Giving Compass' Take:

• The global push to get kids into schools faces yet another challenge: parents in developing countries report high satisfaction with schools that fail to educate children.

• How can data help parents to demand higher-quality education? How should NGOs prioritize quantity vs quality in education? 

• Learn more about the need for more data-driven education systems.

Ten years ago, the global education community—including donors, think tanks, and NGOs—were mainly focused on getting kids to go to school. Millions of children have since enrolled in primary schools, marking a major achievement. But more recently these same folks discovered that the schools weren’t actually teaching kids very much, and so they set about to try to improve learning.

Meanwhile, however, parents and communities within emerging economies don’t seem to share this concern, and this lack of demand could be one of the biggest barriers to getting kids reading and counting.

With the recent release of the Varkey Foundation’s Parent Survey, we get more insight into this issue. The survey asked 27,500 parents in 29 countries various questions relating to their children’s education. And the results, which point to a major asymmetry between parents’ satisfaction with schools, and what we know about learning outcomes, provide some cause for alarm.

Why this asymmetry? Of some significance may be the huge number of first-generation learners that have enrolled over the last decade. These children tend to come from disadvantaged families with limited support for their learning at home. Illiterate parents are less likely to have the means and the know how to hold their child’s school accountable for its performance and are probably more likely to be satisfied that their child has an opportunity to attend school at all.

Or perhaps parents are listening more to the big policy proclamations by politicians when they judge the performance of their country’s education system.

Another interpretation is that parents are concerned about learning but can act only when they know what to do.

Read the full article about high satisfaction with bad schools by Susannah Hares at Stanford Social Innovation Review.