This post is a summary of the book published with the title above in 2018 at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/.../9781464810961.pdf
Education and learning raise aspirations, set values, and ultimately enrich lives. South Korea is a good example of how education can play these important roles. After the Korean War, the population was largely illiterate and deeply impoverished. Korea understood that education was the best way to pull itself out of economic misery, so it focused on overhauling schools and committed itself to educating every child and educating them well. Today, not only has Korea achieved universal literacy, but its students also perform at the highest levels in international learning assessments. It's a high-income country and a model of success development. Korea is a striking example, but we can see the salutary effects of education in many countries. Delivered well, education and the human capital it creates has many benefits for economies, and for societies as a whole. But providing education is not enough. What is important, and what generates a real return on investment, is learning and acquiring skills. This is what truly builds human capital. As this year's World Development Report documents, in many countries learning is not happening. Schooling without learning is a terrible waste of precious resources and of human potential. Worse, it is an injustice. This year's report provides a path to address this failure. The detailed analysis in this Report shows that these problems are driven not only by service delivery failings but also by deeper systemic problems. The human capital lost because of these shortcomings threatens development and jeopardizes the future of people and their societies. At the same time, rapid technological change raises the stakes: to compete in the economy of the future, workers need strong basic skills. Schooling is not the same as learning. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, when grade 3, students were asked to read a simple sentence, three-quarters did not understand what it said. In rural India, just under three-quarter of students in grade 3 could not solve a subtraction such as 46-17. Although the skills of Brazilians 15-year-olds have improved, at their current rate of improvement they won't reach the rich-country average score in math for 75 years. These countries are not unique in the challenges they face. Worldwide, hundreds of millions of children reach young adulthood without even the most basic life skills. This learning crisis is a moral crisis. When delivered well, education cures a host of societal ills. For individuals, it promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. For societies, it spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.. The learning crisis amplifies inequality: it severely hobbles the disadvantaged youth who most need the boost that a good education can offer. Because of this slow progress, more than 60% of primary school children in developing countries still fail to achieve minimu proficiency in learning, according to one benchmark. The ultimate barrier to learning is no schooling at all, yet hundreds of millions of youth remain out of school. Almost all developing countries still have pockets of children from excluded social groups who do not attend school. Tackling the learning crisis and skills gaps requires dagnosing their causes, both their immediate causes at the school level and their deeper systematic drives. Given all the investment countries have made in education, shortfalls in learning are discouraging. But one reason for them is that learning has not always received the attention it should have. Acting effectively requires first understanding how schools are failing learners and how systems are failing schools. Successful educational systems combine both alignment and coherence. Alignment means that learning goal of the various components of the system. Coherence means that the components reinforce each other in achieving whatever goals the system has set for them. When systems achieve both, they are much more likely to promote student learning. Too much misalignment or incoherence leads to failure to achieve learning. Learning outcomes won't change unless education systems take learning seriously and use learning as a guide and metric. This idea can be summarized as "all for learning." As this section explains, a commitment to all for learning, and thus to learning for all implies three complementary strategies: 1) Assess learning - to make it a serious goal. Measure and track learning better; use the results to guide action. 2) Act on evidence - to make schools work for all learners. use evidence to guide innovation and practice. 3) Align actors - to make the whole system work for learning. Tackle the technical and political barriers to learning at scale. Research has expanded our understanding of how the brain works, and therefore how people learn. The brain is malleable throughout life, even if most brain development is completed by early adulthood. The fastest synaptic growth (thus malleability) occurs between until age 3, with growth then gradually slowing. A range of enriching experiences leads to more complex synapses, but cumulative exposure to risk factors (such as neglect or violence) either eliminates synapses associated with healthy brain development, or it consolidates those associated with unhealthy development. experiences affect the architecture of the brain in part because of the hormonal response they trigger. Hormones such as dopamine stimulate information absorption, whereas hormones such as cortisol can shut off learning. Illiteracy at the end of grade two has long-term consequences for two reasons. First, learning is cumulative. Education systems around the world expect students to acquire foundational skills such as reading by grades 1 or 2. Children who can not read by grade 3 fall behind and struggle to catch up. Teachers are the most important determinant of student learning. But high-quality teachers are in short supply. In Latin America, there is evidence that candidates entering the teaching profession are academically weaker than the pool of higher education students. 15 year-olds who identified themselves as interested in a teaching career had much lower PISA scores than students interested in engineering in every country in the region. Many developingcountries suffer significant losses of instructional time. In Latin America, about 20% of potential instructional time is lost. there are many reasons for this loss of time, including poor training and other demands on teachers, and some teachers may perceive it as justified. This problem is concerning because the bulk of national education budgets goes to teacher salaries. Staff compensation accounts for 80% of public spending in some countries. If one in five school teachers is absent from school, developing countries are wasting considerable resources. The learning crisis is real, but too often education systems operate as if it is not. Many policy makers do not realize how low learning levels are. Others do not acknowledge them or simply equate low learning with low resources. Still, there are reasons for optimism. First, learning is increasingly in the spotlight. Second, learning metrics are generating irrefutable evidence of the learning crisis, thereby creating pressure for action. Third, promising new insights on how to tackle the crisis are becoming available.
