Policymakers in low- and middle-income countries who are working to improve student learning often find themselves flying blind. They see the budget that goes into education and (sometimes) the learning that students come out with, but they lack information on the crucial factors in between—the practices, policies, and politics—that drive those learning outcomes. The Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) shines a light on those hidden drivers.
Many countries, despite having significantly increased access to education for their children and youth, now realize that they are facing a learning crisis (World Development Report 2018). In low- and middle-income countries, despite near universal enrollment in primary school, 53 percent of children cannot read and understand a simple story by late primary age (World Bank 2019). This statistic underlines the reality that schooling is not the same as learning—even though education policy often assumes that it is (Pritchett 2013). It shows just how far off track the world is from the aspiration embodied in Sustainable Development Goal 4, of providing at least quality secondary education to all children.
The World Development Report 2018 argued that the learning crisis has multiple causes: poor service delivery in schools and communities, unhealthy politics and low bureaucratic capacity, and policies that are not aligned toward learning for all. To tackle the crisis and improve learning for all children, countries need to know where they stand on these three key dimensions: practices (or service delivery), policies, and politics. But providing such a systemwide overview requires better measurement. Many of these drivers of learning are not captured by existing administrative systems. And although new measurement tools capture some of those aspects well, no single instrument pulls together data on all these areas. This gap leaves policymakers in the dark about what is working and what isn’t.
To fill this gap, the World Bank, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK’s Department for International Development, and the Government of Japan, has launched a Global Education Policy Dashboard, which measures the drivers of learning outcomes in basic education around the world. In doing so, it highlights gaps between current practice and what the evidence suggests would be most effective in promoting learning, and it gives governments a way to set priorities and track progress as they work to close those gaps.