Research by International Child Support Fund Africa (ICS) - a Dutch NGO reveals that many students may be left behind in societies with curricula that cater for the elite, where Kenya is cited.
“While there is ample evidence that reducing costs can increase access to schooling, it is much less clear how to improve school quality,” the research points out.
Lead researchers argue that even those who are skeptical about the impact of funding believe that provision of basic input as textbooks is important to learning, particularly in very poor schools where few students have textbooks.
From the textbook distribution program the NGO conducted in Western Kenya they realized a raise in scores for students with strong initial academic background, but not for the typical student. “We argue that this is likely due to distortions in the educational system in Kenya. It is worth noting that non-experimental analyses of previous textbook programs in the area suggest that textbooks have a positive effect on average test scores,” the researchers say.
ICS provided textbook assistance to 100 schools in western Kenya over a four-year period. But after monitoring the learning and score of the students for five years they discovered that the difference in the average test score in English, math and science between the textbook schools and the schools that did not receive textbooks was not statistically significant.
We can reject the thinking that textbook provision will raise average student test scores by 0.13 or more, they say, adding that under some alternate specifications that compared grades and subjects that received and did not receive textbooks, the improvement was insignificant. The program also failed to reduce grade repetition, dropout rates, and student absence from school.
It’s evident that the textbooks improved scores for the strongest students. Moreover, students in eighth grade in the textbook schools were more likely to enter secondary school than eighth grade students in the comparison schools, a finding consistent with textbooks’ being most helpful to initially high-achieving students since only academically strong students go on to secondary school.
“There is reason to believe that Kenya’s curriculum and the instructional materials prepared around that curriculum may be well suited towards students in the well-off and less well suited to students of the poor,” the paper titled: Retrospective vs. Prospective Analysis of Schools Inputs: The Case of Flip Charts in Kenya, says, giving an example of the language of instruction in the Kenyan education system where English is assumed to be the language of instruction in all subjects save Kiswahili thus a problem for most students to use the textbooks effectively.
The report says that most students in lower grades had difficulty even reading the textbooks. In grade 3, only 16 per cent of the average students in program schools could read the grade 3 English textbook, and only 28 percent of their grade 4 counterparts could read the grade 4 English textbook. Difficulty in reading the textbooks was less pronounced in higher grades “partly because many weaker students drop out before reaching the higher grades,” the paper reads.
“Such a mismatch between curricula and education materials and the needs of the majority of the population may be a common feature of centralized educational systems in contexts where there is great heterogeneity in students’ educational preparation due to rapid expansion of education and where elites have disproportionate power in setting the curriculum,” they say adding: “Many developing countries’ education systems have changed little since they were implemented in colonial times for the purpose of producing a small bureaucratic elite.”
The research testifies that recent expansion of education in sub-Saharan Africa has created an influx of students with different levels of preparation. Kenyan students are extremely heterogeneous in their family background, preparation for schooling, and economic status. Middle-class children in Nairobi and other cities grow up with constant exposure to English, good nutrition, and electricity, while the children of subsistence farmers hear very little English until they go to school, have poor health and nutrition, have no electricity, often miss school, and have teachers who are often absent.
It comes to the fore that although enrollment rate in primary school has risen over the years, the curriculum remains better suited to children with educated parents. In the United States, the expansion of secondary education over the first half of the twentieth century was followed by a transformation of the curriculum - dropping Latin and the incorporation of vocational education. Developing countries that are undergoing similar rapid expansions of education may need to undertake similar transformations of the curriculum.
The researchers say that once Kenya had made the decision to have a uniform, centralized curriculum for nation-building reasons, no curriculum could perfectly suit all of its students. “Even parents of average students may favor a curriculum designed for stronger students in order to secure more desirable peers in their children’s schools, because a curriculum best suited for the typical student may cause elites to switch from government schools to private schools,” they say, urging teachers also to have incentives in demanding appropriate textbooks for the learners as primary schools are judged by students’ national examination score.
Evidence is accumulating from other evaluations on strategies to help less prepared students who fall behind, many of which randomly assign schools to treatment and control groups. “One option is remedial education for children who cannot keep up with the official curriculum.”
Secondly they propose an option of allowing different schools or different programs within schools to teach the curriculum at different speeds, as in Singapore. In the same region of Kenya, another recent study found that tracking students by their initial achievement increased test scores for all students.
The report concludes that providing textbooks to students who lack them seems to be an obvious way to improve educational performance. “Textbook provision is almost universally accepted as an effective education policy, even by those who doubt the effectiveness of increased school spending. Yet our results show that providing textbooks to rural schools in Kenya did not increase average test scores, although it did increase the scores of students with high initial achievement,” it reads.
The latter finding suggests that the official textbooks are ill-suited for the typical student and may reflect more fundamental problems with centralized educational systems, heterogeneous student populations, and entrenched elite power. “Remedial education and suitably designed achievement tracking may be promising ways to address these larger problems,” they say.
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