Students experienced significant learning loss during the pandemic, accelerating pre-existing trends and widening achievement gaps. The World Bank estimates that seven in ten students in low- and middle-income countries are living in “learning poverty” today, unable to read a simple sentence by the time they finish elementary school. Furthermore, if existing trends continue, it will take until 2040 just to get back to where we were in 2019 in terms of global student learning outcomes and more than 725 million children worldwide would still be in “learning poverty” status by 2050. Looking for some signs of hope, analysts from McKinsey and Company’s Global Education Practice scoured the globe for education systems bucking the trends. Their new report suggests that there is a roadmap available to speed up improvement for those willing to follow it.
The enormous research effort was multi-faceted and involved data from hundreds of educational systems—national, regional, state/province, and even city-level systems—across the world. It included a literature review of over 400 publications covering twenty years, encompassing a broad range of international testing data (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and more); over 10,000 education policy changes in 190 countries via Stanford University’s World Education Reform Database; and conversations with more than 200 system leaders, experts, donors, philanthropists, and researchers. The final step was a global education survey conducted between September and December of 2023, gathering 422 responses from twenty-seven countries across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Survey respondents included senior leaders (from national education ministers to school superintendents) and senior members of executive teams (like chief academic officers and chief operating officers of education systems). Analysts then built detailed case studies of fourteen systems that had made and sustained educational improvements over the course of a decade or more prior to the pandemic, documenting their reform efforts in an effort to find replicable commonalities.
The topline finding is that, based on student performance on those various international tests, many systems were “beating the odds” and showing strong improvement between 2005 and 2019. The biggest improvers ran the gamut of national and subnational (state/province/local) structures and experienced both high- and low-poverty. Interestingly, educational spending was only impactful up to a point—somewhere around $6,000 to $8,000 U.S. dollars per student—above which additional spending was not clearly correlated with continued academic improvement.
Looking to see what worked in various contexts (size, structure, socioeconomic status, education spending), analysts dug deeply into those systems chosen for case studies. Nationally, they are Kenya, Poland, Singapore, Morocco, Norway, South Africa, Peru, Estonia, and Malawi. The regions of Ceará in Brazil and Punjab in India were also studied. So was the state of Mississippi, which has been lauded elsewhere for its success in scaling reforms statewide. London, England, and Washington, D.C., represented city-wide efforts. The latter was specifically cited for coalition-building across various levels of stakeholders under Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson. The report covers all of the particulars, but the bottom line is that if—starting today—all education systems could improve at the same rate these exemplars exhibited in 2019, anticipated global pandemic recovery time would be drastically shortened and improvement would restart at such a pace that an additional 350 million children could be lifted from learning poverty by 2050.
That’s great news, but is it realistic to expect improvement on that kind of scale? The answer to that question takes up the majority of the report, and is perhaps even more relevant to the authors than documenting the existence of improvement.
On the upside, it seems that the high level “to do” list is fairly short. Successful school systems, analysts say, emphasize changes in the classroom, focusing first and foremost on teachers and the content they deliver. These systems choose evidence-backed strategies relevant to their starting place, require a solid baseline of data, acknowledge that student outcomes can only improve incrementally (from poor to fair to good to great), prioritize outcomes at the instructional core, and use available technology as a tool to enhance learning. Timelines for improvement must be realistic and include short-, medium-, and long-term benchmarks. Measuring student outcomes—and making those data transparent to all stakeholders—is key to knowing when to stay the course and when to make changes. There is a wealth of detail from exemplar systems about lower-level “to dos” that could help kickstart this kind of success in other locales.
If this sounds like an all-hands-on-deck approach to you, then you’re reading it right. Everyone from government oversight agencies and school bureaucracies to teachers and families must be brought on board for meaningful change to occur and, most importantly, sustain. The exemplar systems examined in this report accomplished this by setting fewer priorities so they could reach higher goals, cultivating multiple likeminded leaders at each stakeholder level, and engaging educators and families “authentically,” with transparent two-way communication.
The McKinsey authors are not Pollyanna-ish. To wit: “One should never underestimate stakeholders’ perception that a reform is a threat to them and their values, even if all they want is to retain what is familiar, stable, and predictable in their work and life.” The status quo, they add, “has many protectors.” But their conclusion—in response to all of the data, good and bad—is two-fold. First, a number of education systems of various sizes and resource levels have clearly shown that reform and improvement are possible, scalable, and sustainable. Second, their successes occurred in spite of the many “protectors” that were surely present at the start of their journeys. The distillation of these systems’ success into basic guidelines for other leaders to replicate—including how to address inevitable opposition—is meant to spark the belief that if another system can do it, so can we.
SOURCE: McKinsey and Company, “Spark & Sustain: How all of the world’s school systems can improve learning at scale” (February 2024).
