Interestingly, the discourse of development is often marred by distractions. It may not be entirely incorrect to say that a very significant part of the development discourse is avoidable and distracting noise. I blogged here about the distractions caused by the predominance of programs and schemes.
Bloomberg has a good op-ed that draws attention to the near-universal problem of deficient student learning outcomes and argues that the debate on school choice in the US may be a big distraction.
Cultivating more school options is not the end-all-be-all. As of 2019, 25 states had voucher programs of some type in place, but only 2% of K-12 students are in private school with public vouchers. Only 7% of public school students are in charter schools. The reality is that most kids end up staying in the public schools they are zoned for a variety of reasons: some private schools don’t take vouchers and some charters are oversubscribed or on the other side of town. School choice is particularly ineffective in rural environments... Worse, school choice can become an excuse for policymakers to skirt hard and immediately needed conversations about an ineffective public-school curriculum, classrooms that have morphed into screen zombies, or unaccountable teacher and student performance...
Indeed, the most meteoric change in student achievement this last decade wasn’t from vouchers. It was from a statewide investment in the basics. Since 2013, Mississippi has gone from one of the worst elementary school literacy rates in the country to above average from investing in third grade reading. That included better training for teachers, using a phonics-based curriculum and hiring reading coaches. These investments have been paired with steep accountability: if kids are not literate, they repeat third grade. Instead of falling behind, those kids were further ahead academically by 6th grade for having gotten the basics right. We need more of this, shoring up the foundation.
This echoes across development sectors and public policy areas, and countries, developed and developing.
The description of school education in the US could be applied to school education systems in India and elsewhere. Smart classrooms and digital technologies, Edtech in general, may have become big distractions from doing the basics right.
On the same lines, the neglect of public health and primary care is sought to be made up for by focusing on universal health insurance. Consultants and dashboards are the response to basic governance failures in monitoring and supervision of programs, schemes, and policies. The unwillingness (and inability) of basic energy audits and their enforcement is sought to be made up for by installing smart electricity meters to address the persistence of high electricity distribution losses. Instead of focusing on basic governance and improving their property tax base and collection efficiency, cities chase technology solutions like GIS mapping and municipal bonds.
There’s a false comfort from believing that infrastructure financing gaps can be leapfrogged by replacing public financewith Public Private Partnerships, private capital, and foreign direct investment. Instead of derisking bank finance for infrastructure, public policy prioritises capital market deepening. Instead of managing the governance of processes and ensuring compliance, tax authorities tend to use targets and coercive practices to boost revenues. Instead of improving governance, the reflex reaction to an adverse news item about abuse of regulation is to double down with more layers of regulation.
All this, more generally, is in line with the pervasive belief that the way to fix struggling public systems is through innovation and doing new things instead of doing the basics right and doing them much better.
The point here is not to reject these innovative approaches and technologies, but to put them in perspective, as (perhaps even distant) supplementary to the primary activities that get marginalised in the hype. This is especially so in systems entrapped in low baseline of achievement.
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