Comments

As a new incoming 2013 Students Representative Council (SRC) President and one of the senior students I totally agree with all the points and recommendations made by Scott MacWilliam about University of Papua New Guinea. I've been studying at UPNG for 6 years; completed my BA (Political Science) in 2008 and am now in my third year of a Law degree. Whatever MacWilliam mentioned about UPNG is true to the best of my knowledge. There is a great need for bringing UPNG to a next level to meet the international standards and become competitive in the region. Right now, we are no way near to the international standard.... Our only hope is God who will one day make it become possible. Our Government needs to seriously look into it, and the UPNG Administration needs to manage funds properly and extend their arms outside to bring funds in to develop this institution. Donor Agencies such as AusAID, NZAID, etc are willing to help but its just that we need to seek rather than wait.

This discussion is getting really interesting! Dan, your comment draws attention to what I think is a major issue, which is the alarming trend towards the “homogenization” of education systems around the world. Countries like the US and Australia, among others, seem to be headed down a path of unrelenting attention to matters such as structural knowledge and technical skills reflected in demands for more standardized testing of literacy, numeracy and science, more control through setting minimum “standards”, rankings, and more accountability. Others, including Finland, are not going down that path but have adopted a more balanced approach reflecting emphases on creativity, values, morality, and culture. (Have a look at books by Ken Robinson on this or his talks <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>) From what you write, Indonesia seems to be going down this more balanced path. Personally, provided there is good balance in the curriculum, I think this is terrific! Why do developing countries have to blindly follow what is too often thought to be so great about western education? When I was working for 3 years at Universitas Indonesia, it was plain to me that the worst influence on universities then was in striving to be like an American or European university but without the resources, shared values, and with totally different needs. Why shouldn’t Indonesia educate according to its own values and culture? As to PAKEM, I believe this is no more or less compatible with the second curriculum approach, provided that teachers, as always, are fully equipped with a sound repertoire of skills to choose the most appropriate methods and classroom arrangements for helping children achieve particular learning goals. Even the military in liberal democracies, an organisation that may be fairly described as indoctrinating its members, uses a wide range of student-centred learning methods that encourage critical thinking, and, in fact, did substantial work in pioneering many of them for their training needs. <a href="http://www.humrro.org/corpsite/" rel="nofollow">HumRRO</a> in the US has done a lot of work in this area for the US military from at least the 1960’s.

Bob: Many thanks for keeping this dialogue going. I will send email contacts of a few other friends--I don't know how to link them to this. The issue I think will be very pertinent to the new curriculum if it is eventually formalized as being discussed in the papers now. It seems the focus on religion and citizenship, etc. is a way to address radicalism, "primordialism" (whatever term they use to mean ethic group focused vs. nationalism focused) and even bullying and fights among students. I guess this is a worthy goal but perhaps brings the system back to nation building and pancasila educational goals in the early Suharto years, as Mark writes, and a turn from the currently expressed goal of preparing youth to compete in the global economy. (Heavy investments in international standard schools follows from this policy.) It will be interesting to see if they will continue to state the latter as the over arching goal of education while changing the underpinings that mitiagate (remove sciene and English with more religion and (Indonesian) citizedship. I don't know which is better and that is up to Indonesian leaders. Only stakeholders should at least be cognizant of inherent contridictions. So if they go through with this curriculum change what is the future of instructional methods such as Pakem which is supposed to engender critical thining and self expression? Would this be an inherent contridiction? I have no answers but would welcome opinions

Pure speculation, but could a failure to release the evaluation be linked to the continuing consideration of labour mobility as part of the PACER-Plus negotiations? Officials from Australia, New Zealand and the Forum Island Countries will meet in Samoa this month to continue the trade talks - including discussing whether the SWS and NZ's RSE Scheme can meaningfully be included in a final PACER-Plus agreement.

"A better defence is that a lot of aid will not generate economic development but, done properly, can at least make life substantially less miserable to millions of people who live below the poverty line"...That's exactly what elites in extractive political insitutions want aid to provide...for political stability so they can continue to extract wealth and power while aid agencies continue to maintain political stability in their country. Aid therefore can be viewed as keeping these institutions in power.

Each Resource Project runs its own TCS Projects; eg; Oil Search Ltd, Porgera Gold Mine via Barrick, Ok Tedi etc. but they all come together under the oversight of the Department of National Planning & Monitoring under the Economic Sector and are all approved by the Internal Revenue Commission. Thus, the best places to check for a summary of TCS projects would be DNPM & IRC. You would find a list of projects, type of project, costs, duration of implementation whether the projects are new or in some exceptional cases; rehabiliation of existing proejcts.

Bravo! The post 2015 agenda is fast becoming a very noisy debate dominated by the usual suspects. I don't think the ideas that CGD, ODI, etc. are bad, but I agree with Morton that once the debate heads in the direction they suggest it will become harder and harder for voices from the South to be heard and more importantly, to influence the outcome. I am hopeful that given the more varied international development community today (compared with 2000) that there are many factors and forces that will not allow this to happen. Nevertheless, we in the developed countries should be more generous, stepping back to allow others to take the lead; that, unfortunately, is not likely to happen.

Hi Stephen, I agree with you about the need to publically publish information about what we are claiming we are spending on foreign aid. The essence about published information however is whether it is meaningful or valueless? While the article you refer to may well have limited horizons, I suggest the real issue is not whether consultancies are either good or bad but whether they areeffective in producing results at the grass roots? The experience of many would suggest that after decades of huge amounts of aid monies being spent on wonderful sounding projects, the effects are minimal at best at the level where something is desperately needed. Take for example the recent media report on the provision of AusAID support in the fight against drug resistant TB in Western Provence of PNG directly opposite the Torres Strait. What is really happening as reported by a journo who actually visited the region and saw with his own eyes is I’ll bet not what is being reported to those who are signing off on the program. Sorry mate. I don’t agree with you about it being hard to address compliance issues concerning foreign aid. Having worked at the kunai roots level I can assure you it is very easy. All you have to do is accept that a published assessment is only as good as the methodology used to prepare the report. What use is there to get those wonderful, glowing reports of achievement if they are in fact, based on totally meaningless statistics and misinformnation? Total expenditure figures are the beloved addiction of politicians who quote them ad nausium but don't have any idea about what was actually achieved in reality. They are also the meat of those who feed off the public purse without achieving any long term results for those who we are supposed to be assisting. If a consultancy is worth its salt, it should provide an effective reporting mechanism that assesses achievements based on a prior set practical benchmark or target. If you can’t measure practical results, you can’t manage a program. Could it be (perish the thought), that those who are currently involved in consultancies might be slightly partial in this area of concern?

The constructive and thoughtful comments here tend to reflect a number of key matters that seem important to me. They all highlight the great importance of considering culture and context whether it is Uzbekistan or Indonesia. In the case of Indonesia, Sopantini reminds us of the need to be more local in our thinking, such as considering culture in Flores, rather than the broader concept of Indonesian culture, and Mark draws attention to different concepts of knowledge and learning that have implications for teaching. Dan asks if there is research on methods used by different countries that link to success in PISA tests. Yes, there is a literature on this of which the "Mathematics Teaching and Learning Strategies in PISA" by the OECD, 2010, is one example. In relation to your comment, Dan, these general conclusions are pertinent: “Teaching and learning strategies are complex processes that interact with one another, suggesting that in-depth, context-specific analyses are necessary to fully understand each strategy’s role in enhancing student performance. With a few interesting exceptions, most teaching and learning strategies do not have a direct, robust and consistent relationship with student performance across countries. The relationship between the strategies and performance tends to be moderated by other factors such as student attitudes and background, suggesting that these issues cannot be analysed separately (page 9).” (Both this study and the one below are discoverable by Googling the titles.) To emphasise the importance of culture and society in these tests, have a look at this publication by the Finnish National Board of Education, "Main factors behind the good PISA reading results in Finland". This publication points out the importance of reading in Finland – “one of the best library systems in the world, the library is the most beloved cultural institution” and “the number of books borrowed annually from public libraries and number of new books for children and young people is high”. Other indicators of reading are cited. Compare these values and habits with Indonesia! The above points also relate to the comments made by Chimi Thonden. Chimi’s comments about “incremental change” are raised in the discussion of the book Poor Economics here. It is a pity that there are so few examples of continuing support from national governments or donors to continue with incremental changes over time. The new USAID PRIORITAS project in Indonesia is one welcome exception to this, however. The other pity, and this is implied in Dan’s comments, is that there is very little quality research upon which to base policies and practices in relation to teaching in Indonesia. Even the data we do have from shorter commissioned studies and from routine monitoring and evaluation is not always well used in drawing lessons for practice and policy development. Like others, I have often wondered whether formal or progressive approaches are best. But while we await better evidence to help make our decisions for specific contexts, I think I will still be guided by conclusions reached by R.B. Spence in the 1928 edition of the Journal of Educational Psychology, 84 years ago: “The real problem is not "Is method A better than method B or method C?", but rather "Under what conditions does each method produce the most effective results?" And in relation to the selection and use of one approach to teaching, in this case in universities, he observed: “The decrying of the wholesale use of lectures is probably justified. The wholesale decrying of the use of lecturing is just as certainly not justified.”

I believe that proposed strategies for development and accounting for development progress is something that should be subject to analysis, debate and evidence when this is available. By the tone of your response, Lant, I sense that you may not agree with this. I think this is unfortunate. It inhibits considered progress towards good development strategies for good outcomes. This is why I noted that your Paper is a welcome contribution because it foregrounds the move away from schooling goals towards learning goals, which has the potential for good outcomes. Nevertheless, there are risks when we begin to consider ways of measuring these outcomes. And this is why I argued for caution. You identify three key points in your comment. As I understand your first point, you say that I that "cannot coherently applaud the shift of focus from “schooling” … to “learning” and then claim we can do that without ever measuring learning." I did not assert that we should never measure learning. I acknowledged, for example, that you encouraged the use of country-specific goals and tests, a strategy that I believe is appropriate, if done well. Rather, I said that we should exercise great caution in the wider use of tests such as TIMSS and PISA for comprehensive international comparisons of learning. Further, we need to be alert to the potentially negative consequences of such types of tests for developing countries. This caution is not based entirely on them becoming high stakes for the systems but also because of concerns about their cross-cultural validity. Secondly, you point out that "the debate about ‘high stakes’ in countries like India ... is absurd because there are massively high stakes for the student tests at grades 10 and 12 and university entrance examinations already." If you really mean debating high stakes testing is absurd, I find this troubling; with more reason to consider the stakes and figure out how to manage them. Another of your points is "that [the Indian] system itself (and schools and teachers) avoids any measurement of its performance at all ... So introducing learning goals would not increase the stakes for students–that is there already–it would just create some tracking of overall performance on goals the society claims to care about." I agree with you that tracking is necessary, but this is where the caution I argue for is also necessary so that the stakes from tracking are understood beforehand and carefully managed so that their consequences do not filter down to schools and children with even more negative consequences. I fail to see why exercising caution is problematic, particularly in the kind of environment you describe. To do otherwise would be irresponsible. In your third point you denigrate the work of large numbers of dedicated teachers and I wonder why you do this. Yes, I am sure there are some teachers in Africa, and elsewhere in the developed world as well, who are absent too often or only work 29 minutes a day. But there are very many teachers who are, as you sardonically describe, “wonderful, intrinsically motivated teachers and doing their best at the complex task called teaching”. Where is the evidence to support your assertion about the typical Indian teacher’s commitment and that the Indian education “system itself (and schools and teachers) avoids any measurement of its performance at all”? I will go on “assuming” (to use your term, Lant) that the risks of high stakes testing will apply in developing countries just as they do in the developed, until proven wrong. I repeat that I believe the move to learning goals you argue for in your Paper is a positive direction to take. But I also repeat that we must be cautious about the risks that can arise when testing attainment of these goals becomes high stakes within developing countries with all the known and potentially negative consequences that will be counterproductive to good development outcomes.

Paul, You've misunderstood what the article is about. I think what you've put forward is a proposal for assessing aid effectiveness at the recipient country level. I wouldn't say its a particularly good proposal. Sometimes a really good consultancy has massive resturns, whereas I get the impressions you would say: the more being spent on consultancies, the worse the program. But in any case, our article is about something quite different, and much less ambitious. It's about one small piece of the aid puzzle, the production and publication of country strategies. I assume you would agree that aid agencies should produce and publish country strategies. If we agree on that, then we can also agree that we should check on whether AusAID is actually following through on its promise to produce and publish. That's what we try to do. More generally, I think assessing aid effectiveness is really hard. Assessing compliance with good practice in aid is easier. Compliance doesn't necessarily imply good aid, but its an important first step.

There is some question about when to cry wolf. Clearly if there is a wolf. But what if it is dusky and I cannot really tell if it is a wolf or an Alaskan Husky? Probably better to play it safe and cry wolf. On the other hand, crying wolf at everything that is canine leads to lots of hub-bub and confusion. I own a Bichon-Frise who weighs about 12 pounds and is white and cuddly and looks alot more like a sheep than a wolf (for reasons I don't understand she has her own Facebook page at Jaya Dog, go see). Crying wolf at a Bichon-Frise just makes you seem hysterical and a little silly. Our paper never proposes high stakes testing, never uses the words "high stakes" and cannot, in my view, be reasonably construed as proposing test for high stakes purposes for students, teachers or schools. Debates about "high stakes" should be reserved for when that is actually on the table and not when it is never mentioned. The authors current attitude seems very Victorian, the current paper isn't proposing sex but it does say things that could lead people to think about other things that might eventually lead them to think about sex and so the paper is prurient. On a less facetious note, three points. First, in developing countries there is "high stakes" measurement--it is just that measurement is about enrollments and inputs. So the debate is not about "high stakes" or not, it is about what the "high stakes" measures that drive organizations should be. I don't think you can coherently applaud the shift of focus from "schooling" (where there are scads of measures that drive policy making) to "learning" and then claim we can do that without ever measuring learning. This is like saying I am going to drive from New York to Kansas but never look at where I am. Odds of doing that seem pretty slim. Second, the debate about "high stakes" is countries like India (where I now live) is absurd because there are massively high stakes for the student tests at grades 10 and 12 and university entrance examinations already. So right now there are examinations that are crushingly high stakes for students but the system itself (and schools and teachers) avoids any measurement of its performance at all and so at times produces tragically awful schooling--especially for the poorest--with consequences at all. So introducing learning goals would not increase the stakes for students--that is there already--it would just create some tracking of overall performance on goals the society claims to care about. Third, I do not believe--for many of the reasons the blog author cites--in "high stakes" or "thin accountability" metrics. That said, many of the arguments from rich country denizens about "high stakes" is that it detracts teachers from doing more worthwhile things. But in poorly performing countries the issue is not that these wonderful, intrinsically motivated teachers and doing their best at the complex task called teaching and evil green-shade guys would sully their cherished occupation with mind numbing, task-narrowing, soul-shrinking, numbers. In India it is well documented that a typical teacher is in the classroom engaged in instructional activity less than half the hours they are paid to do so. I just heard today that a recent survey in Africa (rural Uganda I believe) found teacher instructional time was 29 minutes a day. So instructional activity of any type would be a gain. In countries at high levels of performance, like Australia or the USA or Finland I can see being very worried about high stakes testing because the system is already functioning pretty well and some combination of intrinsic motivation and thick accountability (internal and external) is working reasonably well. But this is not the problem in many countries and about them we should not assume that the same risks are present.