EDUCATION-ASIA: Fiddling with the Figures

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Johanna Son

BANGKOK, Jan 17 2000 (IPS) - Not just the scorecards that 41 Asia- Pacific governments submit on education – but where they got t heir figures – are being tested at a conference that began here Monday to gauge progress in meeting education goals in the last decade.

In fact, the quality and credibility of statistics on various aspects of education in the world’s most populous region — from net enrollment ratios to adult literacy rates — are crucial to the integrity of the Asia-Pacific Conference on Education for All (EFA) Assessment, which ends on Jan 20.

For years, a “goals-reporting culture” dominated efforts to review progress in education, so that the idea of a review of performance was “to take ministers to a nice hotel and ask if they can improve their figures”, said Jim Irvine, regional advisor to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) here.

“Every country came together and felt obliged the push up their figures a bit,” he added.

And often, because there were few ways of independently cross- checking figures and comparison was difficult, “you have a guess that becomes a reported guess to a second-hand reported guess”, Irvine pointed out.

Apart from producing doubtful “official” figures, this practice produced statistics that were not only dishonest but virtually useless for measuring real improvements and going beyond national averages.

It was, and is, also not uncommon for political considerations to colour statistics reported to show “progress”.

“From the age of advocacy to activity in the nineties, next is the age of analysis,” explained Victor Ordonez, director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Principal Office for Asia and the Pacific, based in Bangkok.

“For the first time, we are being presented with common (kinds of) statistics. We hope the level of statistics we get is accurate and will be much more useful than ever before,” he said at the conference opening Monday.

The reporting and use of credible figures is “the core of what we will try to do (here),” Irvine said, adding that many hope “we can move into the new year with honest benchmarks”.

“Otherwise there is no point if we know the whole thing is based on fraud,” he explained. “Some governments have been willing to be honest, and some have been so frightened of (explaining discrepancies) that they simply have not released their reports.”

Thus some governments had draft reports in May 1999, but still do not have completed reports in December 1999, on the eve of the Bangkok conference.

The inadequacy of statistics was also among the factors that prompted the EFA movement, launched in 1990 at the World Conference on Education in Thailand, to specify 18 statistical indicators on six aspects of education to be presented this week.

These indicators, which match the six EFA goals, range from enrollment figures to public spending on education, pupil-teacher ratio to repetition rates and ratio of female to male literacy rates.

Countries are now also asked to present not just national averages, but subregional data to show gaps in urban and rural figures and data for the smallest sub-district or village, and differences between boys and girls.

The Bangkok conference is a laboratory of this effort to get better statistics in the light of the problem, which emerged at the 1996 mid-decade of review of EFA goals in Amman, Jordan, that governments often had “estimates” and poor quality or old data or did not have sub-national data.

These often resulted in inflated figures or bloated claims of success. Irvine cites, for instance, statistics on net enrollment ratios in 1995-96 that were inconsistent or strained credulity.

For the UNESCO conference in Amman in 1996, Pakistan reported a net enrollment ratio of 36 boys to 25 girls. At the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) education meeting in August that same year, it reported a ratio of 71 boys for 46 girls. The government gave yet another set of figures – this time 71 boys to 62 girls – in other surveys done around 1995 and 1996.

Provisional figures on net enrollment rates for Pakistan reported just before the conference had 58 boys to 40 girls.

India reported a net enrollment ratio of 98 boys to 76 girls at both the Amman and SAARC meetings – but officials say this are overoptimistic figures given the real situation there on the ground.

In provisional figures cited by UN officials as the Bangkok conference got underway, India had a net enrollment rate of 77 boys to 64 girls.

“To the scholars of the world, this either a scandal or remarkable progress,” Irvine said of the differences in reported data.

In South-east Asia, Indonesia reported a net enrollment ratio in primary education of 100 percent for boys in 1996, though as one expert says “we all know this can’t be the case”.

In some cases, the exercise of undertaking studies to produce the required statistics made a difference. For instance, one country’s data on the sub-district level showed that some areas listed teachers – but no school children.

Other examples show the big difference that statistics make in education.

Ken Vine, education specialist with the Asian Development Bank (AsDB), says that “reform is driven by transparency” and that the need to produce certain statistics can push governments into action. For example, he said, “you take a tiny Pacific country that won’t know how many children of a certain age group it has, so how will it know how many (classroom) seats to provide?”

Bangladesh is an example of a country where close to gender parity has been achieved in “less than a decade” with the help of NGO-run schools, resulting in the halving of the gap in net enrollment rates between boys and girls from 1991-98, says James Jennings, chief of education at UNICEF Bangladesh.

But even then, he cautions that enrollment rate figures can be “a problem” because there are no statistics on birth registration in that country.

Education analysts add that more detailed indicators should give a picture not just of what governments say they are doing, but the marginalised groups, poor children and dropouts they have yet to reach.

After all, “education for all is about reaching the unreached,” Ordonez pointed out. National averages have limited use because they do not show the lowest or highest figures, and mask differences between cities and the countryside which are often bigger than gaps within countries.

The years after the 1996 review also sought to change the reporting mindsets among governments, from just meeting numerical goals to recognising every child’s right to education.

Said Irvine: “Because of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the focus has shifted from reaching goals to looking at disparities in rights.