The Problem of Overambitious Curricula

Learning Profiles

One of the most curious features of education outcomes in developing countries is the presence of strikingly flat learning profiles. What do I mean by this? Figure 1 provides a good illustration. The x-axis plots students’ grade progression through school; the y-axis plots the proportion of students able to perform a basic competency. In this case, the graph plots what percentage of children are able to perform simple division (i.e. dividing a large number by a one-digit number) in four developing countries: India, Kenya, Pakistan and Uganda. In Pakistan, around 10% of students can do basic division by Grade 3; around 40% by Grade 5 and around 70% by Grade 7.

Figure 1: Learning Profiles in Four Developing Countries

Source: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/are-we-wrong-about-right-way-organize-schooling

This is strange – as Maryam Akmal, the author of this graph notes: we can’t really tell when division is taught in school. This flies in the face of what we tend to think about learning: that it occurs in stages, whereby mastery of ‘core’ concepts is a prerequisite for moving on to more advanced material. For instance, you can’t learn optimisation without calculus; and you can’t learn calculus without having mastered basic division. In an ideal world, all students would gain mastery of core competencies at the time it is taught, giving rise to a ‘steeper’ learning profile as overlaid in Figure 2.

Figure 2: A ‘Healthier’ Learning Profile

Source: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/are-we-wrong-about-right-way-organize-schooling

The Problem of Over-Ambitious Curricula

There are many explanations that try to make sense of these curves. For me, the most compelling one is the ubiquity of unsuitable and over-ambitious curricula in developing countries.

In many places, national curricula largely mimic those of more industrialised nations: but are delivered in schools that are less well-equipped, by teachers who are less well-qualified, to students who are less well-fed, well-mentored and well-rested at home. As a result, many students are left behind the official curriculum and are instead forced to pick them up at a much later date – or to leave school having not learnt them at all.

Learning in a Foreign Language

One of the most damaging ways in which an over-ambitious curriculum manifests itself is through an unsuitable language of instruction. In many countries, local languages are replaced by English or French long before most students have mastered proficiency. This, I think, is one of the biggest challenges facing the Zanzibar education sector, where English replaces Swahili in Form I (when students are 12 years old). Students and teachers are forced to interact in a language they are not comfortable with, leading to high rates of failure in Form II exams and subsequent dropouts soon after. The gap in exam performance between government and private students also widens at this point – a fact I think can be explained by them being unfairly discriminated against in Form II exams, which are written in a language they are less likely to be familiar with that their private school counterparts.  

In light of these consequences, administrators occasionally revert back to local languages. 2 weeks ago, the Chief Minister of Punjab, Pakistan announced that Urdu would replace English as the medium of instruction for primary education. Millions of schoolchildren will now be taught in a language they and their teachers easily understand – a great success, and an example that other countries would do well to emulate.

The Politics of Curriculum Reform

Unfortunately, unsuitable and over-ambitious curricula do not come about by accident. As Paul Glewwe argues, many national curriculums were originally designed to produce a narrow elite to work in colonial bureaucracies, with no remedial education offered to those who fell behind. After independence, enrolment expanded rapidly but control of the curriculum remained firmly in elite hands. These elites were likely to prefer an education system targeted to the needs of their own children – who were better-equipped to cope with an advanced curriculum due to their better schools, higher socioeconomic status and access to extra-curricular tuition.

This tendency to maintain the status quo was also exacerbated by the uncomfortable nature of reform itself. Curriculum reviews are highly politicised and contentious – often viewed by opponents as cynical attempts to indoctrinate children into the ideals of the regime (for more on this, read my Despots Guide to Education). As a result, reform often resembles a Pandora’s Box – something that’s better off unopened, delayed and left for the next regime to deal with. These dynamics are evident in Zanzibar: in theory, a curriculum review is supposed to take place every 7 years; in reality, only 2 have taken place in my lifetime: one in 1996 and one in 2010.

This inertia means curricula quickly become outdated. Below is a depressing excerpt from a Primary IV textbook in Nigeria in 2019 – something which would have looked positively Stone Age even when I was in school.  

Figure 3: A Primary IV Textbook in Nigeria, 2019

Source: photo taken by @Kabira_Namit

Terra Incognita?

The politicised nature of curriculum reform also makes it a difficult topic to study. For obvious reasons just discussed, governments are reluctant to allow researchers to tinker with different curriculums in randomised experiments – unlike with free school meals, teacher performance grants and conditional cash transfers. Natural experiments are also difficult to come across: reforms tend to be rare and, when they do occur, they tend to happen nationwide and all-at-once, making it hard to identify a distinct treatment and control group.

As a result, the body of evidence we have to inform ‘what works’ in improving the curriculum is pretty thin, especially compared to other education inputs like teachers, learning materials and textbooks. In fact, of all the inputs that go into making kids learn, I think the curriculum is the one where there is the biggest gap between what we can empirically measure and what we intuitively deem important. There is no obvious way out of this predicament: though looking at the effects of ‘localised’ reforms such as the recent language-switch in Punjab, Pakistan may be a promising place to start.

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References

The section on learning profiles was inspired by a great blog post by Maryam Akmal of CGD, available here: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/are-we-wrong-about-right-way-organize-schooling

For more on the problem of over-ambitious curricula, read:

• Glewwe et al. (2009), ‘Many Children Left Behind? Textbooks and Test Scores in Kenya’
• Pritchett & Beatty (2012), ‘The Negative Consequences of Overambitious Curricula in Developing Countries’