WASHINGTON, D.C.- What are your thoughts on the school systems in our country? Underfunded? Do teachers make too much for what they do, or too little? Do you think that our schools are becoming too standardized, or do you lament that there are not enough clear matrices for measuring student progress? Pretty much everybody has an opinion on schools and how to improve them, but it’s mostly conjecture based on personal experience.
How nice would it be to have a universal results driven system? Clear cause and effect relationships where education is concerned. If you want students to test better, teach this way. If you want to increase creativity, teach that way. It sounds impossible, but that’s just what the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) project is trying to do.
SABER’s goal program is no less than an audit of the various teaching methods and policies employed across the globe. It is a daunting task to say the least, but if successful, SABER will give clear and concise guidelines for educators and politicians to follow.
The case for a good educational system pretty much makes itself, but let us recap. A strong educational system has huge impact on a diverse number of issues, including national productivity, scientific discovery, population control, economic well being, innovation, lawfulness, liberty and personal happiness. These probably all sound like buzzwords, but that is because the effects of a strong educational backbone are so vast and all encompassing that vague buzzwords are all that can be used to describe them. In other words, a good education is a good idea.
Through the SABER program, countries can improve their educational infrastructure while helping out the rest of the world by providing data on what works and what doesn’t. In this way, a country can get a snapshot of the effectiveness of its own policies and examples of how it might improve, while helping other nations to do the same.
The early challenge in for the SABER program is creating a system of measurement that could be used to monitor the effects of various educational institutions and policies. While results like literacy rates and numerical skills are easy to measure, things like creativity and what effects on future employment specific policies have is difficult to calculate.
There are many variables in educating a child. After much toil and careful consideration, SABER has managed to identify key threads that run throughout different educational systems that help establish baselines.There are some amazing advantages to this approach, not least of which are that it provides a cheap but effective way for impoverished nations to improve themselves.
The answer, it turns out, is not always to throw more money into funding education. Small changes in the way schools are managed can yield huge results. Simply changing the concentration of teachers from urban to rural has provided amazing results in Tanzania. Nigeria is quickly becoming the poster child for SABER, having created a comprehensive plan using SABER tools. While it is still early, results are looking promising for Nigeria as enrollment rates in its primary and secondary schools continue to improve.
So how does SABER actually work? First, only countries that actively seek participation in the SABER program are included in the results. Any country can take information freely from the project to use at its discretion but many choose not to provide data. When a country agrees to participate, SABER analysts set up shop and evaluate programs and policies with the help of government and educational professionals. These evaluations can be all encompassing or specific to just a few domains or locations. After the evaluation, the SABER representatives work with policy makers to figure out which policies could use improvement and how best to go about the task.
Because participation is voluntary, there are a few countries that have opted to not use the SABER project. Sadly, many of these nations that have yet to join have a huge amount of helpful information that remains untapped. Nations like the United States, Australia, Brazil and Japan have yet to participate. As SABER works with each nation, it refines and expands the global knowledge base, so the more participants the project gets the more each participant benefits. For powerhouses like the U.S., to remain out of the project is a lot of wasted potential.
The SABER project will continue to expand, gathering information and using it to help improve the educations for millions of children worldwide. The program is constantly getting better and the results are starting to come in. Everything is looking good for the SABER program, which will continue to improve education across the globe for years to come.
– Dylan Spohn
Sources: Saber Project, Biztech Africa, RCICD
Photo: Feltjournalistene