Educational system reforms, changes, and inequality in attainment in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)

Educational systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have gone through considerable reforms and changes, especially during the last four decades. This has been a part of the broader shift of development assistance by international organisations (IOs) from merely financing to policy reforms for better results by overcoming the limitations of traditional, centralised institutions in many LMICs. One of these reform areas has been to decrease standards or de-standardise educational systems by devolving managerial responsibilities regarding education policies to sub-national and school levels. De-standardisation means the extent to which educational systems do not maintain equal standards across local entities and schools. The World Bank (WB) has played a pioneering role to lead this ‘movement’. Nonetheless, there is a lack of literature about the theoretical and empirical understanding of these reforms, actual changes in educational systems brought in LMICs, and how they relate to inequality in educational outcomes. This dissertation examines four major questions addressing these issues in four different papers.
The first paper (published in Sociology of Education) investigates the trends and the types of de-standardisation reforms implemented by the WB across 99 LMICs. Data come from coding all available WB projects on primary and secondary education through extensive archival research. Findings show that WB-implemented de-standardisation reforms have experienced notable growth since the late 1980s and early 1990s onwards. Around 63 percent of WB project components have focused on de-standardisation reforms. This could be arguably led by the end of the Cold War resulting in diffusing these reforms across LMICs from countries with liberal democratic institutions. The second paper, using the same measures as in paper 1, examines why the WB may have implemented more de-standardisation reforms in some countries compared to others. Results suggest that the more authoritarian regimes are, the more likely they have received these reforms by the WB at the sub-national level. This aligns with the existing debate that de-standardisation reforms may have been diffused more authoritarian regimes; many of those were part of the former Soviet Union. However, the result is the reverse for de-standardisation at the school level. This could be because school-level de-standardisation may require substantial autonomy at the sub-national level first. This is why more authoritarian regimes have been more likely to implement these reforms in sub-national entities, while less likely to implement at the school level. The third paper examines whether de-standardisation reforms are associated with factual changes in decreasing the standards of educational systems on the ground in 30 LMICs. This is based on a unique dataset on the actual state of the de-standardisation of educational systems. There is no evidence of the association between WB reforms and corresponding factual changes. Finally, the fourth paper investigates the association between the actual state of the de-standardisation of educational systems and the inequality in attainment at the secondary level in 27 LMICs. Combining the macro institutional measures at the country level with household surveys, findings suggest that the attainment gap between the poorest and richest individuals is 11 percentage points higher in highly de-standardised systems at the sub-national level compared to that of weakly de-standardised systems. The gap is 14 percentage points when considering school-level de-standardisation. Moreover, highly de-standardised systems, especially at the school level, continue demonstrating wider attainment gaps over time. These results align with existing evidence from high-income countries that educational systems maintaining dissimilar standards may widen inequalities in educational outcomes. Implementing educational reforms in LMICs by IOs without evidence still remains a prevalent practice. Instead of diffusing similar reforms across educational systems, more focus should be given to contextual elements and how the reforms may affect marginalised communities in particular.

Advisor: Bukodi, E