The public-school educational landscape of Pakistan has been buzzing with reform efforts for nearly a quarter of a century now. From education voucher schemes to outsourcing schools; from rigorous testing to regular school monitoring; from overhauling hiring processes to creating model schools; from establishing ECE rooms to providing extensive and continuous teacher support—to name just a handful—the volume of reforms that has been pushed through is unprecedented and nearly ubiquitous. In the school improvement literature, a period of three to five years is considered a reasonable length of time for any reform effort to begin translating into outcomes. While it will be preposterous to make any causal claims about the impact, or the lack thereof, of the reforms undertaken in the first quarter of the 21st century in Pakistan in the absence of a thoroughly designed study, it is high time to juxtapose the current situation in public schools with the massive reform efforts of the last twenty years to highlight the broader characteristic features of the efforts. To that end, this two-part article is a brief and critical survey of the plethora of reforms and the changes one has seen in the public sector education in the meantime.
Punjab has been the hub of wide-ranging reform efforts undertaken in the education sector, with KP and Sindh following suit, somewhat along a similar trajectory. By now, the following reforms are in place in most, if not all, the provinces. Firstly, there are monitoring mechanisms in place whereby regular exercises are done to assess attendance, availability of facilities, usage of school funds, and (in some cases) observation of lessons and testing of a sample of students. Secondly, the hiring process is now more transparent than ever before. Most provinces now use standard evaluations and provide some form of training in pedagogy to the new inductees. Thirdly, most provinces have a structure in place for continuous professional support to help teachers become better at their jobs. Fourth, most provinces now provide teacher guides and other learning aids to ensure teachers have some form of go-to resources to augment or improve their practices. Fifth, some provinces have experimented with voucher schemes, school support programmes and outsourcing of schools to bring the private sector agents in on the operation of schools.
In addition to these, most provinces now provide school funds that can be used as per need at the school level. Among other things, such funds can be utilised to hire additional teachers, purchase learning support material, and repair minor damages at the school. Students of elementary school in most provinces get free textbooks. Capital punishment is banned, and conspicuous offenders have been seen facing the music. Some provinces have made substantial efforts to make information about schools publicly available for the citizenry to see using digital dashboards as well as boards/flexes to be displayed at the gate of schools. Textbooks have been overhauled multiple times and teachers now even get lesson plans and calendars to be followed during the academic year. There is enormous stress on integration of ICT in classroom practices. Some provinces have begun establishing well-furnished ECE rooms for 3-5 years old students. This is a brief survey of the macro level reforms that have been undertaken but is, by no means, an exhaustive one. It will indeed be unfair to try to do an exhaustive survey in one article—such is the abundance of the reform efforts.
One is left wondering why—if such enormous reforms have been undertaken—shall there remain a learning crisis in Pakistan? How come the ASER reports find that over half of grade 5 level students are unable to answer grade two level questions and declare that children in public schools are either learning ‘too little or too slow’? The answer is that learning at schools is an outcome of a complex inter-relationship between the learners, the teachers, the atmosphere at school, and the wider ecosystem of schools that include not just the administrators and parents, but also the resources, incentives, regulations, and policies. It is because of this complex interaction that improvement in learning is difficult to come by.
Inputs do not translate into outputs or outcomes in a linear way, much less in a similar way across various milieu. The public sector education functions the way it does because of the unique interplay of the agents in its ecosystem and overhauling it will take some stern perseverance. The reform efforts may have been well-intended and had the right ambitions but the system that they are aimed at overhauling has its own inertia and momentum.