Primary Education in Bangladesh: Who serves education in Bangladesh?

Politicians’ goals for primary education in South Asia differ from those of parents. Politicians want to build schools, recruit teachers, free textbooks and a centralized education system. Parents want quality education that will give their children a better future.

It is therefore no surprise that there is a steady increase in the number of parents in South Asia who send their children to non-government schools (“cheap” private schools, NGO schools, madrassas) with the hope that their children will learn at least basic reading skills in the local language and performing basic arithmetic.

Yet even with these humble desires, we believe that both children and their parents have been betrayed by school systems in South Asia – with the exception of Sri Lanka. For example, rates of “educational poverty” in South Asia’s three most populous countries range from 56% in India and 58% in Bangladesh to 78% in Pakistan. The exception is Sri Lanka, where the rate is just 14 percent, better than many high-income countries.

Why is this so, given that access to primary education has been almost universal over the last thirty years?

To understand this, you must realize that school systems are composed of institutions dominated by educational bureaucracies, politicians, and teachers’ unions. The dominant goal of these groups is not to educate children, but to protect their own interests.

Gaming the system

Politicians see education as a tool for building shared loyalty and national loyalty among citizens. Therefore, bureaucrats and politicians are playing the game of universal primary education in different ways. In 2009, India passed an ambitious Right to Education Act covering all children aged 6–14. At the same time, Bangladesh introduced the Primary Education Examination (PECE). Both initiatives resulted in higher school enrollment and higher primary school graduation rates, but not better learning.

The most reliable assessment of primary school students’ learning in India is ASER, a large-scale assessment conducted in students’ homes with a statistically significant sample size. The organizer is Pratham, a large non-governmental organization. The most advanced questions ask selected children’s ability to read stories at a Grade 2 level and divide a three-digit number by a one-digit number. National averages from the latest ASER survey in 2022 are dismal. In Grade 5 in government schools, 39 percent of children can read a story and 22 percent can divide it. Non-government schools, while far from perfect, do much better: in Grade 5, about 57 percent can read a story and 37 percent can divide it.

But this begs the question: Why do children successfully complete school but cannot understand a passage at a Grade 2 level or solve a simple division problem? The “game” in Bangladesh and India is to lower the bar for passing the Class 5 exam and often allow question papers to be leaked before the exam day.

For example, for over a decade, Bangladesh has conducted the National Student Assessment (NSA), a highly sophisticated school-based assessment, on a representative sample of students in grades 3 and 5 of primary school. However, in 2022, Bangladesh compromised assessment integrity by offering special tutoring to Class 5 students using testing tools to show better performance in their latest NSA. Ironically, the national body that oversees the provision of primary education services played this “game” rather than protecting the integrity of the assessment. The international watchdog organization NSA 2022 collaborated with the basic education department in Bangladesh and failed to ensure minimum research integrity.

In Bangladesh, despite this type of fraud, international organizations have played an important role in expanding primary education opportunities for millions of children. Like many other developing countries, Bangladesh has received significant educational development assistance since the 1980s, following the recognition of education as an investment resulting from the Jomtien Conference in Thailand and the subsequent commitment to education for all towards universal primary education .

After 1990, Bangladesh began to receive more educational development assistance. Politicians and bureaucrats used the money to create more teaching positions, build more classrooms, distribute free textbooks to all primary school students, and expand teacher training facilities. Everything improved except the actual learning. After the Jomtien conference, the bureaucracy and politicians achieved their desires; parents didn’t do it.

Education as an investment – ​​for whom?

Around the world, national governments and multilateral and bilateral organizations have initiated development programs to reduce poverty. In these development efforts, education has always been considered the most important means of increasing the incomes of poor households. The importance of basic literacy and numeracy is so obvious and the evidence so overwhelming that bilateral and multilateral agencies, philanthropic organizations – and even private companies – are investing in education.

However, development aid for education in South Asia has never kept pace with basic educational needs. International organizations emphasize quality and equity in primary education and are “reluctant” to adopt common strategies, without adequate evidence, to persuade political and bureaucratic leaders to address chronic quality deficits in primary education in South Asia.

In Bangladesh, several development partners have tried to include interventions to improve basic literacy and numeracy skills in the fourth Primary Education Development Program (PEDP), but their efforts have been uncoordinated and sometimes thwarted. Multilateral banks were more interested in disbursing funds than adding any accountability measures to achieve high-quality educational goals in primary schools.

The second PEDP program (2004–2010) received 37% of development assistance from 11 bilateral and multilateral donors, with a total budget for basic education of $1.8 billion. However, with PEDP-3 and PEDP-4, this figure dropped by as much as eight percent, even though the absolute value of donor contributions remained constant as the government significantly increased the budget for basic education.

The government financed this significant increase by negotiating more loans from multilateral banks such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank – loans that would have to be repaid. As a result, the national government’s additional revenues served mainly political and bureaucratic purposes rather than educational purposes for children and their parents, whose numbers continued to decline. Moreover, donors’ declining share of primary school budgets in Bangladesh has reduced their influence on discussions about learning outcomes.

Where is primary education in Bangladesh now?

Where does this mean primary education in Bangladesh under the new political dispensation?

While education will not be high on Professor Muhammad Yunus’s short-term priorities, there are opportunities to change and correct the systemic failings identified above, especially through more consultative and inclusive processes.

One such option is to conduct an assessment of students’ basic skills using the ASER process developed in India. The results will reveal the scale of the problem and determine how quickly to take action to reduce educational poverty levels.

Investing in teachers is the second important strategy. Teacher professionalism and performance drive change in education. A redesigned teaching profession should attract and retain the best talent in the profession, but this also requires changing standards of performance, status, incentives, compensation and career paths. This rethinking of teachers will be a long-term task, but it should start in earnest now.

Decentralizing education management within a single ministry of education can open up the reform process to gain stronger traction and broader support. This will be important if we want to make a real impact on basic literacy and numeracy skills.

There is now a real chance in Bangladesh to stop the betrayal of politicians and bureaucrats. Meeting parents’ demands by focusing on learning outcomes and reforming the education system to include multiple voices can enable change.

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This article was first published by Re-education October 8, 2024 The authors participated in a study on primary education systems in South Asia.

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Islam Shahidula is an expert in educational policy and planning.
Dr. John Richards is Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the authors.

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