Last fall, in the World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report, was a rallying cry for global education in crisis. The gains in school attendance that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals yielded are significant yet insufficient, the report says: “Schooling is not the same as learning. Schooling without learning is not just a wasted opportunity, but a great injustice.”
The sad fact is that we don’t even know how much kids are learning — of 121 countries studied, one in three lack data on students’ reading and math proficiency at the end of primary school. The information we do have paints a bleak picture. More than 60 percent of primary school children in low- and middle- income countries do not reach a minimum proficiency in reading and math. We’re even further from ensuring the world’s children gain the competencies and dispositions necessary to shape a better future for themselves and all of us.
The World Development Report makes a critical point about what it will take to address this crisis: that learning is not the exclusive province of teachers and schools. Indeed, it takes a village. Elected officials, community organizations, academia, the private sector, and the philanthropic community all have a role to play.
If we don’t work together, how else might we determine what outcomes to work towards, write the policy required to change those outcomes, and prioritize education in the first place? How else might we tackle what students need when it comes to other issues, like nutrition, housing, and health care?
The global education community must keep four ideas in mind about the type of leadership it will take to address this crisis. These lessons all originate from the same premise: the only path to meaningful, sustainable change is leadership that is deeply rooted in local context and culture.
1. Elevate teachers
Being an educator, particularly in low-income communities, is a powerful foundation for leadership. Teachers can build relationships with students and families, witness all the factors that impact student’s lives, and see firsthand the strengths of some of the most disadvantaged communities. If we’re going to serve kids, we need as many committed people to teach as long as possible. But it also makes a real difference when teachers become policymakers, civic leaders, social entrepreneurs, and principals.
In 2012, Peru ranked last out of 65 countries on PISA, an international assessment of student performance. Among the steps Peru’s Ministry of Education took to improve its position was elevating the voices of those who had taught in their most underserved schools, including by hiring many of them into the Ministry. Four years later, Peru was the fastest-improving country in Latin America and the fourth fastest-improving in the world.
2. Make leadership inclusive
I have seen how vital it is for some of the most privileged people in society to gain proximity to inequity — often, they become determined to address it. But I’ve also seen that it doesn’t work for a bunch of privileged folks to drive for change unilaterally.
The push for change must be defined and owned by people who have experienced disadvantage firsthand, with the help of more privileged allies. To progress otherwise is to perpetuate privilege, and to forego the perspective of the people who intimately understand these injustices.
This work is easier said than done, but it’s a priority across the partners of Teach For All, the global education network I co-founded in 2007. I previously founded one of those partners, Teach For America, and today almost half of its participants are people of color and 43 percent received scholarships for low-income students. Diverse leadership means organizations are having a more positive impact on students and families.
3. Bring people together
When Nedgine Paul Deroly co-founded Anseye Pou Ayiti — a Teach For All partner organization— to develop the education system in her native Haiti, she started by spending years in rural areas, just listening.
“Whenever we walked into a community, people would immediately want to introduce us to the dignitaries, but we learned that power and influence did not solely reside in elected officials,” Nedgine said. “It resided with the elders who may have never had titles but knew so much more about the fabric and the history of their community.”
We must be intentional in fostering a collective approach to leadership — one that involves creating the time and space to pull people up from individual pursuits to build relationships, have difficult discussions, reflect together, grow collective wisdom, and develop shared vision. Today, Anseye Pou Ayiti is better positioned to succeed over the long-term because they are part of a coalition of actors working toward a shared vision.
4. Learn from across borders
Education is lionized as a local issue, but many of the challenges we face are common across different countries. As Shanghai shot to the top of the PISA results over the last decade, Minxuan Zhang, the former president of Shanghai Normal University, said that the key to the city’s education transformation was their “open door policy.” The local government encouraged educators and administrators to visit school systems around the world and bring back the best practices. They adopted, adapted, and saw tremendous gains.
The learning crisis is severe. But with an intentional effort to develop the right kind of leadership — leadership that includes teachers and is diverse, that is collective in its approach and international in its perspective — we can meet this challenge.
