This article is written by George Kronnisanyon Werner, former education minister of Liberia (2015-2018).
Results from a three-year evaluation of a ground-breaking education pilot in Liberia offers lessons to leaders across the world who want to transform their education systems.
In 2015, as Liberia’s new minister of education, I inherited an educational system in a state of emergency and crisis.
35 percent of our young women and 21% of our young men under the age of 24 could not read a single sentence. Only 39% of women across the country had completed primary school. Coming out of a brutal civil war and a severe outbreak of Ebola, many of our schools were destroyed and many teachers had been killed.
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As one of the poorest countries in the world, our education budget was severely constrained.
Having read the Brookings Institution’s prediction that it would take children in the developing world as long as one hundred years to catch up with their counterparts in the developed world, I refused to accept that Liberia had to wait a century for our children to succeed. I knew we couldn’t afford to play it safe — leaving millions more children behind. Instead, we embarked on a bold experiment to disrupt the status quo, jumpstart a cycle of positive change, and leapfrog improved learning outcomes.
The lessons we learned could help both advanced and resource-constrained countries around the world that are considering similar reforms.
Starting from scratch
The Partnership Schools for Liberia three-year pilot (now known as LEAP) leveraged international expertise and funding in order to test innovative approaches and bolster our ailing education system.
As a government, we chose eight education providers — ranging from local NGOs to international non-profits and a few private sector organisations. These providers were brought into existing public schools to test new approaches for improving teaching and learning. Their models differed, with some introducing a master teacher approach, while others focused on the introduction of technology to standardise teaching. For all schools in the program, we insisted upon capping class sizes and ensuring that children were in school for the entire day, rather than being broken up into morning and afternoon shifts.
Mindful that these interventions had to work within the Liberian context, we demanded that the providers use Liberian teachers and principals on the public payroll, meet and enhance the standards of the Liberian national curriculum, and provide education free of charge to families. We also required them to help fundraise until the Ministry was in a position to cover the anticipated costs of the program, which were a total of $100 a student per year, one of the lowest in Africa.
As a result, students in schools managed by the most successful providers were performing at a level two or more grades above the national average
Alongside the program, we commissioned one of the first independent evaluations into educational public-private partnerships in Africa, to measure which models were most successful in improving learning outcomes and which interventions could be easily adapted and implemented into the broader school system. After the first year’s results showed that students in participating schools were learning 60% on average more than their peers in other public schools (albeit from a very low starting point), we expanded the number of schools from 93 to about 200.
The final evaluation was published in December 2019 and showed that, overall, students benefitted from the equivalent of an additional year of learning when compared to their peers in schools outside the program over the same time period. However, this benefit was not shared equally across the schools. Of the eight school providers, three didn’t deliver any change in learning. The other five delivered significant learning gains, and the most successful program delivered up to five times more than the program average.
As a result, students in schools managed by the most successful providers were performing at a level two or more grades above the national average. We now need to delve into the data to understand exactly why these gains were made so that they can impact on learning for all children across Liberia and potentially provide lessons for other countries facing similar challenges.
Hard choices
Our experience also illustrates some of the difficult choices that governments with limited resources face when embarking on ambitious reforms.
Following the 2016/17 school census prior to the start of this program, there was an uptake in enrolment across all schools. This resulted in increased class sizes and double and triple shift schools — where students were only in class for a fraction of the school day. When we introduced the Partnership Schools for Liberia program, we knew that by lengthening the school day and capping class sizes, we would be displacing some students who would need to find places in other schools. However, we also had serious concerns about overcrowding, and we knew it was crucial to test the impact that these interventions would have on learning gains. The authors of the independent evaluation term this as “mass expulsion”. That is disingenuous and doesn’t capture the full picture.
Our country has just delivered one of the most innovative public private partnerships in the world which, by the evaluator’s own data, has successfully improved learning outcomes for tens of thousands of children
Designing, implementing and continuing a program disrupting the status quo was hard. But I am encouraged by the knowledge that it serves as a model for high quality, low cost education that can be scaled not only in Liberia or even in Africa, but in any country around the world that is recovering from conflict or crisis and needs to rebuild its education system. Africa needs proven and meaningful partners to get to quality and equity in government schools. That is not privatisation. That is pragmatic.
I have been heartened to see that my successor has carried the program forward, seeing the value it has provided for the schools in the program and for the wider education system. While the Ministry is still determining the exact shape, it will take now that the pilot is over, it seems clear that substantial components of the program will continue.
The international community's interest may wane now that the three-year study is done, but my interest and the interest of Liberia’s government won’t. Neither will the interest of parents across Liberia. Our country has just delivered one of the most innovative public private partnerships in the world which, by the evaluator’s own data, has successfully improved learning outcomes for tens of thousands of children.
For those interested in reading more about our experience, you can find links to further information below:
“A report card for Liberia’s charter schools” – The Economist
“Lessons from a radical education experiment in Liberia” – The Economist
“Can Outsourcing Improve Liberia’s Schools?” – Center for Global Development
— George Kronnisanyon Werner
(Picture credit: Unsplash)
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