Learning Inequality in Francophone Africa: School Quality and the Educational Achievement of Rich and Poor Children

Abstract

Influential reports about the “learning crisis” in the global South generally pay insufficient attention to social inequalities in learning. In this study, we explore the association between family socioeconomic status and learning outcomes in 10 francophone African countries using data from the Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems, a standardized assessment of pupils’ mathematics and reading competence at the end of primary school. We start by showing that learning outcomes among grade 6 pupils are both poor and highly stratified. We then develop and test a conceptual framework that highlights three mechanisms through which family socioeconomic status might contribute to learning: (1) educational resources at home, (2) health and well-being, and (3) differences in school quality. We find that most of the effect of family background on learning outcomes operates through school quality, which results from a combination of the unequal distribution of resources (such as teachers and textbooks) across schools and high socioeconomic segregation between schools. On the basis of these results, we suggest that most countries in the region could improve equity as well as overall performance by “raising the floor” in school quality.

Unequal experience of COVID-induced remote schooling in four developing countries

“…Past research from developing countries also finds that school characteristics are strong determinants of learning achievement inequalities (Gruijters & Behrman, 2020).…”

Does greater community involvement mean more parent-teacher interaction? Evidence from seven developing countries

“…SBM promoters also believe that community involvement will help address the needs of the poorest by empowering grassroots population rather than simply putting more resources (Barrera-Osorio et al, 2009). This view goes against recent evidence that school resources are important determinants of achievement inequality in developing countries (Gruijters & Behrman, 2020).…”

“…Because of these structural challenges, strengthening SBM by community involvement may not matter in increasing parent-teacher interaction as much as school resources and parents' background. Since between-school achievement inequality in many developing countries is more prevalent than within-school or between-student inequality (Gruijters & Behrman, 2020), interactive communication may depend on more school characteristics such as higher resources.…”

Looking beyond changes in averages in evaluating foundational learning: Some inequality measures

“…Unfortunately, a blind spot in this general body of work is the little attention paid to thoroughly characterizing the changes in the full underlying distribution of foundational skills induced by these policies ( Gruijters and Behrman, 2020 ). Research studying the previous implementations of these programs which mostly targeted, and were successful at, improving the average results, did not necessarily focus on descriptions of the initial distributions or their shifts post intervention.…”

“…Other studies ( Crouch and Rolleston, 2017 ; Crouch et al, 2006 ) provide some initial evidence that countries that go from very poor mean performance to middle mean performance do so by reducing the percent of students at very low levels. In this sense, work such as Gruijters and Behrman (2020 ), and Oketch et al (2020) has pointed out that raising overall outcomes, and decreasing dispersion is desirable, as long as this shift comes from “raising the floor”, and not at the expense of higher performers. Even earlier work by Willms (1999) identified socioeconomic gradients in literacy, where countries with the highest literacy rates also having the flattest gradients.…”