Comments

Wood criticises the claim that global poverty and hunger have been increasing. This claim seems to be based on research by Jason Hickel, who is one of the signatories on the letter in question. Perhaps Wood would find it useful to read the underlying research before he weighs in? Here is an example: https://www.academia.edu/21593862/The_True_Extent_of_Global_Poverty_and_Hunger_Questioning_the_Good_News_Narrative_of_the_Millennium_Development_Goals

It is good to see that 1 year after graduation the employment rate doubles. At the PNG University of Technology in Lae 3 surveys were done at graduation in April 2015, April 2016 and April 2017. Students graduate in October the year before. The overall employment rate 6 months after graduation was only 40%. There were noticeable differences per academic department. In 2018, the survey was not held.

The issue of foreign aid is a menace to poor countries, it has put their development strategies in jeopardy. I would argue in favour of no aid/donors. We need to wake up from this "begging" situation for heaven's sake. The UK, US and Japan were poor - no one was born wealthy. It's upon us to change our destiny. Its now or never Wakanda forever.

Hi Gerard, Final comment from me. It seems that your position is, in a sense, not that far from Garth's after all. You appear to believe, as best I can tell from your comments on pedagogy, that we know what to do, we just don't do it. Minor technical points from me: 1. Cost benefit will be a function of two things: (1) benefit & (2) cost. Small benefits may well be worthwhile if the economic cost is itself small. 2. The standard deviation is itself a function of variance around the mean. If variance is high, it is possible to achieve a non-trivial absolute benefit, on average, and still have a gain, in terms of standard deviations, that is not especially high. Under some circumstances (amidst a diverse population, say) I would be interested in knowing the substantive absolute improvement, more than some figure expressed in terms of standard deviations. Anyhow, that's mostly by the by. It's been interesting to hear your thoughts on education. Terence

Hi Terence This is an interesting summary of school effectiveness research. Like most such research, the studies focus on managerial findings rather than classroom practice. While quite large compared to most developing country studies, the improvements indicated mostly fall below the 0.4 of a standard deviation recommended by Hattie as a cutoff for cost-effective investment. Encouraging but not convincing. In any case, little of the research reported deals with the classroom teaching style and professional issues that I raised. The one area that does relate is teaching to the test. The assumption that this is a bad thing is culturally biased. In societies where poverty is endemic, public examinations are a high stakes opportunity that might provide a rare, and hopefully corruption free, opportunity for upward mobility, escape from poverty, and capacity to support family: one of the many things not well-understood in the western literature! Gerard

Very interesting and motivational story here. Your hardwork made you prosper as you are today but the sad part is the rural decay and that is the biggest problem and disaster to your siblings at Kolombi and Ewa Paiyala that you could ever imagine of. Your story here needs to be shared to the public of Hewa Paiyala as you made the history in our society. Everyone in Paiyala heard of your story. Thank you big bro. Lawrence Koma.DWU.

Hi Gerard, This is an interesting read, although not all aid funded. Also note the external validity limitations of rcts discussed below. https://www.povertyactionlab.org/policy-insight/improving-learning-increasing-motivation-targeting-instruction-and-addressing-school Terence

Thanks for the comment, Terence. I'm always interested to see any examples of successful educational outcomes - what cases did you have in mind?

I wish I could agree with Garth’s comments that it is ‘amazing what has been achieved especially in areas that are well understood such as … education’ and also ‘the main impediment to further progress is lack of funding rather than lack of knowledge’. Sadly, evidence suggests the opposite may well be the case - for both. For example, Gerard Guthrie, who has already commented here, has written two important books ‘The Progressive Education Fallacy’ and ‘Classroom Change in Developing Countries’ that show how a lack of understanding of the important place of traditional epistemologies in developing counties such as PNG and elsewhere has seriously hampered educational development. My own work on the sustainability of benefits from educational development assistance to Indonesia shows how little of the considerable effort and resources over 40 years has yielded longer term benefits. In both cases, my view is that we in the development community have not applied educational and local knowledge to the extent necessary, favouring instead imported, top-down, western economic and managerial approaches. More funding in areas of education that are not well understood will likely lead to further waste and disappointment. More positively, the adoption of analytical approaches such as Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation advocated by Harvard’s Center for International Development and currently implemented by DFAT in Indonesia, may yield a significantly stronger base of understanding to achieve more in education and in other areas of development.

Thanks Gerard, Interesting comment. Education isn't my specialty but my understanding is similar to yours. Aid - in aggregate - has been better at producing outputs than outcomes. That said there are good cases of aid-funded education work delivering education outcomes too, so it's clearly possible. Terence

I'm not sure I agree with Garth's comment about 'well-understood', at least in regard to education. The main benefit of aid to education has been to increase enrolment levels, especially at primary level (Riddell and Nino-Zarazua 2016). However, quality-focused aid trying to introduce Anglo-American (and Australian) curriculum philosophies, teacher education and classroom methods has been a widespread failure. Accumulating evidence of the lack of success in fundamentally changing formalistic classroom teaching has been ignored or downplayed. In PNG, this evidence goes back to the 1970s. I've also found evidence from over 600 research and evaluation studies in at least 31 other 'developing' countries that shows similar findings. Often projects successfully generate material and professional inputs, but I have not uncovered a single methodologically sound example of success in generating paradigm shift to 'progressive' styles, nor impact on increasing student achievement from trying to change teaching styles. Actually, the evidence of failure is there and fundamental cultural reasons are understood, at least in the broad, but the evidence just happens to be ignored. Why?

Thanks Sally