To summarize, four main characteristics of the ward secondary schools policy make it worthy of an in-depth study.
23 See Annex A for a historical mapping of the various education policies.
24 For the full document, see http://www.oecd.org.
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i) First, the pace of expansion was exceptional, even from an internationally comparative perspective. What state/communities configuration and what funding arrangements (or fiscal space) made its tangible accomplishments – lower secondary schools spread all over the country and a dramatic increase in the enrolment figures – possible?
ii) Second, this policy meant a profound reconfiguration of the post-independence educational settlement, a shift from a quality, free, elitist and meritocratic secondary education to mass secondary education of poor quality. It was also in obvious contradiction to Nyerere’s educational prescriptions. In a context where Nyerere remains a figure of worship and a mandatory reference in political and policy-making spheres (Fouere 2014), how could a policy that so profoundly contradicts Nyerere’s teaching be enacted? What main factors may explain the Tanzanian elites’ decision to significantly alter the country’s educational organisation?
iii) Whereas, since the mid-1980s, education policy-making in Tanzania has largely been driven by the donor community, the ward secondary schools policy may qualify, at least in the first instance, as a home-grown educational policy. What does this policy, conducted against donors’ recommendations, reveal about power relations between the Tanzanian government and international aid agencies? At the same time, to what extent did donors contribute to shaping the ward secondary schools policy?
iv) Finally, while post-primary education and quality (under the ‘learning’ label) are given increasing attention in international debates, the specific access-quality-equity nexus that the ward secondary schools policy gave rise to provides an interesting opportunity to study critical challenges that the post-2015 global educational agenda may well face in practice.
The ward schools movement provides a telling illustration that ‘schooling ain’t learning’
(Pritchett 2013).
Increasing resources for schools, improving teachers’ pay, working and training conditions, constructing infrastructures to decrease class size, providing textbooks and other learning materials or revising the curriculum have long constituted the core of educational policy-making. Yet, a global diagnosis of the learning crisis is currently under formation that challenges the relevance of these traditional policies. An influential international compact made of scholars, aid agencies and philanthropic institutions is advocating for an alternative intervention package consisting of: randomised controlled trials to identify policies that
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work to deliver learning; standardised measurement of learning performance and the dissemination of results to induce citizens-clients’ demands for learning; teachers’ salary and school funding tied to performances and replacing/supplementing state by private provision, in decentralised and autonomous units, financed through publicly funded vouchers (for instance Pritchett 2013; Barnerjee and Duflo 2011; World Bank 2011a).
This research does not engage, systematically and thoroughly, with this emerging global learning agenda.25 As we will see, chiefly in Chapters 4 and 5, the international learning shift has had an impact in Tanzania at the very end of the research period; but donors’
interventions to translate the new strategic orientations mentioned above, on the ground and at secondary level, were at too early a stage to assess their impact in practice.
Nevertheless, understanding how political economy factors have shaped the access-equity-quality problem in the context of the ward schools policy constitutes a guiding thread of the present work.
More generally, this research project was driven by six broad questions:
- What are the main driving forces of the educational policy choices made by elites? To what extent do labour market demands and economic considerations play a determining role (as predicted by human capital theory)?
- What strategies do governments adopt to maximize education aid while securing their decision making power over national education choices?
- What is the appropriate scale of the fiscal space and corresponding political unit to organise the funding of ‘public goods’?
- To what extent are education policies renegotiated through implementation at local level?
- What are the implications of an enrolment expansion for market-based production of educational goods?
- How do ruling class’ capital accumulation strategies interact with the education system?
The thesis is organised as follows:
25 Chapter 2, however, provides a critical analysis from a conceptual perspective.
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Chapter 2 describes the core tenets of human capital theory and its evolution from rate of return studies to the recent cognitive skills enriched model. It highlights its key limitations, particularly with regard to its ability to account for educational policy-making and implementation. It also traces the genealogy of the global education agenda – specifically in relation to secondary education – and demonstrates its direct lineage from human capital theory. This exposition justifies the choice of an alternative analytical framework.
Chapter 3 presents the theoretical framework of the research and defines the key principles of the political economy approach adopted. It also accounts for various sources of theoretical inspiration in the sociology of education and the political economy tradition.
The chapter also clarifies the meaning of two key concepts - ‘the state’ and ‘the elite’- and provides important contextual information. Finally, it describes the methodological framework, mostly qualitative. The fieldwork, conducted in Tanzania between September 2011 and April 2012, encompassed about 180 in-depth semi-structured interviews with members of the elite at national level and in Lushoto district, the visit of 28 secondary schools and focus groups with parents, students and teachers.
Chapter 4 sheds light on the politics of educational policy-making through an exploration of elite narratives. The Tanzanian state is not a homogeneous entity: the ward schools policy has been the outcome of intra-ruling class struggles, especially between politicians and technocrats. Nevertheless, in 2011-2012, elites deployed a homogeneous discourse to legitimize this education policy with controversial outcomes. Education – transmission of knowledge – was not the core concern of elites; youth domestication was their primary objective. Three main discursive resources were consistently mobilised: the policy was a response to a ‘social demand’, to the ‘youth ticking bomb’ threat and to the knowledge economy imperatives. This specific formulation of the equity/access/quality nexus resonates with global education discourses while being profoundly rooted in the country’s history: an instance of hybrid discursive construct. The growing consensus among donors and domestic elites about the inescapable demands of the global market – quality education defined as English, skills and sciences - built on shallow empirical evidence, conceals mechanisms of social reproduction at play within the education system.
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Chapter 5 investigates internal and external political economy factors that, beneath the technicalities of the budget, have moulded a negligible budget for ward secondary schools.
Trapped within a global agenda focused on primary education, donors did not provide additional resources to support secondary education expansion, their own creature in many respects. Their effective response to the learning crisis – at the end of the research period - fell short of the enormous fiscal challenge. On the other hand, elites’ egalitarian claims to legitimize the ward secondary schools did not provoke a realignment of their budget preferences. With a narrow budgetary room for manoeuvre, they favoured ‘productive sectors’ over education and higher education over basic education; resources were never ring-fenced for ward secondary schools. The social order imperative was revealed as a prominent parameter in elites’ budget decisions and prevailed over welfare considerations.
Since 2009/10, donors and domestic elites’ converging concerns over quality have allowed marginal budgetary adjustments in favour of secondary education and quality-related inputs.
The budget remained, however, the favoured locus for domestic elites to assert their sovereign power: within the asymmetrical power relations that characterise aid relations, they persistently and successfully deployed mechanisms to curtail donors’ attempts to structurally alter their budget preferences.
Chapter 6 is dedicated to the politics of implementation in Lushoto District, in North East Tanzania, where the expansion was particularly dramatic. The policy was grounded in a
‘self-help’ ideology and anchored to the decentralisation process: this chapter challenges this model of expansion, congruent with donors’ good governance agenda. The initial ‘social contract’ between communities and the state turned into a ‘fool’s game’: the state did not honour its part of the contract; peasants and parents, via consent or through coercion, bore a large share of the costs of the reform. All segments of the local elite, as brokers of the central state, played a pivotal role in the mobilisation of communities: they deployed coercive measures, ideological discourse and patronage practices to gain communities’
consent. At the same time, these community schools turned into a major political battlefield between members of the elite: spatial politics has been the main engine of the expansion, local politicians using the construction of new schools as a privileged route to prestige and power. Their opportunistic translation of the central state policy into a ‘village school policy’ led, however, to a hyper-fragmentation of the local policy space. Two specific local arenas - the district budget and school boards – are of particular interest in deciphering
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competing interests among various segments of the elite and the process of power reconfiguration that the implementation of the ward schools policy unleashed.
Chapter 7 explores the interactions between the textbook industry and secondary education expansion, at a time when Tanzania’s textbook sector was on the verge of collapse. The chapter examines Tanzania’s textbook publishing and distribution infrastructure and its historical embeddedness within political-economy dynamics. The opening of Tanzania’s textbook market (starting in the mid-1980s), imposed by donors, promoted Western publishing corporations’ interests but was not based on any evidence of a comparative lack of efficiency of the state-owned textbook publishing complex. Aid agencies’ practices – their direct support of Western publishing companies, their procurement procedures, the prevalence of the ‘transparency imperative’ and their utilitarian definition of quality education – have contributed enormously in shaping the Tanzanian textbook sector. The sovereign project of building an indigenous private publishing industry (as a substitute to a state-owned industry) has also been hampered by a specific distribution of power within the Tanzanian state. Finally, the chapter explores elite accumulation strategies harnessed to the textbook trade and unpacks intricate distributive networks woven around education resources, in national and district arenas.
The ward schools movement occurred in a context of job scarcity, quasi-universal primary education and quality private education available for the wealthy. In conclusion, Chapter 8 argues that, in this context, under-resourced and under-performing ward secondary schools can be interpreted as a renewed educational settlement to resolve the structural tension inherent in education systems between the integration of the youth and social differentiation. Despite its break with the past, the ward schools policy also displayed elements of continuity: its modes of legitimation and implementation were profoundly rooted in the country’s history. Donors’ ideology, funding and policy choices significantly influenced the shaping of this policy and its narrow fiscal space. New aid modalities currently under consideration completely evade the structural question of the fiscal space for quality basic education for all and obscure the responsibility of domestic and international elites to fund it. Far from sites of human capital accumulation, these public
‘business’ secondary schools offered members of the elite a major site of power and capital accumulation. Yet, the functionalism of elites’ educational policy choices or the
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homogeneity of the state and the donor community should not be overstated: educational policies and budgets are forged through conflict-ridden historical processes, underpinned by more or less unstable balances of power. Finally, the chapter sketches out a future research agenda that would tackle critical issues not covered in this research: the relationship between education and the labour market; the growth of private education provision; and the role of various actors – teachers, parents, students, teachers’ trade union or civil society organisation - in shaping, transforming or contesting the ward secondary schools policy and the educational settlement they embody.
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