The education policy that makes a difference is not the policy you think | Opinion

Children’s educational test scores are a major cause for concern around the world. Learning collapsed nearly everywhere during the COVID-19 pandemic, but even before that, standardized test scores in math, science, and reading were trending in the wrong direction.

Education unites parents around the world, but the level of challenge varies. Achievements in America and the rich countries stagnate at a relatively high level, while children in the poorer half of the world struggle to read a simple sentence or do basic math.

But after years of experience it has become clear which policy measures do not work at all, even though they have loud supporters.

Increasing spending per student sounds like a no-brainer, but it can produce little or no learning if the money isn’t used wisely. India demonstrated this when it increased spending per primary school student by 71 percent in seven years, but reading and math test scores still fell sharply.

The go-to policy for many teachers’ unions and politicians is to reduce class sizes. This sounds like it should make a big difference: teachers can spend more time focusing on individual needs. But analysis shows that reducing class sizes is one of the least cost-effective ways to improve student learning. A 2018 review of 148 reports from 41 countries found that smaller classes had “small at best” effects on reading skills and no effect on maths.

Paying teachers more is another favored approach. But even dramatically higher salaries can have little effect on learning. Indonesia embraced all of these popular policies at once: it doubled spending on education to achieve one of the smallest class sizes in the world, while doubling teacher salaries. Yet a landmark randomized controlled trial showed “no improvement in student learning.”

The painful truth is that the oft-promoted approaches—raising teacher salaries, reducing class sizes, and building more schools—are expensive and do little or nothing for learning.

But there is one promising policy, coming from an unexpected source. Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, is struggling with overcrowded classrooms, a lack of teaching materials and a shortage of trained teachers. It’s not a place where we would expect to see innovative solutions. Yet it is now embracing an education policy that shows hope for turning things around, and is even being scaled up and adapted elsewhere.

When my think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and the Malawi National Planning Commission joined forces to identify the most powerful and cost-effective policies to boost Malawi’s well-being and growth, one education policy stood out.

“Technology-enhanced learning” sounds deceptively simple. But it solves an often intractable problem. Almost universally, schools put all nine-year-olds in one class, ten-year-olds in another, and so on. But many of the children in each class are far behind or far ahead. Children in Malawi now use personalized, adaptive software on a tablet for an hour a day. It first identifies where each child is, then teaches them reading, writing and arithmetic at their exact level.

Teachers describe their surprise when they started using the software and found that their entire classroom of children would become fully engaged. Children have described the relief of not having to worry about embarrassment if they gave an incorrect answer in front of their peers, or being forced to compete with the teacher for time.

The policy is incredibly cheap, costing just $15 per pupil per year in Malawi, partly because using the tablet for just one hour a day means it can be shared by many students. Extensive studies show that just one year of one hour a day can lead to an astonishing three years of normal learning.

More learning ultimately translates into more skilled adults who are more productive in the workplace and earn higher wages. Using standard economic estimates, that means that a year of kids spending an hour a day on a tablet results in a lifetime income increase of about $16,000. Since most of that income won’t come in for decades, the present value of that benefit is about $1,575. That’s a phenomenal 106-fold return on a $15 investment.

Malawi is scaling up the policy to all of its 6,000 primary schools, and encouragingly, the costs are even lower, making the policy even better. Currently, almost 300,000 children are working on a tablet for an hour a day, with the aim of reaching all 3.8 million children in grades 1-4 by the end of the decade.

Sierra Leone and Tanzania have already begun implementing the same approach. Malawi’s determination shows how the entire poorer half of the world could improve the learning of almost half a billion primary school children. Our analysis shows that in the poorer half of the world, a $10 billion education investment in delivering this approach would generate more than $600 billion in benefits each year, boosting future productivity. This approach could also be useful in rich countries, with early evidence from trials in the UK showing promise.

Parents around the world are desperate for policies and approaches that can reverse poor test scores and ensure that children are better equipped to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Tablets that teach at each student’s individual level offer a powerful way forward.

Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus and a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His new book is Best Things First, which was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Economist.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.