcomes; more equitable outcomes and a reduction in poverty; increased intergenerational social mobility; greater female labor market participation and gender equality; increased fertility rates; and better social and economic development for society at large (OECD, 2006; Campbell et al., 2002).

Numerous studies conducted in various countries demonstrate that participation in systematic preschool education per se as well as the length of attendance at kindergarten, pre-school etc. are positively correlated with later school success (WENIGE ZITATE Tietze, 2010). The rate of grade retention among children from disadvantaged families and immigrant backgrounds shows a particularly strong reduction.

However, not only the length of attendance matters. In fact the quality these institutions have has an important influence on the outcomes (cf. Britto, Yoshikawa, & Boller, 2011). Here, the quality areas mentioned above are of relevance and have to be viewed considering their interdependency. There is a substantial correlation between process quality and various aspects of structural quality and quality of orientation: For example, process quality and student-educator-ratio are related. As better the ratio as higher the quality. Higher process quality is observed when educators are better paid. But a high level of education of educators seems to represent only a necessary not a sufficient condition for ensuring good process quality. Traditional, less individual-oriented convictions among educators have negative effects on process quality. In sum, good structural conditions create the framework for high pedagogical process quality – making it possible, rather than “determining” it per se. But the relative importance of structural conditions can vary depending on cultural context. While the influence of any single quality aspect is usually rather small; taken together, they form a potent package.

High institutional quality is shown to have consistent short, middle and long term effects. In terms of preschool-aged children (= short term), consistent, supportive effects were found for linguistic-cognitive development. Results concerning social development are mixed. In the medium term (= school age), effects of high-quality preschool education have been found for cognitive, language and math performance, and in general for scholastic abilities. Furthermore, high institutional quality is related to a higher ability to cope with everyday situations. In the long run (= off school age), also positive social and cognitive effects were found e.g., better final school degrees, higher income, lower rates of criminality (Campbell et al., 2002). However, with regard to long-term effects, the quality of the subsequent school plays an important role. If the subsequent school has low quality, the positive effects of high quality preschool education diminish.

All in all, a growing body of research recognizes that early childhood education and care brings a wide range of benefits, including social and economic ones: better child well-being and learning outcomes; more equitable outcomes and reduction of poverty; increased intergenerational social mobility; higher female labour market participation and gender equality; increased fertility rates; and better social and economic development for society at large. Research further shows that quality matters a lot, in particular the everyday process quality. Exposure to high-quality care appears especially important for at-risk children’s later school success. The literature clearly shows that money invested in early childhood development and education yield extraordinary public returns. Governments are increasingly working to assist families and support children. Between 1998 and 2011, public expenditure on young children in the form of childcare and preschool increased 55% on average across OECD countries (OECD, 2016). However, there are large differences in the percentage of their GDP the countries spent on childcare and preschool. Even in the OECD-countries preschool places for very young children are lacking (OECD, 2015). From the two year olds 39% stay in childcare (variation 0 – 95%) from the three your olds 74% (variation 3 – 100) while 88% of the four year olds attending kindergarten (variation 36 – 100%). Furthermore, the quality of childcare, kindergarten, and preschool education is very mixed. Schools Obviously, the three quality areas (process quality, structural quality, and quality of orientation) are also of high relevance for schools. However, respective research does not focus on these quality areas, but on school effectiveness and quality management. Within this research several parameters for success (concerning the four goals of education) and their working mechanism could be identified (Scheerens, Glas & Thomas, 2003; Bonsen & Bos, 2010): (1) Achievement orientation: High but appropriate expectations for both teachers and students provide a positive stimulus for the school’s pedagogical work. (2) Well-structured learning atmosphere: Students can be r supported better both in advancing their content knowledge and in taking responsibility for themselves and their environment in a learning environment where everybody feels valued and secured. This encompasses a positive school climate among students as well as between students and teachers and among the teaching staff. (3) Professional cooperation among teachers: There should be broad consensus among the teaching staff in terms of pedagogical goals; teachers should work together in formulating goals and in planning and developing their classroom instruction. (4) Pedagogical leadership: The school’s leadership goes beyond purely administrative matters. Rather school principals` responsibilities are: supporting, evaluating and developing teaching quality; goal-setting, assessment and accountability; strategic financial and human resource management; and collaborating with other schools. (5) Quality of the enacted curriculum: Schools have to ensure the alignment between the intended and enacted curriculum. This requires school-level reflection with regard to its pedagogical work. (6) Evaluation focus: Evaluation is considered important, and systematic monitoring of student performance, feedback on instruction and internal as well as external evaluations take place at the institutional level.

Sustainably successful schools need to fulfill all six parameters together as they are highly related. Similar as for kindergarten, most important are parameters contributing to process quality (= instructural quality) as e.g., achievement orientation and well-structured learning atmosphere (Hattie, 2008). However, even in the OECD countries this high level of school quality is only partly realized with high variation across countries. This could be shown on the one hand by such studies as PISA or TIMSS, and on the other hand by studies focusing on school climate. Conclusions The opportunities for implementing these parameters vary internationally and across cultures. Nevertheless, professionalization of educators and educational institutions is needed. This professionalization should explicitly seek to target all four educational goals and take responsibility for achieving them. So far, there is a lack of models that explicitly and cohesively describe necessary competencies for educators, teachers and school principals. One such approach was presented by Schober, Klug, Finsterwald, Wagner and Spiel (2012) and refers to schools in its original form. The same basic idea can easily be broadened to include other educational institutions as kindergartens. The approach will be described in the next subsection.

3.2.2 Competencies of educators and principals

The approach presented by Schober et al. (2012) proceeds from the assumption that results-oriented, output-oriented, and competency-oriented quality development leads to the optimization of educational institutions as a whole by means of orienting the entire pedagogical process as well as the entire work of the school / educational institution towards improving young people’s learning outcomes. As a guiding maxim for behavior, educators (daycare educators, kindergarten teachers, preschool teachers, school teachers, etc.) and principals (daycare and kindergarten principals, school principals, etc.) should ask themselves what concrete learning goals are being pursued in a given situation, whether these are being achieved – and if not, why not and what needs to be changed in order to achieve them.

Concretely, these competencies are: being able to 1) define (learning) goals; 2) take targeted measures to achieve these goals; 3) measure and assess whether and to what extent goals have been achieved; 4) derive new measures as a consequence of this; 5) initiate and conduct internal evaluations (i.e. effectiveness analyses); and 6) handle and make use of the results of external evaluations. The extent to which these competencies are necessary certainly vary by group of actors (educators vs principals) and by level (e.g., kindergarten vs school). Nevertheless, they are equally valid for all actors regardless of whether they work in schools or in pre-schools, whether they are involved in direct instruction or in leading the institution as a whole. Table 1 in the Appendix specifies these six competencies for result-oriented quality development more in detail.

Comprehensive and fundamental determinants for all six competencies are (a) a fundamentally positive attitude towards evaluation, (b) the willingness to take responsibility, and (c) high self-efficacy and self-worth. R esponsibility means that educators and principals must feel connected to the goals of their institutions and believe that they can be achieved. Taking responsibility, in turn, requires high self-worth and a high self-efficacy . A further (d) fundamental determinant is to view diversity as an opportunity . Differences among individuals in terms of abilities and starting points must be recognized in setting goals and taken into account in designing instruction. This particularly applies to the areas of multiculturalism (cf. Cochran-Smith, Davis & Fries, 2003), gender, special abilities / needs and socio-economic background. Related to this, it is also necessary to explicitly view a much wider range of competencies as resources and a source of student potential, rather than just a few (cf. those that align with the traditional canon of school subjects).

For realizing results-oriented quality development not only the described competencies of educators and principals are necessary, but also appropriate conditions at the mesolevel (= institutions) are needed as described in the subsection before. Furthermore, the macrolevel has to provide respective high professional education for teachers and principals.

3.2.3 Central barriers

Having in mind the described characteristics of successful educational institutions and of the competencies educators and principals should have for results-oriented quality development, several barriers could be brought into discussion. They obviously vary across cultures and countries. In the following we mention four central barriers that are of general relevance.

Presently a high proportion of children is not attending public education; in particular there is a substantial supply gap in daycare, kindergarten and preschool education. Of course, here is a high variation across continents and cultures.
High quality of education and professionalization of teachers and principals is not widely established. Again, a large variation across continents and cultures is evident. A further problem arises from the fact that poor teacher education and lacking school and preschool attendance is often combined. Furthermore, even in OECD countries there is a substantial portion of institutions (schools, kindergartens, etc.) that does not fulfill the criteria for success as described above.
Even in countries where nearly all children are attending public education and teachers are obligatory educated at universities, initiatives and reforms for quality improvement fail as they are not systematically implemented. Implementation is widely understood as the “specific set of activities designed to put into practice an activity or program of known dimensions” (Forman et al., 2013).
A further general barrier that hinders reforms for results-oriented quality development is that most of the programs, recommendations etc. are formulated on a meta-level lacking concrete advises for action and measures for educators, principals and institutions.

3.2.4 Conclusions and recommendations

The section focuses on characteristics of institutions, educators and principals that contribute to their ability to work towards the four goals enabling social progress rather independently of specific cultural and national contexts. They are expected to put learners in the position to actively participate in shaping their educational careers, gather information and have confidence in their ability to overcome challenges and uncertainty. Learners have to be prepared for overcoming social barriers – both of a personal nature and with regard to society in general.

In the following we provide recommendations for institutions and educators to be facilitators to education as a means for social progress. The recommendations address all three levels mentioned before (macro, meso, micro):

Given that educational institutions play an important role in social progress, opportunities for participation in them need to be assured – even in early childhood.
Investment in the quality of institutions and their actors increases the positive effects on various facets of social progress. Thus, all three areas of quality (process, orientation, structural) need to be supported systematically – at all levels of learners’ educational careers. Decisions with regard to structural quality are political decisions (macrolevel) that have corresponding effects on quality of orientation (at the mesolevel of educational institutions) and process quality (at the microlevel, educators).
The goals of education must be explicitly defined in ways that go beyond economics and the labour market. Educational systems need to be aware of their responsibility for all educational goals (holistic perspective) relevant to facilitating social progress (e.g. in terms of designing curricula; ensuring that institutions attend to all goals; ensuring that basic education is sufficient and defining corresponding minimum standards with relevant criteria; and monitoring a wide range of competencies, not just a few very specific ones)
Educational institutions and their principals and educators are important factors influencing educational success on the individual, societal and economic level. Policy makers must be aware of this and enhance the professionalization of the educational system.
Results-oriented quality development processes should be promoted . Here, autonomy and the participation of all actors of an institution are necessary prerequisites for success.
Being a principal in an educational institution or an educator is a challenging position in society that carries great responsibility. Therefore a high investment should be put in attracting high-potential candidates for these positions and in high-quality training for principals and educators (beginning with educators in preschool institutions).
All reforms and programs in the field of education need a systematic implementation strategy. The realization of this strategy should be accompanied by evaluation measures. In recent years, a growing body of implementation research has indicated that an active, long-term, multilevel implementation approach is far more effective than passive forms of dissemination.

Educational institutions should not only focus on their respective educational duties but also recognize their shared r esponsibility for social progress, for successful incoming and outgoing transitions and for the complete educational careers of their students. This responsibility about what happens before and after learners are part of their own institution also needs to be better anchored within universities. This is recommended as they are actively involved in the training of educators in many countries.

3.3 Content and pedagogy

The support of the four goals of education and consequently the promotion of social progress is not only dependent on governance, institutions, and educators but also on content of education (curriculum) and pedagogy which is the topic of this subsection. In the first part we discuss the power of content and pedagogy in promoting social progress. Based on this, we focus first on relevant aspects of the content of education and two further parts deal with important trends in pedagogy. The description of barriers and facilitators for promoting social progress and the influencing factors of the three levels (macro, meso, micro) are integrated in all subsections. Considering the high relevance of school for lifelong development, achievement, well-being and further basic values of social progress this section primarily focuses on schooling.

3.3.1 The power of content and pedagogy in promoting social progress

For those in primary and secondary education, what happens in classrooms is the main shaper of their experiences of schooling and dominates future memories. It also plays important roles in shaping identities, constructing citizenship, preparing learners for the workforce, sustaining and renewing cultural traditions, and developing capabilities that matter to individuals and society. Education does not always do these things well, or with balanced emphasis. In addition to being experientially important, classroom processes and the content of teaching and learning have major consequences for learning outcomes, no matter how these might be defined, and positive or negative experiences or expectations or life in classrooms create ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that contribute to decisions about whether to attend school and whether to continue. Curriculum and pedagogy are also ultimately where the vast majority of educational funding goes in the form of the recurrent costs of teacher salaries. Surprisingly, despite the centrality of curriculum and pedagogy to the experience and benefits of education, and despite the costs of staff to deliver and enact them, in comparative perspective they are relatively under-researched and they receive insufficient attention in terms of, for example, aid funding to education, as compared to questions of access and outcomes.

The content taught in schools is expressed in a curriculum, which may be more or less controlled and centralised. Many, but not all, countries have a state (or sub-national) curriculum. This sets out the knowledge that learners are expected to command, and also in most cases defines particular skills they should acquire and sometimes the values that are intended to be inculcated. The level of detail of these varies widely, ranging from minute details of ‘facts’ to be covered and learned and competencies to be attained by all students, to very loose guidelines within which teachers make some of the most important decisions regarding what is taught and learned and there is space for differentiation for and by individual learners based on their needs and interests. Where the national curriculum is tightly framed, it is also common to have state-prescribed textbooks which buttress this control over content. While a common curriculum can potentially support equity by equalising entitlement, the use of imposed state curricula to oppress citizens in totalitarian or racist regimes is well-documented. Whatever the explicit learning outcomes might be, the content of teaching and learning also has an implicit dimension, known as the hidden curriculum, which sends strong but oblique messages to learners. For example, the ways that women are portrayed in textbooks – the jobs they do, the ways they communicate, the clothes they wear, who is loved and who is not – set out a normative framework for learners that has deep effects on their own identities and understandings of what to expect from others, regardless of whether the official line advocates equality for women as a learning goal.

Pedagogy is a complex and highly culture-bound process and this is perhaps among the explanations for the lack of attention it receives by researchers and funders. On one level, pedagogy consists of the observable methods and interactions that take place in classrooms. However, as in Alexander’s definition (2000) it also includes the beliefs, philosophies and theories that underpin these in the minds of teachers. These govern what teachers do, although habit and imitation are highly significant as well. All the lessons in the world have a number of shared and familiar ingredients: tasks, activities, teacher judgments, and interactions, structured through use of time, space and student institution, and, over the cycles of the school year, routines, rules, and rituals (Alexander, 2001). Within this there are context-specific variations which create a plethora of approaches. Despite these cultural variations, there are powerful international norms of ‘best practice’ which become travelling policies and prescriptions for pedagogy. We explore one of these – learner-centred approaches – in the section below.

What have these to do with social progress and with the four goals of education as set out above? There are a number of issues around content and pedagogy which relate to the question of equity. The curriculum often caters far better for some parts of the population rather than others, and privileges particular forms of dominant knowledge that reinforce an unequal status quo. Language of instruction strongly governs access to the curriculum for learners. On the other hand, teaching ABOUT inequality through the use of critical thinking has the potential to interrupt cycles of reproduction. Much is learned too about one’s rightful place in society through the interactions that shape experiences of pedagogy. Teachers send out strong messages about who is able, who is powerful and who is in charge through how they interact with students. Classroom discussions may be dominated by boys, by dominant ethnic groups, by those whose parents are better educated, or by those with good language competency, disenfranchising others and reminding them of their lower status. When teachers tightly control tasks and activities there is little space for questioning of the status quo or for exploring what is of interest to learners whose life worlds are outside the norms established within curricular content that supports inequalities.

Schools are a primary site for socialization for children and adolescents in particular, for whom relationships with individuals outside the home gain increasing importance. Although schooling structures can be sites in which adolescents are socialized to reproduce existing social class hierarchies (Bourdieu, 2000), they are also – at least potentially - mechanisms for upward mobility. In particular, school social contexts have been found to be critically important sites for socialization towards schooling and career, with consequences for students’ educational outcomes (Hallinan, 2006). The relationships children form through school have been theorized to be instrumental in their access to resources and support. Transmitted through these relationships, the realization of academic and career goals can be fostered. The quality of these relationships has proven to be an important factor in youths’ academic achievement (Bryk & Schneider, 2002).

The four goals of education are supported – or undermined – by content and pedagogy. Much discourse around curriculum reform is couched in terms of preparing students for economic productivity, whether that means learning ‘the basics’ of literacy and numeracy, studying vocational subjects as preparation for specific jobs, or focusing on the so-called 21st century skills that support the knowledge economy (see below). The nature of civics as a subject area or cross-curricular theme – for example whether it is limited to knowledge about governmental structures and prescriptions about obedient citizens, or whether through critical pedagogy it questions inequalities and power – shapes understandings of the possibilities and limits of democratic political and civic participation. The Janus face of education’s relationship to equality is also in evidence in the roles of content and pedagogy. The curriculum has the potential to contribute to the redistribution of opportunity by debunking myths of in-group superiority; equally, it can reinforce social stratification when different curricula are offered to different groups of students and those groups align with relative privilege. Where learners are streamed into academic and vocational tracks there is often a correlation between socio-economic status and one’s place in the streams. As noted above, textbooks and other curricular resources can communicate messages to students that build or undermine their confidence in terms of what they can achieve. A pedagogy for equality is one which allows equal participation and promotes critical questioning of privilege.

One key area of international debate revolves around the development and implementation of initiatives and agendas such as Education for All (EFA), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and more recently the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular, it has been frequently argued that international efforts have focused far too narrowly on increasing access to formal education, without attending to the quality of learning actually taking place in schools. There has been a failure to ensure that schooling actually leads to education, resulting in a need to recapture the broad understanding of education and its purpose in future goals and frameworks. These critiques highlight the need for policy and practice to attend not just to learning outcomes, but also to the learning process and the role of pedagogy in providing quality education (United Nations, 2013). Linked to these educational policy discussions is a large body of academic work from disciplines such as development studies, development education and anthropology that has critiqued international development, and by extension education, initiatives and agendas for their tendency to rely on a ‘Western’ view of what constitutes ‘development’. Authors such as Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Arturo Escobar, Robert Chambers and James Ferguson have argued for a range of alternative conceptualizations of the term capable of providing space for indigenous and local knowledges, diverse understandings of what constitutes a ‘good life’, and acknowledgement of the effects of unequal global relationships. This shift in academic discourse has also run parallel to a shift in international development policy, which is increasingly moving away from an idea of ‘development’ being organized for the Global South by actors in the Global North (Skinner, Blum & Bourn, 2013).

Beyond all these restrictions and controversial discussions, the subjects and themes a global core curriculum might include have been described and are set out below. Additionally, identity formation as one highly relevant cross-subject theme is discussed in more detail.

3.3.2 Core curriculum for the 21st century

Among the striking features of contemporary global education is the consolidation of a globally recognized core curriculum. Such curriculum describes the subjects and themes that are considered the basis for those personal competencies and for the societal capacities that are required for 21st century progress worldwide (Trilling and Fadel, 2009; Rotherham and Willingham, 2010).

Whereas post World War II international education policies concentrated mostly on basic literacy, currently the global core curriculum includes a much expanded list of subjects and themes. Chief among them is STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), which is adjusted per education level to build the required general science and math knowledge and skills. In its expanded form STEM also includes environmental education, chemistry, physics, and computer sciences (Marginson et al., 2013). Alongside, global core curriculum also includes citizenship education, which generally includes civic and political skills, studies of international relations and human rights, multiculturalism and tolerance education (Cogan and Derricott, 2014). Last, the global core curriculum also incorporates post-literacy curriculum, referring to life-long learning and non-formal education and acknowledging the ever-changing conditions of global society and the need for continuous education and skilling of the labor force (Jakobi, 2009; Tuijnman, and Boström, 2002). These three general curricular areas – STEM, citizenship-, and post-literacy education – differ in their worldwide appeal: drawing upon the definition of science as a universal body of human knowledge, STEM is the most internationally standardized curricular areas, whereas citizenship- and post-literacy curricula are treated with greater sensitivity to local social traditions. And still, on the whole, all three curricular areas are included in international policy recommendations regarding education and progress.

The sweeping endorsement of this global core curriculum is predicated on the non-contested expectation that education is the mechanism for delivering social progress, namely prosperity, wellbeing, justice and security. Therefore, while education in general is hailed as the panacea for social ills and goods, the impact of the subjects and themes that are incorporated into the global core curriculum is specifically articulated. For example, STEM is commonly linked with the 21st century’s knowledge- and innovation economy; in a similar manner, citizenship education is assumed to guarantee political engagement, public responsibility, and social action. In these ways, education in general and the 21st century global core curriculum in particular are defined as both a means to a social end and as a human right.

The global core curriculum is set as a policy recommendation and its implementation worldwide is voluntary. Nevertheless, the authority of such education principals as UNESCO to specify and prescribe this curricular model propels the diffusion of the universalized curriculum to societies worldwide. Moreover, curricular and learning assessment tools that were designed to evaluate curricular development and implementation work to further articulate and even scale the globally recognized curriculum (Brinkeley et al., 2012). For example, UNESCO’s General Education Quality Analysis/Diagnosis Framework (GEQAF), which was designed to strengthen the capacities of national education authorities to monitor local education achievements and thus to allow for policy interventions, has been also responsible for the diffusion of isomorphic curricula across the world. Likewise, the testing and rankings scheme of OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) confirms the standing of reading, math and science as the three areas of global education competence.

The nature of globalisation demands that educational programs in all countries prepare young people to understand global relationships and concerns, cope with complex problems and live with rapid change and uncertainty. Insufficient recognition, particularly in LAMICs (low and middle income countries), of the importance of these issues in international education and development policy, not to mention research, undermines international efforts to engage all citizens around the world with developmental processes and debates in providing quality education to all.

3.3.3 Identity formation

Who am I? What shall I do with my life? Questions of identity can and do arise at many points in life, but they are particular and intense during adolescence. The term identity has been used to refer to many different phenomena, such as goals, values or beliefs. The term is also used to refer to people’s group affiliation and role in society. From a social-psychological and sociological perspective, individuals have multiple identities: one can be Indian, female and planning to be a teacher in the future. These various facets of identity converge to define the self (Schwartz, Donnellan, Ravert, Luychx, & Zamboanga, 2012).

In addition to being shaped by dispositions, motivations and individual experiences, the process of identity development can be influenced by the social and cultural environment. This is of particular relevance regarding schools as the most important institution adolescents are committed to (Lannegrand-Willems & Bosma, 2009). Adolescents in schooling in most countries spend a minimum of 20 hours a week during at least 10 months of the year.

There is, however, not only a lack of empirical research analyzing identity formation in school contexts, but also a lack of recommendations on how schools can actively contribute to identity formation in positive ways that promote individual choice and emancipation. Whereas people in the mid-20th century could develop their individual and collective identities within well-defined roles of work and partnership, today’s youth is challenged with identity issues prior to entering the workforce and committed partnerships. The transition from adolescence to adulthood has become far more extended, individualized and complex than in the mid-20th century. Consequently, schools are forced to systematically provide opportunities for students’ exploration of life and supporting identity formation in domains such as occupation, culture, religion, politics and gender roles. It is of particular importance that schools with students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds provide such opportunities for their students.

Cultural background and gender are significant aspects of identity in which schooling plays a significant role. For immigrants, school provides an opportunity to socialize. School is a place where both local and migrant children and youth spend a substantial part of the day. For many, school provides prolonged first-hand contact with people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, and is therefore an important context for forming peer relations. As a result, school has the potential to afford positive opportunities like friendships, learning about other cultures, understanding other ethnic groups; as well as negative experiences such as prejudice and racism, rejection and social exclusion, bullying and victimisation (Schofield, 1995) having either positive or negative effects on identity formation in the domain of culture.

Despite men and women, or boys and girls, formally having the same educational opportunities, gender differences still exist in students’ performance and motivation, in vocational aspirations, and also in salaries and the participation in different substantive fields. Gender-stereotyped expectations play a central role in the perpetuation of gender differences, as they determine behaviour of important others and thus lead to vicious cycles in the development of children’s gender-stereotyped motivation and performance and therefore their identity development. Overall men and women are typified to differ both in terms of achievement-oriented traits, labelled as agency, or instrumentality and in terms of social- and service-oriented traits, labelled as communion, or expressivity (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008). Men are characterized as aggressive, forceful, independent, and decisive (= agentic attributes), whereas women are characterized as kind, helpful, beautiful, and concerned about others (= communal attributes).

Gender-stereotyped expectations are often confirmed even though they are false, as expectations often lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and to perceptual biases (Jussim, Eccles, & Madon, 1996). In the context of education, gender-stereotyped expectations in particular concern interests, abilities and vocational aptitudes attributed to girls and boys (Kollmayer, Schober, & Spiel, 2016). In general, a positive view on heterogeneity should become a pivotal educational goal for teachers leading to the active promotion of students’ social competence and coping with diversity which also supports positive identity formation.

For realizing the described subjects and themes of education respective pedagogical measures are needed. In the following subsections two important trends in pedagogy are presented in more detail.

3.3.4 Learner-centred education

Learner-centred education (LCE) is a travelling policy and classroom practice which has gained international currency, not least due to its links – in theory – to education’s role in promoting social progress. The broad term ‘learner-centred education’ is an umbrella for a wide range of practices which emphasise different approaches to pedagogy and the curriculum, including, for example, inquiry-based learning, activity-based learning, critical pedagogy, and child-centred pedagogies. What they all have in common is their reaction against teacher-centric approaches such as lecturing and drilling, and their emphasis on learner control over what is studied and how.

Learner-centred practice has been associated with social progress in a number of ways [5] . By encouraging active participation by all individual learners, and by giving them greater control over the curriculum, it upholds Children’s Rights conventions and is assumed to facilitate the development of democratic skills. Critical versions of LCE encourage questioning of received knowledge and of authority, also essential for democracy and for social change. By acknowledging and accommodating individual differences in terms of interests, talents and preferred approaches to learning, in theory LCE has the potential to promote equality in the classroom, at least in terms of processes, if not outcomes. It also has the potential to promote learner engagement with schooling and by generating and channelling motivation, raise achievement across all groups of learners. LCE is also claimed to prepare all learners for the knowledge economy by creating flexible, lifelong learning practices that can respond to rapid change and the information revolution.

However, given the complexity and multiple interpretations of LCE, pedagogy’s close relationship to culture and to power interactions, and LCE’s export to low-and-middle-income countries especially during the late 20th century, it is perhaps not surprising that much of this potential has not been realised and that LCE’s assumed link to social progress has been questioned. The lack of evidence – or occasionally contradictory evidence – concerning the underpinning suppositions above are one source of critique. What is especially compelling, however, is that whatever the potential of LCE, it cannot be realised within mainstream schooling where it does not embed into local systems, and in many lower-income countries where it has been an import, there have been unintended consequences of the introduction of LCE through policy reform. Research has offered a range of reasons for this, including teachers unaccustomed to learner-centred approaches and with little preparation; assessment regimes which test a fixed curriculum and memorised knowledge; and a lack of resources to support a wider range of learning activities in classrooms. LCE has also been accused of being an individualistic and ‘Western’ approach which is not in harmony with indigenous approaches or locally-acceptable relationships of power distance between teachers and learners (Schweisfurth 2011). Beyond these issues of policy-practice gaps and accusations of neo-colonialism which have sometimes followed in lower-income contexts, research in the UK has suggested that not all learners are equally equipped to participate in learner-centred lessons, with already advantaged learners being more accustomed to stimulating learning activities and more practiced at expressing themselves (Bernstein 1971, Young 2013).

Despite these challenges, it is striking how successful LCE has been with adult learners, such as those based on Freirian approaches (Freire 1972), and in alternative schools outside of the mainstream, such as those that follow the Montessori model. It seems that LCE’s shortcomings are more to do with understandings of childhood and children’s places in the world, and the domination of particular modes of state schooling, than it does with its own failings.

What is perhaps needed is a new understanding of learner-centredness and approach to it. Policymakers and teachers can embrace its potential to uphold rights, encourage critical thinking and democratic exercise, and support the development of love for learning. However, given the cultural variations that will frame the enactment of such pedagogies, to be successful and to suit the local context it is essential that educational reform to pedagogy does not impose individualistic approaches where more collectivist ways of working are more culturally valued and have been educationally successful. Reforms must also avoid making inappropriate or unrealistic demands on teachers. The limitations of this cultural relativity are where pedagogical approaches violate rights (such as the use of corporal punishment) or perpetuate or create inequalities (for example by excluding students with less cultural capital).

3.3.5 The role of technology

Begin with the obvious: the most drastic change over the past generation to the lives of both teachers and students is the explosion of digital technology. In 1996, universities began to create websites, email was still a novelty, and cell phones were costly and looked like small radios. Research was conducted via card catalogue at libraries and in encyclopedias. Google and Wikipedia were yet to be born. Today the world looks utterly different. Access to the worldwide web, cellular technology and mobile computing, email, and social media have completely transformed what takes place inside and outside the schoolyard. Parents, teachers, and, above all others, students inhabit a hybrid world, interacting with distant others and information with ease.

The opportunity to communicate via technology -- email, social media, text message -- marks one massive shift in the experience of teaching and learning. A still larger shift is the digital accessibility of knowledge and information. The success and ubiquity of Google, whose stated mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” has forever changed how anyone connected to education can access knowledge on any topic. And technology has also begun to transform classroom lessons: teachers and students create online learning opportunities, including testing and assessment.

In recent years, technological innovation has done more than color the experience of teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom; it has threatened to replace the classroom entirely. The advent of “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, provide opportunities for children and adults alike to access educational opportunities, often for free (or no more than the price of an internet connection) anywhere in the world and at any time. It is too soon to assess whether MOOCs will be as “disruptive” to traditional brick-and-mortar schooling as some of their founders wish.

In contrast, the aims of on-line distance education in low and middle income countries are often different from those of the higher income countries. In the latter, moves to widen participation and lifelong learning for non-traditional learners are closely linked to the development of a strong knowledge economy. In contrast, in LAMICs motives for distance learning are often to provide basic and literacy education to large numbers of poor people, particularly in the rural areas. Lack of trained teachers has meant that several open learning initiatives in LAMICs have focused on educating and training their unqualified teaching force. In sum, there is a variety of open and distance learning methods that have been successfully implemented with an outreach to the poorer and deprived groups in LAMICs.

It is widely suggested that online technologies can help address issues of educational equity and social exclusion, and open up democratic and accessible educational opportunities. The national governments and non-government agencies who funded endeavours in LAMICs have advocated the use of new technologies to reduce the cost of reaching and educating large numbers of children and adults who are currently missing out on education. However, the present IT provisions in LAMICs is limited to the urban elite. Existing infrastructures allow only a few to develop communication and interaction skills and to become part of the new social networking paradigm. Education for the masses continues to be didactic and devoid of interaction and critique. And while e-learning may offer the opportunity to shift the distance learning paradigm from delivering of content towards learner-centred and discussion-led learning, continuing reliance on print material and broadcast technologies dominates in LAMICs (Gulati 2008). The IT access gap is contributing to the widening digital divide between haves and haves not in LAMICs. Furthermore, using online education needs both high motivation and self-regulated learning competencies. Therefore, as it was outlined in the section on LCE not all learners are prepared to profit from technology based education as online courses.

Many of these technologies – email and the web, for instance – are so ubiquitous that we no longer see them as innovative; they are merely the medium through which we do business. But much more remains to be done in order to realize the educational promise of technology. For one, there is a digital divide between haves and have-nots, and extending access to the web through cellular and broadband technologies must be a global priority. Beyond access, we need much more research on how most effectively to adopt blended learning strategies and to incorporate online learning opportunities in the classroom. But there is evidence, that online education often lacks respective didactical concepts and is not solidly based on learning theories. Mostly, the technology dominates educational concepts and models. The idea that often has driven the adoption of technology in education is to save money and time. But the contrast is the case. High quality and successful use of ICT in education needs time and money.

3.3.6 Conclusions and recommendations

While there is ever greater recognition of the need to focus on pedagogy and learning, and the development of critical approaches to education that incorporate diverse perspectives and skills, uncertainty remains about precisely how to achieve this in practical terms. Just as teachers cannot overhaul the education system alone, nations cannot counteract worldwide deficiencies in education systems in isolation. All countries will face consequences if today’s learners are not adequately prepared to collaborate and resolve the world’s economic, environmental, health, social, and political challenges. All can contribute to a global pool of expertise on how best to implement 21st century learning by forming alliances to overcome obstacles to overhauling education.

In the following we provide recommendations for content and pedagogy addressing all three levels mentioned before (macro, meso, micro):

Curriculum developers and teachers need to ensure that the curriculum does not privilege particular ethnic, socio-economic, gender or other groups through embedded stereotypes or differential access.
Further research is needed on the interactions that shape identity in different contexts, and how the curriculum and pedagogical relationships can nurture positive identity construction of the self, the group, and the other.
Policymakers and teachers need to embrace the potential of pedagogy to uphold rights, encourage critical thinking and democratic exercise, and support the development of love for learning. However, learner-centred and related approaches need to be adapted to suit the local context within a framework of human and child rights and equality.
More research is needed on how most effectively to adopt blended learning strategies and to incorporate online learning opportunities in the classroom, while minimizing the effects of the digital divide.
LAMICs, wherein only a small proportion of the population has Internet access, need to realize the disparities between rural and urban communities, male and female students, and elite and non-elite groups. They need to consider how to adapt global software and hardware to benefit all of their citizens. This also holds true for those from the Global North advising on and supporting education in LAMICs. The critical challenge is to educate students and teachers to the use of computers and develop accessible infrastructures so that they benefit from the interactivity offered by online learning.
In the future, curricular reform will most likely be required to balance core subjects and new 21st century skills. This will also require fresh thinking about performance measures to overcome legitimate concerns that there has been limited progress toward recognizing and rewarding skill development that cannot be detected in an end-of-term assessment.
Accountability will be more essential than ever in 21st century education systems. It will be important to measure accurately the impact of new skills and pedagogy in the classroom to bring about new and improved outcomes.
The roles of educational institutions in the future and their capacity to radically transform themselves remain uncertain. Every nation has its own vision of what a 21st century education should look like. Innovations that produce successful learning in one nation can have a ripple effect as other nations adopt and adapt these methods for their own use. With increased international cooperation and collaboration, all can participate in building a global learning network as dominant and pervasive as existing international networks in business, finance and communications.

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Table XIX.1 : Specific competencies of educators and administrators for result-oriented quality development in educational institutions (CROQD)

[1] Affiliations : University of Vienna, Austria ; Stanford University, USA

[2] Affiliations : University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA ; University of Konstanz, Germany ; CHET, South Africa ; Hebrew University, Israel ; Institute for Advanced Studies — IHS Vienna, Austria ; University of Vienna, Austria ; Institute for Studies on Labor and Society, Brazil ; University of Glasgow, UK ; Panjab University, India

[3] Affiliations : CHET, South Africa

[4] Data on GDP per capita are taken from: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD (accessed August 2, 2016)

[5] The narratives which follow are drawn from Schweisfurth 2013.

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Present Levels (Component of the IEP)

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IDEA requires that each IEP must include a statement of the child’s present levels of academic achievement and functional performance. This part of the IEP is commonly referred to as the “ present levels statement .” For short, we’re just going to call it “present levels.”

If you’d like to know more about it– the information to include, where to get it from, and the importance of this statement overall to the IEP that’s developed– keep reading!

IDEA’s exact words
A closer look at “present levels”
Where does the information come from?
“Present levels” for preschoolers

______________________

IDEA’s Exact Words

It’s always helpful to know exactly what the IDEA says. So here’s the verbatim requirement for this component of the IEP, with the lead-in that…

Each child’s IEP must contain…

(1) A statement of the child’s present levels of academic achievement and functional performance, including—

(i) How the child’s disability affects the child’s involvement and progress in the general education curriculum (i.e., the same curriculum as for nondisabled children); or

(ii) For preschool children, as appropriate, how the disability affects the child’s participation in appropriate activities…

And what does this mean —present levels of academic achievement and functional performance? Let’s take a closer look, because a lot of the other information in the IEP will rise out of this “present levels” statement.

A Closer Look at “Present Levels”

Picture of a young boy, sitting atop a bookshelf in the classroom.

Academic achievement. According to the Department:

“Academic achievement” generally refers to a child’s performance in academic areas (e.g., reading or language arts, math, science, and history). We believe the definition could vary depending on a child’s circumstance or situation, and therefore, we do not believe a definition of “academic achievement” should be included in these regulations. (71 Fed. Reg. at 46662)

Thus, when we’re talking about “academic achievement,” we’re talking about the academic subjects a child studies in school and the skills the student is expected to master in each: reading and language arts, writing, math and the various skills expected there, science, history, and so on.

Children’s circumstances will vary, as the Department notes, which means that the examination of the child’s academic achievement and performance is an individualized consideration. Where does that child stand academically, and—a critical question—how does the child’s disability affect his or her involvement and progress in the general education curriculum? The “present levels” statement must contain a description that answers these questions.

Functional performance . With respect to the meaning of “functional performance,” the Department of Education points to how the term is generally understood as referring to “skills or activities that are not considered academic or related to a child’s academic achievement.” This term “is often used in the context of routine activities of everyday living.” The reason that examples of functional skills were not included in IDEA was because “the range of functional skills is as varied as the individual needs of children with disabilities” (71 Fed. Reg. at 46661). But we can understand that “routine activities of everyday living” refer to skills and activities of daily living skills such as:

dressing, eating, going to the bathroom;
social skills such as making friends and communicating with others;
behavior skills, such as knowing how to behave across a range of settings; and
mobility skills, such as walking, getting around, going up and down stairs.

All of these types of skills are important to consider when writing the child’s “present levels” statement, asking questions such as: Where does the child stand in terms of functional performance? How does the child’s disability affect functional performance and, from there, his or her involvement and progress in the general education curriculum?

As with academic achievement, consideration of a child’s functional performance is highly individualized.

You also won’t find a description in IDEA of how functional skills are measured, “because this is a decision that is best left to public agencies, based on the needs of their children.” ( Id .) However, the Department goes on to note that:

[T]he evaluation procedures used to measure a child’s functional skills must meet the same standards as all other evaluation procedures [described in IDEA at §300.304(c)(1)]. (71 Fed. Reg. at 46661)

When all is said and done, then, the IEP Team must talk about the impact of the child’s disability on his or her ability to learn and do the kinds of things that typical, nondisabled children learn and do. This is the information that is then included in the IEP as the “present levels” statement. Back to top

Examples can be very illustrative, so we have included several below. None is a complete “present levels” statement, of course. These snippets are provided to suggest the range of information and detail you might find in a “present levels” statement.

Elise is essentially non-verbal and uses many ways to communicate including: gestures, facial expression, eye gaze, vocalizations, word approximations, head nods for yes, head shakes for no, and use of a Dynavox 3100 augmentative communication device which she accesses with a head switch.
Lawrence needs a quiet, separate place to do individual work.
Terri learns quickly when working in a small group.
Zung understands and remembers what he hears about a subject. Learning by reading or looking at pictures is difficult for him and doesn’t work as well.
Kim imitates other children and learns from them.
Results of standardized testing using the Woodcock-Johnson Revised (WJ-R) show Mario’s basic reading skills are at a beginning-4th grade level (standard score = 89). His basic writing skills are at a 3.7 grade level (standard score = 81).
David’s performance in basic reading and writing is significantly below his ability. David makes errors when he reads and has trouble decoding long words, but his comprehension skills are strong. He uses context cues and picture cues to help him understand what he is reading.

If the child is new to special education, the information used to craft the “present levels” statement will come from the tests and observations done during the child’s evaluation for eligibility. If the child’s IEP is being revised, the information may come from evaluations done during the year (by the school or from an Independent Educational Evaluation or IEE. Teachers and others who work with the child may offer information gained during the child’s day-to-day school routine. Parents also share information that help shape the child’s “present levels” statement.

“Present Levels” for Preschoolers

Oh, and one more thing about the “present levels” statement. If we’re talking about a preschool child, the statement will be a bit different.

In this circumstance, “present levels” won’t be talking about how the preschooler’s disability affects his or her participation in the general education curriculum. For preschoolers, the statement needs to talk about how the disability affects the child’s participation in appropriate activities—meaning preschool activities. Those are often different than what school-age children are involved in and include things like learning basic skills such as using scissors, coloring, grouping things, learning your letters, playing children’s games, and so on. So the “present levels” statement for a preschooler will describe how the child’s disability affects his or her participation and success in the preschool environment.

Here are two examples:

Dayton prefers to play in isolation and becomes upset (e.g., cries and hits others) when another child comes too close. As a result his peer interactions at playtime are limited.
Damien’s attention problems result in failure to follow the teacher’s directions, talking out of turn and responding inappropriately during group activities.

The “present levels” statement is intended to comprehensively describe a child’s abilities, performance, strengths, and needs. It is based on, and arises out of, all the information and data previously collected and known about the child, most especially the full and individual evaluation of the child that must be conducted in accordance with IDEA’s evaluation/eligibility provisions of §§300.301 through 300.311. A well-written present level will describe:

the child’s strengths and weaknesses,
what helps the child learn,
what limits or interferes with the child’s learning,
objective data from current evaluations of the child, and
how the child’s disability affects his or her ability to be involved and progress in the general curriculum.

A fully developed, well-written “present levels” is the foundation upon which the rest of the IEP can be developed to specify appropriate goals, services, supports, accommodations, and placement for the child.

________________________________________

Sources for the examples of “present levels” come from:

Anderson, W., Chitwood, S., & Hayden, D. (1997). Negotiating the special education maze: A guide for parents and teachers (3rd ed.). Bethesda, MD: Woodbine House.

New York State Education Department. (2005, December). Sample individualized education program (IEP) and guidance document . Explore current guidance on writing present levels statements at: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/specialed/publications/iepguidance/present.htm

Rebhorn, T. (2009). Developing your child’s IEP. A Parent’s Guide, 12 , 1-28. Available online at: https://www.parentcenterhub.org/pa12/

**Highly Rated Resource! This resource was reviewed by 3-member panels of Parent Center staff working independently from one another to rate the quality, relevance, and usefulness of CPIR resources. This resource was found to be of “High Quality, High Relevance, High Usefulness” to Parent Centers. ________________________________________

Would you like to read about another component of the IEP?

If so, use the links below to jump there quickly.

Present Levels How is the child currently doing in school? How does the disability affect his or her performance in class? This type of information is captured in the “present levels” statement in the IEP.

Annual Goals Once a child’s needs are identified, the IEP team works to develop appropriate goals to address those needs. Annual goal describe what the child is expected to do or learn within a 12-month period.

Benchmarks or Short-Term Objectives Benchmarks or short-term objectives are required only for children with disabilities who take alternate assessments aligned to alternate achievement standards. If you’re wondering what that means, this article will tell you!

Measuring and Reporting Progress Each child’s IEP must also contain a description of how his or her progress toward meeting the annual goals will be measured and when it will be reported to parents. Learn more about how to write this statement in this short article.

Special Education The IEP must contain a statement of the special education and related services and supplementary aids and services to be provided to the child, or on behalf of the child. This article focuses on the first element: a statement of the special education that will be provided for the child.

Related Services To help a child with a disability benefit from special education, he or she may also need extra help in one area or another, such as speaking or moving. This additional help is called related services . Find out all about these critical services here.

Supplementary Aids and Services Supplementary aids and services are intended to improve children’s access to learning and their participation across the spectrum of academic, extracurricular, and nonacademic activities and settings. The IEP team must determine what supplementary aids and services a child will need and specify them in the IEP.

Program Modifications for School Personnel Also part of the IEP is identifying the program modifications or supports for school personnel that will be provided. Read more here.

Extent of Nonparticipation The IEP must also include an explanation of the extent, if any, to which the child will not participate with nondisabled children in the regular class and in other school settings and activities. Read how this connects to IDEA’s foundational principle of LRE.

Accommodations in Assessment IDEA requires that students with disabilities take part in state or districtwide assessments . The IEP team must decide if the student needs accommodations in testing or another type of assessment entirely. In this component of the IEP, the team documents how the student will participate.

Service Delivery When will the child begin to receive services? Where? How often? How long will a “session” last? Pesky details, but important to include in the IEP!

Transition Planning Beginning no later than a student’s 16th birthday (and younger, if appropriate), the IEP must contain transition-related plans designed to help the student prepare for life after secondary school.

Age of Majority Beginning at least one year before the student reaches the age of majority, the IEP must include a statement that the student has been told about the rights (if any) that will transfer to him or her at age of majority. What is “age of majority” and what does this statement in the IEP look like?

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Title II, Part A Resources and Guidance
Specialized Programs

The IEP Module 3

Welcome to the third module in a five-part series on the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process. The previous modules discussed recent changes in California law that affected some elements of the process, and activities required to occur before the IEP is developed.

This module addresses the process of IEP development once the IEP team is prepared to meet.

Module 4 involves a training activity using actual IEPs, to put show how the information in this series is put into practice. And Module 5 addresses some additional considerations for IEP development.

All of the Modules are archived at the Assembly Bill (AB) 114 web page at www.cde.ca.gov. Individuals seeking information on the IEP process are encouraged to consider viewing any or all of the other modules in this series.

Before we proceed, we want to point out some acronyms that commonly appear in this presentation. It is helpful to be familiar with these acronyms because they are commonly used in both written guidance among educational entities and in discussions among individuals involved in the development of Individualized Education Programs.

IDEA – Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – This is the title of the federal law that establishes the educational benefits and services to which students are entitled, and for which local educational agencies are responsible.

IEP – Individualized Education Program – The IEP describes the plan for the student’s educational program, including current performance levels, student goals, and the educational placement and other services the student will receive.

CMH – County Mental Health Agencies – These agencies were, until recently, responsible for the mental health element of services provided to eligible students. They often continue to provide services to students, although in a different context than in prior years.

LEA – Local Educational Agency – In most cases, this term refers to a local school district, but LEAs also include county offices of education, Special Education Local Plan Areas, and charter schools.

This module provides an overview of required elements of the IEP development process, particularly in light of changes to California’s structure for serving students with disabilities. Specific topics include using the concept of Educational Benefit in determining appropriate services, assuring that the student is served in the least restrictive environment appropriate, describing the services the student will receive based on recent changes in state law, and considerations in development of the initial IEP and subsequent revisions to address changing student needs.

As you may recall from Module 2, if the IEP team determines that a student is eligible to receive special education services, an IEP must be developed for the student. Each IEP is required by law to include several specific elements:

“Present levels of performance” describe the student’s current abilities and provide an understanding of the student’s strengths and areas in which support is needed when the IEP is written, and how the student’s disability affects the student’s access to the curriculum. Present levels of performance also establish a baseline against which the student’s progress over the term of the IEP can be measured.
Additionally, in each area addressed in the IEP, the IEP team must establish measureable goals to guide service providers in meeting the students needs, and to determine whether the student is making expected progress over the course of the IEP.
The IEP must also include a clear description of all services the student will receive, including the level and location at which instruction will be provided, and any additional services and modifications the student will receive to enable the student to progress academically. For each service, the IEP must provide details on the frequency, duration and location of the service, and any accommodations for statewide testing must be clearly described.
Also, any accommodations to statewide testing the student is to receive must be clearly described in the IEP.

Coherence in the IEP document is critical to ensuring that the student is properly served. Assessment data provides information about the student’s strengths, expected progress, and supports required to progress academically. The student’s present levels of performance in academics and other key areas, informed by assessment, are to be clearly described so that needed supports are identified and provided, and future performance results can be compared to current status to determine how the student is progressing. Present levels of performance assist the IEP team in identifying the student’s needs associated with the student’s disability. Measurable annual goals and objectives, based on present levels of performance and expected progress, provide the student and the IEP team the means to measure whether the student is succeeding, and whether current services and supports are effective. Services provided to the student reflect identified needs, assuring that challenges created by the disability are reasonably offset by these additional supports. A description of the student’s progress on annual goals assist the IEP team in determining that the IEP is effectively serving the student, or alternatively, assists in identifying where the student is struggling and determining appropriate changes or additions to the student’s current related services.

Federal law has established standards for determining whether a student with disabilities is receiving appropriate instruction and services to allow the student access to educational opportunity, taking into consideration whether the disabilities the student has are addressed to the extent that they don’t create barriers to the student’s access to education.

It is important to note that these standards established in law do not call for the student to have the best of all services, but rather that the student has sufficient services to address the barriers that the student’s disabilities may present. These federal standards are based on some important principles, which are fairly basic concepts, but must be interpreted and applied based on the specific circumstances of each student.

The first of these concepts is referred to as “reasonable calculation”. When judging whether an LEA is meeting it’s responsibility to provide educational opportunity to a student with disabilities, we determine whether the student’s IEP provides the student with a “reasonable opportunity” to progress in the curriculum. If, based on the information available, the IEP team appeared to provide the student with a “reasonable opportunity” to progress academically, even if additional services may have provided a higher level of support for the student, the IEP team is deemed to have met its responsibility. In short, “reasonable opportunity to learn” does not equate to “perfect conditions for learning”.

The other concept that supports whether the LEA has met its responsibilities is that of “educational benefit”. We discuss this concept on the following slides.

The concept of ‘educational benefit” resulted from a key federal court case was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. The case, “Board of Education vs. Rowley, considered the circumstances of a young partially-deaf student. The student, very bright and with good lip-reading skills, had been placed in a regular education classroom by the IEP team, and was provided additional services from a special tutor and a speech therapist. The dispute hinged on whether the student should also have a sign language interpreter in the classroom. Such an interpreter had been placed in the classroom for a brief trial period, but the interpreter observed that the student was able to understand the teacher without the interpreter’s help. The school administration determined that the interpreter was not needed and eliminated that service. The parents challenged that decision based on their belief that the student would understand much more of what was happening in class if an interpreter was provided. A lower court agreed, stating that the student was not receiving a “free, appropriate public education” which it defined as “an opportunity to achieve (the student’s) full potential commensurate with the opportunity provided to other children.

The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, who ruled differently, concluding that a free, appropriate public education does not guarantee any specific outcome for students, such as “achieving one’s full potential”, and that given the student’s apparent success, including performing academically better than average and advancing successfully from grade to grade, it concluded that the student was being served well, and was receiving a free and appropriate education that was resulting in an appropriate educational benefit. This quotation from the majority opinion on the case provides some of the basis for this ruling.

The Rowley decision has become the basis for the definition of what was intended by the term “free appropriate public education” and more specifically, what LEAs should be expected to provide in serving students with disabilities.

Note that this quote refers to “other items on the definitional checklist.”

The “checklist” refers to a statutory four-part definition of FREE APPROPRIATE PUBLIC EDUCATION.—The term ‘free appropriate public education’ means special education and related services that—

‘‘(A) have been provided at public expense, under public supervision and direction, and without charge; ‘‘(B) meet the standards of the State educational agency; ‘‘(C) include an appropriate preschool, elementary school, or secondary school education in the State involved; and ‘‘(D) are provided in conformity with the individualized education program required under section 614(d).

The combination of the concepts of “educational benefit” and “reasonable calculation” provides a general guideline for LEAs in determining an appropriate level of services for students with disabilities:

Students are entitled to receive specialized instruction and related services that allow the student to make reasonable progress toward educational goals, based on the needs and strengths of the student. The IEP team’s decision as to the types of instruction and services the student receives are to be reasonably calculated to result in an appropriate level of academic success for the student, including, when appropriate, achieving passing marks and advancing from grade to grade.

Under the Rowley Standard, the expectation is not necessarily that students achieve to their maximum potential, or that they will receive instruction and services that give them the ideal conditions for academic success, but rather that instruction and services are appropriately designed, considering the individual student’s needs and strengths, to give the student a reasonable opportunity to access the curriculum and make progress toward appropriate annual academic goals.

So, to meet the Educational Benefit expectations, the IEP team needs to keep two important points in mind:

The elements of the student’s IEP work together toward the objective of ensuring that the student will have an opportunity to progress academically, and the combination of the student’s instructional placement and related services all contribute to that outcome; and,
The IEP addresses the specific needs and current levels of performance of the student, and sets appropriate performance goals based on the student’s current circumstances that will demonstrate that the student is receiving sufficient support to progress toward annual goals.

Both of these points intend the IEP team to focus on outcomes for the student, and to make placement and service decisions toward that end. This outcome-based approach is most likely to ensure that the student is appropriately served and that the school district fulfills its responsibilities under federal law. Also, using an outcomes-based approach allows for the quality of the LEA’s service and the appropriateness of the IEP to be measured in terms of how the student progresses.

These questions should be considered when developing or revising a student’s IEP. They will assist the IEP team in ensuring that the resulting IEP is designed to provide the student Educational Benefit.

Note that these questions correspond with key elements of the Educational Benefit process, including:

The importance of assessment information and identifying present levels of performance in determining appropriate educational placement and related services;
The importance of establishing specific performance goals for the student to identify areas in which progress is needed, and to determine whether intended progress is being achieved; and,
The focus on support for meeting specific goals when identifying the educational placement and services for the student.

If the LEA is able to accurately answer “yes” to each of the first six questions, the answer to the last question is “yes”.

The situation is more complex when a student fails to make progress. In such cases it is the subsequent actions of the IEP team that determine whether the LEA is fulfilling its responsibilities. If, for example, a student fails to make progress and the IEP team makes changes to services in areas where the student demonstrates the need for more support, that action is consistent with the concept of educational benefit. If, however, the student fails to make progress and the IEP team continues the same services and instructional context for the student, it is not reasonable to conclude that the student’s new IEP has been reasonably calculated to result in educational benefit. In instances in which the student has not made anticipated academic progress since the last IEP, the IEP team is expected to identify the area(s) in which the student has not made expected progress, determine whether the student’s progress goals are appropriate, review the types of services the student has received, and make appropriate revisions to the students goals, services, and/or educational placement to address the lack of progress and provide the student with an IEP that is likely to support the student’s academic progress based on the information now available to the IEP team.

Another important concept to address in the IEP is Least Restrictive Environment (LRE). Federal law requires that a student’s educational placement reflects LRE. As much as possible while meeting the student’s academic needs, the student should be included in regular education classes, with additional support as needed, and attend school in a location as close to the student’s home environment as can reasonably be achieved. Placement in special classes or settings should be limited to instances where the student’s academic needs cannot be met in regular settings, and residential placement should be avoided if possible. When it is determined that a student needs residential placement, the placement should be as temporary as possible, with the goal being to return the student to the home environment. This chart describes the range of LRE placements for a student on an IEP: Less restrictive environments include regular education classrooms, with support services provided in or out of those classrooms, and residence in the student’s home. More restrictive environments include either separate classrooms serving only special education students, or separate schools, such as nonpublic schools that serve only students with special needs, and residential placement. Placement in more restrictive environments is only to occur when placement in a less restrictive environment does not allow the student to receive the supports and services needed to effectively access the general curriculum.

The requirement to place a student in the LRE generally requires the LEA to have an array of placement options. Because students have differing needs and abilities, the LRE for one student would be an inappropriate placement for another. While some students may be served effectively by full inclusion in regular education classrooms and some ancillary support services, other students would not have their educational needs met in such a placement, and for them LRE might necessarily include full-time placement in a nonpublic school and residential placement for a period of time. Note that LRE is defined as being placed with non-disabled peers to the greatest extent appropriate. LRE placement, therefore, will vary from student to student, taking into consideration the student’s needs and appropriate placement based on those needs. This list represent a number of common placements that an LEA should have in its array of program options to ensure that all students have access to the LRE based on their needs and abilities.

In addition to determining where a student will be served (placement), the IEP team must determine what services the student will receive. Most students with disabilities will require additional services to support their access to academic instruction. California law provides a list of related services commonly provided to students with disabilities, and the certification or licensure requirements for individuals providing these services. When identifying in the IEP the specific services a student is to receive, IEP teams should use the service descriptions and definitions in 5 California Code of Regulations (CCR) 3065, and listed here, to ensure clarity and consistency between IEP language and state law governing provision of these services.

One complication resulting in the transition in service delivery from CMH to LEAs is that, given that these entities have operated under different portions of law, terminology they use is not consistent. Some services identified in law governing CMH agencies (Title 2) are not identified in education law (IDEA, CA Title 5), or are identified differently. For example, Title 2 references “individual/group psychotherapy”. Title 5 references several services that may fit within the definition of “individual/group psychotherapy”, such as “counseling, “psychological services” and “social work services” but not “individual/group psychotherapy”. Also, while “case management” is identified as a discrete service in Title 2, the IDEA and Title 5 do not speak to “case management”. Consequently, when reviewing the services identified in a continuing special education student’s IEP, the LEA may need to change the way those services are identified to ensure that service terminology is consistent with the education law that governs IEP development.

Once appropriate related services are identified for the student, the IEP team must provide these four descriptors for each service the student will receive: 1) when the service begins; 2) frequency; 3) location; 4) duration. Each service must be provided as stated unless and until the IEP team amends the IEP at a later time. Recall from the previous slide that services must be described based on language in education law, so some services provided to students under the prior structure may need to be described differently in the student’s current IEP. Services that were bundled under a single term, such as “day treatment” or “wraparound” will need to be “unbundled” in the student’s current IEP, with each service in the bundle listed separately with the four descriptive elements provided. As with all services, those separate services are to be identified using the list of related services that appears in education law.

The concept of “bundling” services comes from programs that provide a menu of services for students, such as Day Treatment. Day Treatment is actually a set of individual services that are provided when needed. Some services may be scheduled, while others may be provided whenever the need arises. This approach conflicts with the more specific requirement that services identified in an IEP must include frequency, location, and duration in their descriptions, so the “as needed” approach is problematic when developing an IEP.

IEP language must be precise, because it establishes the specific services to which a student is entitled based on an assessment of the student’s needs. If the services to be provided to a student do not include specificity concerning frequency, location, and duration, it is difficult or impossible to determining whether the student is receiving the services intended by the IEP team.

Instead of identifying a set of services in its bundled form on an IEP, such as “Day Treatment”, the IEP team is expected to describe in some detail each of the specific services within the day treatment program, including the frequency, location and duration of each service, so that all involved in the student’s education have a clear understanding and accurate expectation of services the student will receive.

The following slides provide greater detail on how this “unbundling” process can work.

This graphic provides some guidance to LEAs for unbundling services that may previously have been identified generally as “Day Treatment”. Services noted in the left column are specific services often included in Day Treatment service plans offered by mental health agencies. Services in the right column are services identified in federal and state education law as “related services”.

LEAs are strongly encouraged to identify services based on education law, so they should refer to the right column and use the service terms noted there.

Also, in all cases the services are to be identified individually rather than using the general term “Day Treatment”. If a student’s Day Treatment program includes counseling services and recreation services for the student, and parent counseling and training for parents, each of those three services is to be identified in the IEP individually, not as a single service under the title “Day Treatment.

As a reminder, every service description is to include the duration, frequency, and location of each service, so in the example above, each of the three services need to have a clear description of the frequency, duration, and location of the service. This way, it is clear to all individuals involved in the student’s education what is to be expected concerning the provision of each service.

As with Day Treatment, it has been common in the past for IEPs to include a set of services called “wraparound”. Given that wraparound is also actually a set of services, and the set of included services may differ among providers, using the term to describe services in the IEP is not specific enough to meet federal requirements. Again, it is critical that those involved in the student’s education clearly understand the services called for in the student’s IEP, including the specific type of service(s) to be provided, and the frequency, duration, and location of each service.

The solution for unbundling wraparound services is the same as is used to unbundle day treatment services. Specific services provided under wraparound must be identified, then “translated” using the terms for related services cited in education law, then listed individually in the IEP and further defined in terms of frequency, duration and location.

This graphic provides some guidance in the process of “translating” services provided in a wraparound program into service terms identified in education law.

Note that most service terms used in wraparound (shown in the left column here) have multiple related terms in education law. In such cases it is necessary to select the term in the right column that best describes the service actually being provided to the student under the general term shown in the left column.

When additional information is needed concerning any of the services noted in the right column, LEAs and IEP team members are encouraged to access the definitions established in California regulations for these services.

Title 5 Section 3065 includes a list of identified related services, the specific definition of each service, and types of certification or licensure that authorize individuals to provide these services. When struggling to identify the specific service from the right column that best describes the services being provided to the student in the category in the left column, it may be helpful to review the definition of each service from the right column as it is described in Title 5 Section 3065.

Given that fact that the assessment process and service terminology used are changing with the transition of mental health service responsibilities from CMH to LEAs, the IEP team may identify a need to change one or more of the services the student has been receiving.

It is important to be aware of requirements and conditions that pertain to changing the IEP. First, changes to services must be based on new information about the student, such as changes in the student’s progress, or newly identified needs. Also, changes must be clearly reflected in IEP revisions, and only upon approval by the IEP team. If the service is not changing, including service type, duration, and frequency, but the LEA will be providing the service through a different provider, the IEP does not need to be formally amended unless it states the specific provider providing the services. However, LEAs are encouraged to provide prior written notice to the parent/guardian when the service provider changes.

In cases in which the change in services involves more than just a change of service provider, the formal IEP revision process is required, including changes to the language defining the service and approval of the change by the IEP team.

There are legal requirements that apply in most cases when changes are being made to a student’s IEP. First, some changes may only be made if new information is available to the IEP team that justifies the change. That information is described in the center of this chart. If the change relates to goals or services for the student, for example, that change must be based on progress information or new assessment information that justifies the change.

Specific actions by the IEP team are often also required when a change is made. Those actions are described in the right column of this chart. For example, if the IEP team is changing the goals, services, or placement for a student, a full IEP team meeting is required, as well as prior written notice to the parent or guardian.

On the other hand, if the LEA is changing the service provider for the student, but there is no change in the actual service, its frequency or duration, then no basis for the change or action by the IEP team is technically required. However, the CDE does recommend that the parent or guardian is notified when any change to the student’s services is made, even if it is only a change of service providers.

Review each of these questions and consider a response based on the information we have reviewed. We will discuss the answers in a minute.

In order to ensure that specific legal requirements are fulfilled and that the IEP is designed to provide Educational Benefit.
ED Ben is individualized instruction designed to provide students the opportunity to benefit from special education and related services. To achieve this outcome, IEPs are designed based on present levels of performance, goals, placements, services, and progress to ensure that the student’s program is reasonably calculated to result in appropriate educational progress.
The least restrictive environment.
Date related service begins, frequency, duration, location, and date service concludes.
No. Each specific service needs to be described individually.
Yes changes can be made based on progress and new assessment data, but the decision to change services must be approved by the student’s IEP team, and the IEP must be amended to reflect the decision of the team.

This has been the third of five modules on the IEP process and related activities, many of which have been affected by changes in California law. This module is designed to be viewed on its own, or in combination with any or all of the other modules in this series.

The fourth module will include training related to IEP development and review using concepts we have discussed in the first three modules. The training will include using actual IEPs to consider the quality of IEP language concerning present levels of performance, assessment results, goals and service descriptions, the alignment of all of these elements, and their effectiveness in providing Educational Benefit. Viewers will be instructed to download training materials, then they will be led through a set of exercises intended to provide a practical understanding of the concepts addressed in this series.

We encourage you to consider viewing the fourth module (and the others in this series) to address additional professional learning needs of your group.

Other modules include: Module 1 – Changes to special education service provision resulting from the passage of AB 114; Module 2 – Requirements for LEAs, from Child Find to the IEP Team meeting; and Module 5 – Additional Considerations for IEP Development.

For more information on a variety of issues related to the passage of Assembly Bill 114, please visit the AB 114 web page on the California Department of Education website. For other information about California Public Schools, visit the CDE home page .

Here are several additional resources that provide more detailed information on the subjects addressed in this series.

AB 114 Special Education Transition Transition of Special Education and Related Services Formerly Provided by County Mental Health Agencies (Assembly Bill 114, Chapter 43, Statutes of 2011).
Parents' Rights
Laws, Regulations, & Policies
The IEP Module 3 (this page)
Complaint Process
Local Educational Agency Grants
California Special Education Local Plan Areas
Resources on IEPs for Students with Disabilities
California Parent Organizations
CALPADS Special Education Data Spring Roadshows (updated 19-Apr-2024) removed by RO --> California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS) Regional trainings in Spring 2024 to inform local educational agencies (LEAs) with updates and changes to the collection of data for students with disabilities. removed by RO -->
ACSE Agenda April 17-18, 2024 (updated 18-Apr-2024) removed by RO --> Advisory Commission on Special Education (ACSE) meeting agenda. removed by RO -->
A New Pathway to a High School Diploma (updated 04-Apr-2024) removed by RO --> An Alternative High School Diploma for Students who qualify for the California Alternate Assessment. removed by RO -->
California's Annual State Application for 2024 (added 22-Mar-2024) removed by RO --> Annual State Application under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be submitted by May 22, 2024, for federal fiscal year (FFY) 2024. removed by RO -->
FMTA Consultant Assignments by Region (updated 20-Mar-2024) removed by RO --> The Focused Monitoring and Technical Assistance (FMTA) Consultants are assigned geographically and by quality assurance activity to align with the eleven California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSESA) regions. removed by RO -->
Cyclical Monitoring for Small LEAs (updated 15-Mar-2024) removed by RO --> This is the home page for local educational agencies (LEAs) that have been selected for Special Education Cyclical Monitoring. removed by RO -->
Special Education Resource Leads (updated 08-Mar-2024) removed by RO --> The Special Education Resource Leads (SERLs) are part of the California Statewide System of Support. removed by RO -->
Grazer Outstanding Achievement in Learning (updated 06-Mar-2024) removed by RO --> Grazer Outstanding Achievement in Learning (GOAL) Award background information and application. removed by RO -->

IMAGES

Learning process infographic 10 steps concept Vector Image
Flat concept of education processes with icons Vector Image
Education process concept 438828 Vector Art at Vecteezy
Present Education System
Steps of Education Process. Education and Science Banners Set Stock
Education Process stock vector. Illustration of instructor

VIDEO

UNDERSTANDING OF THE EDUCATION PROCESS
simple present tense| part 1 English grammar for student 1st to 8|formula of simple present tense
Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"?
Indian Education System
Tenses
Present Education system is a failure ( Urdu |. Hindi )

COMMENTS

Education
Education is a discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).
Why we must transform our education systems, now
Step 1: Start with purpose. Education leaders, families, teachers, and students can have very different expectations about the purpose of their education system. Without a broadly shared vision in ...
Transforming education systems: Why, what, and how
What is education system transformation? We argue that education system transformation must entail a fresh review of the goals of your system - are they meeting the moment that we are in, are ...
The turning point: Why we must transform education now
Transforming education requires a significant increase in investment in quality education, a strong foundation in comprehensive early childhood development and education, and must be underpinned by strong political commitment, sound planning, and a robust evidence base. Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development.
The Evolution of Education: Past, Present and the Future
Introduction Education has evolved drastically over time. Humanity began storing and transmitting knowledge through word of mouth, passing down information about animals, plants and the land to each succeeding generation. Formal education is said to have begun in Greece at around 4 BCE. In fact, the word "school" comes from the Greek word "schole", which Join Hirushi, Jana and Stanley ...
Five questions on transformative education
Education can only be "transformative" when students feel valued, acknowledged, safe and are included in the learning community as full and active members. This starts by preventing and addressing school violence and bullying, gender-based violence, as well as health and gender related discrimination towards learners and educators.
Transforming lives through education
Transforming education to change our world. UNESCO provides global and regional leadership on all aspects of education from pre-school to higher education and throughout life. It works through its Member States and brings together governments, the private sector and civil society to strengthen education systems worldwide in order to deliver ...
Education
Education is the transmission of knowledge, skills, and character traits and manifests in various forms. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education also follows a structured approach but occurs outside the formal schooling system, while informal education entails unstructured learning through daily ...
How technology is reinventing K-12 education
In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data. Technology is "requiring people to check their assumptions ...
The Learning Process
In stage 1 the learner only has to discuss or show interest in a new experience, but in stage 2, he or she begins to apply new skills that contribute to reaching the learning goal. In the dance example above, you would now be learning basic dance steps. Successful completion of this stage relies on practice.
Strengthening education systems and innovation
Getting all children in school and learning takes strong, innovative education systems. UNICEF/UNI321762/Filippov. Education systems are complex. Getting all children in school and learning requires alignment across families, educators and decision makers. It requires shared goals, and national policies that put learning at the centre.
Educational Process
In the educational process, the communication between the student and the teacher can be verbal or non-verbal. Both interlocutors and participants can express their emotions. A student can express emotions regarding the relation with the content of the lesson, and toward the kind of knowledge acquired. A teacher can express emotions related to ...
Education as a Process: Assessment, Outcomes and Achievement
Seeing education as a process lays the foundations for adopting approaches which will remove uncertainty from what happens within education. Part of this is the adoption of learning outcomes. This can be seen as a consequence of a managerialist discourse which seeks control over educational processes. In turn, it is argued that this contributes ...
Jerome Bruner and the process of education
One result was Bruner's landmark book The Process of Education (1960). It developed some of the key themes of that meeting and was an crucial factor in the generation of a range of educational programmes and experiments in the 1960s. Jerome Bruner subsequently joined a number of key panels and committees (including the President's Advisory ...
Paulo Freire: An educator of the present and the future
The emphasis, here, is on the inseparability between education and politics and his radical humanism as central axes of his pedagogy. The relevance of dialogic-communicative action in the learning process and the valuing of the learners' knowledge as the starting point for elaborated knowledge enhance the choice of freedom, autonomy and ...
Educational Psychology Promotes Teaching and Learning
Educational Psychology Applied. Psychologists working in education study the social, emotional and cognitive processes involved in learning and apply their findings to improve the learning process. Some specialize in the educational development of a specific group of people such as children, adolescents or adults, while others focus on specific ...
The Special Education Process
The special education process begins when a child is referred to special education. A parent, or anyone who knows the child well, may refer the child to the special education process. ... Present levels of academic achievement and functional performance. This statement describes how the child is currently achieving in school. This includes how ...
The school evaluation process: What to expect
It's called an evaluation process because there are a series of steps that go into it. A school evaluation looks at a student's areas of challenges and strengths. Doing just one test or assessment wouldn't provide all the information an. team needs to make decisions about services, supports, and interventions.
Philosophy of Education: Navigating the Past, Present, and Future of
The philosophy of education is an applied discipline that informs, analyzes, and criticizes current educational environments, much like the sociology and psychology of education. Contemporary ...
PDF FACT SHEET: U.S. Department of Education's 2024 Title IX Final Rule
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) was signed into law more than 50 years ago. In the decades since, Title IX's protections have paved the way for tremendous strides in access to education and more for millions of students across the country and have opened doors for generations of women and girls.
Chapter 19
7. There are many reasons to believe that increased educational opportunity and achievement lead to social progress. The aim of this chapter is to examine how educatıon can promote social progress. Answering this question is not straightforward. Education has multiple aims, and the way in which education is provided - educational governance ...
Developing Present Education Levels
Identifying specific needs and establishing a baseline begins the process of developing meaningful and measurable goals. The PLAAFP statement is a brief and understandable narrative accurately describing the child's performance in all areas of education and functional activities that are affected by the child's disability.
PDF A Guide to the Individualized Education Program
300.349 Private school placements by public agencies. (a) Developing IEPs. (1) Before a public agency places a child with a disability in, or refers a child to, a private school or facility, the agency shall initiate and conduct a meeting to develop an IEP for the child in accordance with §§ 300.346 and 300.347.
Present Levels (Component of the IEP)
The "present levels" statement is crafted by considering the areas of development in which a child with a disability may need support. These are roughly divided into the two areas of development: academic and functional. Neither of these terms—academic achievement, functional performance—is defined in IDEA.
An Introduction to the educational planning process
The principal task of the educational planner is to elaborate the national strategy of educational development into a plan of action over a selected time horizon. A plan may be long-term or perspective extending from 10 to 20 or even- 8 - 25 years. It may be medium-term, usually 4 to 7 years.
PDF Developing the Present Levels of Performance
The Present Levels of Performance comprise a snapshot of the student's academic, social/emotional and physical strengths and needs. The Present Level is grounded in data and formative assessment and subsequently informs all other components of the IEP. Shared Path to Success: Quality IEP Created by Special Education Office Instructional Team
Present Education System
The present education system seems to be highly evolved due to being connected to technology and the use of advanced methods of learning. ... Also, practicals in labs require costly instruments and chemicals, making education an expensive process. Besides, there is a great deal of pollution, environmental hazards, and risks to nature. ...
The IEP Module 3
Welcome to the third module in a five-part series on the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process. The previous modules discussed recent changes in California law that affected some elements of the process, and activities required to occur before the IEP is developed. This module addresses the process of IEP development once the IEP team ...