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general education’s contribution and relevance to the labor market is increasingly con-sidered. Also, the learning-outcomes approach weakens the monopoly of professional educators in determining education’s goals, because focusing on competencies makes it possible to involve laymen, too. (Not surprisingly, the contribution of stakeholders to the identification of new competencies in certain countries was vastly more useful than the conceptual work done by experts.) As a result, involving employers in the discourse on the goals for the initial phase of primary education is not regarded as “perverted”
anymore.
An additional advantage is the much easier translation of goals that are set in terms of learning outcomes to teaching. For example, certain social policy goals, such as the integration of minorities, sustainable development, or promoting democratic civic at-titudes, are becoming interpretable for pedagogy; therefore, they can be broken out from the “ghetto” of extracurricular activities and can be integrated into the mainstream of education. In general, detaching the problems of participation and qualifications from the actual outcomes of learning makes the interpretation of participation-related mat-ters much easier. Focusing on learning outcomes instead of inputs and processes allows education to better serve certain lifelong learning-related goals, such as connecting the subsectors of education (i.e., general, vocational, higher, and adult education) to the competencies to be developed or the recognition of informal learning.
The learning-outcomes approach, departing from subject knowledge and from process orientation, is a paradigm shift; as such, it has major implications for the content of all other major public policy expectations of educational services like quality or equity. It also influences all aspects of education and has implications for teaching, for the work of schools, and for the pattern of governance, too. All these implications will be discussed in the following chapters.
5.5 The Impact of the Learning-outcomes Approach
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“standards” are educational goals, specific targets, and service specifications that are regulated by governments or (in decentralized systems) lower-level management. Of course, the most important ones are those institutions or individuals that set goals for the service: curricula and achievement standards, such as examination requirements or qualification requirements. Although in centralized education systems the meaning of a “contract” is typically rather limited (all schools offer the same), if curricular and program diversity is introduced, all schools “offer” something in their school-based programs, and parents who decide to send their children to the school are entitled to expect the fulfillment of the offer. (This is the reason why introducing major changes in the program to those who have been already learning in the school for several years is considered to be a “discourtesy,” even in centralized systems.) Also, a school program that responds to the needs of its “constituency,” that is, to the needs of the local com-munity, also can be considered as a kind of “contract.” The third measure of quality, that is, the satisfaction of parents and students, does not require any explanation; it is as relevant to education as to any other service.
To recap, the main characteristic of centralized systems is the use of a narrow ap-proach to quality in education that is restricted only to the compliance to centrally-issued standards. However, since our contemporary understanding is based on a balanced view of the three major criteria, the two other sources of requirements are equally important.
Therefore, education services that assert their high quality also should respond to the actual expectations of their local environment and the clients. In theory, the implication of the leaning-outcomes approach in this respect is that when local self-governments determine their expectations of their schools on behalf of the local community, they supplement the centrally-set learning outcome goals with their own. Of course, in prac-tice it does not work so nicely, especially if local owners of the school are improperly supplied with comparative performance-related information. (In addition to this, the owners may have various expectations beyond measurable performance.) However, this does not mean that responding to local expectations is not something that schools can ignore without compromising the quality of the service they provide.
The case with the satisfaction of parents and students is different. Research results prove that parents are not necessarily the most satisfied with those schools that produce the highest scores in performance surveys. Also, in spite of the expectations of adults who have difficulties recalling their childhood, students do not necessarily feel good in those schools that help them to achieve the highest learning performance. (Something as trivial as table tennis equipment for use during the breaks between classes, or other small things influencing the climate in the school, are much more important in this respect.) There are various implications of using diverse criteria for quality. First of all, quality is fundamentally contextual. Quality of education means something completely different in downtown Sofia, in the Roma urban ghetto in Plovdiv, or in a small village in the
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in two different schools within the same settlements, or in the case of different student groups of different socio-economic or ethnic background. This important feature of our contemporary understanding of quality—to a certain extent—devalues the centrally-issued quality standards that previously carried (and in several South Eastern European countries still carry) an absolute weight.
The second implication is that quality is a moving target. Even in the case of service outcomes, as they are increasingly connected to external (economic and social) refer-ences, their perpetual change forces all service providers to reflect upon the changes and to strive to adjust. To put it simply: as goals change, the actual meaning of quality changes, too. This also applies to the expectations of the local governments and the clients of the service; their views, interests, and perceptions are not static in the least.
Sometimes we use the terms quality and effectiveness as exchangeable concepts. In fact, quality is less and less the feature of the results and increasingly that of processes. As a result—as it is demonstrated by a possible taxonomy of the aspects of quality bel-low—effectiveness is one of the components or aspects of quality that is a much broader concept, even in terms of the results of education. Poor performance results that are increasingly measured in terms of learning outcomes indicate quality problems but they are far from being identical to them.
Figure 5.2
The Aspects of Quality and Effectiveness in Education
Impact
Quality Effectiveness
Management Human resource management
Organization The use of financial resources
Staff satisfaction Client satisfaction
Educational outcomes
Measurable economic and social outcomes
Learning pathways
• participation, enrollment rates
• dropout rates
• retention rates
Learning outcomes
• examination results
• student performance
Social and economic impact Educational outcomes
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The conclusion from the above definition of quality is its organization-connected nature. If quality is tied to goals and various external expectations and to the processes that must be designed to serve all these expectations, it becomes so contextual that makes it very difficult to talk about across the entire education system; where we can grasp quality is always a specific organization (school), with specific goals operating in a specific environment.
Equity of Education
Equity has been one of the major concerns of educational policies in Europe for many decades. The rationales for promoting equity are extremely diverse and vary from value-based orientations (such as gender equity, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, etc.) to value-neutral considerations (such as investment in human capital, the reduction of social safety costs, or strengthening social cohesion). The approaches to educational equity vary between the two extreme positions of a wide spectrum. On the one end is a pessimistic approach that is rooted in the sociology of the 1960s, according to which schools are the products of modern societies that are based on deep social inequalities.
Therefore, the very purpose of education is ingraining and reproducing inequalities.
On the opposite end is the enthusiastic approach of “alternative pedagogies,” according to which “all children can learn.” It was strengthened by the ruling egalitarian “social engineering” approach of the former communist countries that was based on the illu-sion that the social positions of entire societal macro-groups can be changed through education (Radó 2009).
The prevailing “mainstream” approach to equity is a rather balanced one: although the social background of the students determines their educational outcomes to a huge extent, education still has a certain space to compensate for the negative impact of low so-cial status or other dimensions of soso-cial and personal inequalities on educational outcomes.
Therefore, the question is how to enhance this compensation capacity of schools. This balanced view is the underlying approach of the definition of equity produced by an OECD expert group in 1997:
Educational equity refers to an educational environment in which individuals can consider options and make choices based on their abilities and talents, not on the basis of stereotypes, biased expectations, or discrimination. The achieve-ment of educational equity enables males and females of all races and ethnic backgrounds to develop the skills that are needed in order to be productive, empowered citizens. It opens economic and social opportunities regardless of gender, ethnicity, race, or social status.
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Figure 5.3
The Conceptual Framework for Understanding Inequities in Education
Educational inequalities were dealt with almost exclusively within the framework of equal access to education for many decades. However, the focus of thinking gradually shifted from access to teaching, from teaching to learning outcomes. This shift is not independent from the fact that inequalities, as they are measured by rather traditional indicators (such as enrollment rates at different levels of education or dropout rates), show a rather favorable picture for most countries in Europe, especially from a global perspective. The real reason, however, for the need to renew the interpretation of equity in education is the new emerging paradigm of learning outcomes. The implication of this approach to equity is that inequalities are worth considering through the prism of the very purpose of educational services: the results of learning. Identifying inequities, that is, performance differences that are considered to be illegitimate either because of their degree (such as gender inequities) or because of their type (such as performance differences caused by discrimination), is not simply a shift in the methods of identification. It has also major implications for the alignment, targets, and instruments of policies designed to reduce inequities in education.
However, as mentioned earlier, in several cases of inequities, participation differences are so large (as in the case of Roma in South Eastern Europe) that a strong focus on
Socio–economic status
Ethnic/minority affiliation
Residential status
Personal abilities (special needs)
Gender The dimensions of social and personal inequalities
Educational service provisions (schools)
Inequalities of educational outcomes
Organization of learning Teaching and
learning
Organizational operations
Failures in terms of learning pathways
Failures in terms of learning outcomes
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access and participation still has to be maintained. But even in these cases, the analy-sis of information on learning outcomes gaps provide an essential insight on the way inequities are generated in the education system, without which participation-related problems can not be dealt with properly.
Cost-effectiveness of Education
We will discuss financing of education in centralized and decentralized governance systems in a separate chapter. However, in order to demonstrate the impact of the learning-outcome approach, we have to anticipate a few considerations.
The cost-effectiveness of education is the relationship between all sorts of expenditures and their outcomes. The relation between the two can be improved either by reducing expenditures or by improving educational outcomes. This measure is one of the most important public policy requirements, even if the principle of “value for money”—that all citizens in South Eastern Europe carefully consider while shopping—is not often applied to public services. The reason why governments still have to strive to improve the balance between inputs and outputs of educational services is the fact that education systems in the region are facing enormous challenges, meanwhile increasing the amount of public resources deployed to education has serious limits.
Education in a given country can be considered effective or ineffective only by com-parison to another country. Therefore, indicators allowing for international comcom-parison play a key role in judging the cost-effectiveness of education. The basic indicator is spending per student (e.g., per capita expenditure). As far as educational outcomes are concerned, there are various participation and learning-outcome indicators that can be set against per capita spending. Due to the availability of learning-outcomes data, they are increasingly replacing participation-related indicators in measuring cost-effectiveness.
As the data for four Central and Eastern European countries illustrate, the “price” of learning outcomes in different countries can be calculated.
Table 5.1
The “Price” of the Results in Central and Eastern European Countries6
Expenditure7 (USD purchasing power
parity)
Mathematic scores in PISA8
Expenditure/PISA scores
Slovakia 17,612 498 35
Czech Republic 28,444 523 54
Poland 26,544 490 54
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When comparing the cumulative per capita spending on primary education with mathematics scores in PISA in the OECD countries, it turns out that there is a statistical correlation between the two. Nevertheless, there are countries that perform better than would be expected on the basis of the level of funding, while there are other countries that perform lower. The comparison suggests that the closer the average achievement data are to the expectations on the basis of the level of spending, the better is the balance between expenditure and outcomes. In Serbia, however, because of the poor average performance of the Serbian education system in spite of the relatively low level of funding, the education system of the country performs much lower than expecta-tions (Teodorovic 2008). It suggests that there is a space to improve the effectiveness of primary education even at the level of recent funding.
Figure 5.4
Relationship between PISA Scores and Spending (2003)9
Although these statistical correlations are good indications of the cost-effectiveness of a given education system, a great deal of cautiousness is recommended about their interpretation. As will be seen later, there is no overlap between the factors that deter-mine per capita funding and those determining learning outcomes. In other words, there are no shortcuts in this respect: the relationship between financing and outcomes is remote and indirect; therefore, increasing funding does not necessarily result in better outcomes of any kind.
350 400 450 500 550 600
0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000 90,000 Korea
Finland
Greece Serbia
Mexico
Spain
Portugal Italy
Czech Republic
Hungary
Ireland Poland
Slovak Republic Germany
Sweden Australia Netherlands
United States Norway
Austria Canada Japan
France
Switzerland Belgium
Denmark Iceland PISA mathematics score
Cumulative expenditure per student between the ages of 6 and 15
R2 = 0.15
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The expenditure on education can be compared with its external outcomes. For example, the impact of spending on education can be analyzed in relation to unem-ployment, earnings, innovation, or other aspects of development. The challenge to the analysis is to filter out the impact of factors other than education. Nevertheless, the
“educated guess” that impact analysis offers is instrumental in understanding the effi-ciency of investment in education in light of its external effectiveness.
Figure 5.5
Cost-effectiveness in Education
As will be discussed later, the learning-outcomes approach does not influence how we measure cost-effectiveness only. It has implications for certain principles of financing, too. For example, the approach—which allows for deviations from financing standards in order to recognize the diverse priorities of the owners of the schools and the parents (i.e., fiscal neutrality)—is increasingly justified by the required diverse specific costs of education that are necessary to produce the same level of learning outcomes.
Level of funding (amount of
resources)
Efficiency (in generating, allocating and using
resources)
Equity (in distributing
resources)
Student outcomes (participation and learning outcomes)
Social and economic impact
C H A P T E R 6