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GI-ESCR participation at CIES conference
GI-ESCR participation at CIES conference
The Comparative and International Education Society | 66th Annual Conference will run between April 18-22, 2022. The CIES 2022 theme Illuminating the Power of Idea/lism arises from the intersection of two immutable realities of our time and the impact both are having on the field of comparative and international education. The first is the global experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. The second is the rise of nativism and fundamentalism representing both ideological rigidity and political divisiveness. The CIES 2022 theme seeks to find ways to address these challenges by bringing forward new ideas with a sense of idealism in the work on Education.
GI-ESCR will be organising and taking part in the following activities:
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How are Commercial Private Schools Doing in Practice?
The rapid growth of commercial actors in low-fee private schooling have been at the center of debates on education and inequalities for the last two decades. Those in favour of this phenomenon argue that commercial models present a potential “solution” to the problems confronting so-called developing countries. On the other hand, this large-scale expansion of commercial actors has been criticized by many for being incompatible with human rights and has paved the way to the adoption of the Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education in 2019, synthesizing the existing international human rights norms in the context of commercialisation in education.
Bridge International Academies (BIA) is probably the most well-known and controversial chain among commercial low-fee private schools. It stands out by its scale – over 500 schools and the ambition to reach 10 million children by 2025 – and its use of technology. BIA uses what it calls a ‘school in a box’ model, employing a highly-standardised approach to education. Every school looks the same, the material used is the same in each classroom, and most importantly, the lessons are the same across all the academies of the same country. It uses a system of scripted lessons, and its teachers receive lesson plans on an e-tablet, which they have to follow word by word.
Controversies about its involvement in East- and West Africa have been widely echoed in the last few years mainly concerning issues such as compliance with international and national laws, the school environment, questions related to access and parental inclusion, as well as concerns raised relating to the poor labour and working conditions of teachers employed by Bridge, and the lack of transparency and accountability regarding its operations. Some of these concerns have been voiced in a complaint submitted to the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO), the independent accountability mechanism for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the arm of the World Bank which has invested in Bridge, in 2018. This case has been followed by subsequent complaints to the CAO in 2020, alleging the sexual abuse and electrocution of children attending Bridge International Academies in Kenya. Moreover, the fact that many Bridge schools have permanently closed shop due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has left many teachers unemployed and many children without schools, deepening structural inequalities in access to education with specific implications for girls and young women.
This panel aims to build on the developments that have taken place since the 2017 CIES panel addressing Bridge International Academies as the evolving model for commercial low-fee private schools. In doing so, it will offer important reflections on what has changed on the ground since 2017 and will present the latest research and empirical data available in the East- and West- African regions concerning the operations of Bridge schools. It will provide an analysis of the current situation in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia and Nigeria from an equality and right to education lens and will investigate through the case study of Kenya, whether the Bridge model upholds the requirements of transparency and accountability towards the communities it serves. Reflecting on the individual presentations, the panel will ultimately explore whether the model of the Bridge International Academies is fit for the very purposes it was founded for.
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Strengthening Public Education: Tools and Experiences for aligning Education Policies with the Right to Education
In education, the last two decades have seen a significant increase in the scale and scope of non-state actors at the primary and secondary levels, and in particular commercial actors bringing a market-logic in education. These changes have been transforming education systems rapidly. The human rights concerns regarding this commercialisation and commodification of education include economic discrimination and segregation; lower quality and unequal access to for marginalised groups; frequent disregard for labour laws and standards; the reinforcement of unbalanced power relations; and unequal participation in the governance of education institutions. These concerns have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which revealed that market-based education systems are, especially in times of crises, unsustainable and have recentered the focus on the importance of implementing the right to education through well-founded, stable, inclusive and free public education systems.
How the right to public education is being implemented varies across the globe according to local realities. However, a fix point in any State’s approach to implementation, especially in the context of the rapid expansion of commercialisation in education and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, must be that its education policies are in line with international obligations and commitments synthesized in the Abidjan Principles.
The present panel, through the inter-linkage of four presentations, seeks to demonstrate how States and education stakeholders can be supported in better implementing the right to education using human rights tools and by learning from successful examples of public education systems. The first presentation will lay out how the normative content of the Abidjan Principles can guide States in their efforts to put in place more coherent education policies for strengthening their public education systems. Building on this paper, the subsequent presentation will outline how researchers can use the Abidjan Principles to measure if and how States are implementing and individuals are enjoying the right to education. The third paper will introduce a new tool developed by the International Institute for Educational Planning of UNESCO to support education stakeholders in bringing the right to education to the core of their education planning documents, such as their education sector plans. The final presentation on this panel will showcase how some countries have managed to implement the right to education successfully and will go on to conclude that free, quality public education systems can be achieved anywhere around the world, with the necessary political will and adherence to human rights commitments.
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Pre-conference workshop: Strengthening Education in Practice: Using the New Tool of UNESCO-IIEP for aligning Education Planning Documents with Human Rights Law
The respect, protection, and fulfilment of the right to education is the obligation of every State. To guarantee such a fundamental right, States must strive to align their national laws and policies with international right to education standard-setting instruments. Specifically, States must ensure that these instruments are correctly integrated into their educational planning documents, such as Education Sector Plans (ESP), Transitional Education Plans (TEP), or programming documents. This important task requires a specific and systematic approach, which the Methodological Guidelines and accompanying tools aim to facilitate.
The purpose of the Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit is to help relevant stakeholders systematically collect and analyse the efforts to ensure the right to education; these efforts should constitute the essence of the respective educational planning and/or programming documents. The resulting analysis should also bring to light different and challenging policy gaps in education. The final goal is to mobilise all information and analyses gathered towards a constructive dialogue with key national stakeholders, and to strengthen the right to education at national and local levels.
The Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit were originally conceived to support States in the planning process, thus they are mostly directed at educational planners, managers, and decision-makers at the national level. However, the tools are flexible enough to be utilised by other relevant entities or partners at the national (independent human rights institutions, ombudspersons, NGOs, etc.) or international levels (UN agencies, development banks, INGOs, etc.).
These Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit can and should be used to complement the UNESCO Guidelines to strengthen the right to education in national frameworks (2021). The latter cover the right to education comprehensively and provide tools to examine and analyse the compatibility of national education legal and policy frameworks with international right to education standard-setting instruments. Moreover, these Methodological Guidelines and their tools focus on a new, different approach: addressing the right to education within a State’s planning and programming documents, while supporting educational stakeholders in understanding and analysing the compatibility of their own planning (ESPs and TEPs, and/or programming) documents with the international obligations and commitments synthesised by the Abidjan Principles. These complementary documents can be used as a package to ensure that the right to education is effectively integrated and enforced in all national frameworks.
Learning objectives:
• Understand the rationale and purpose behind the development of the Methodological Guidelines and corresponding tools and the importance of aligning education planning documents with human rights law
• Understand the methodology of the different tools included in the toolkit and the way they can facilitate education planning processes
• Explore and clarify the “Key Issues” and “Guiding Questions” incorporated in the tools for the analysis of the education planning documents and their compatibility with the international obligations on the right to education
• Reflect on how the different tools apply to different educational planning scenarios across different contexts
Methodology:
Two facilitators, in addition to the organizers, with experience using the Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit will be present to support the workshop. It will be done according to the following steps:
1. Introduction and workshop objectives
2. Short presentation and discussion about the development process of the Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit
3. Introduction to the Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit and general discussion
4. Break up in groups of about 15 and discussion of how the Methodological Guidelines and corresponding tools can facilitate education planning in practice
5. Plenary to reflect on its use in different contexts and scenarios
6. Conclusion and next steps
