Hope or Despair: Learning in Pakistan's Primary Schools

(Hardback)

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Hope or Despair asks what promotes and what holds back student learning in Pakistan's government-sponsored primary schools. Using a national sample of schools, students, teachers, and supervisors, it shows how learning is affected by student background, teachers and teaching, school supervision, facilities, and innovation. It is the first book to use achievement tests based on the national curriculum to show influences on learning in the primary schools of an entire developing country. The study also explores why some students complete primary school and others do not. The overall quality of education in Pakistan's government primary schools is low, but student learning rises with the teacher's formal education and with certain teaching practices. Student social class, a strong influence on learning in the United States, makes little difference in Pakistan. Whether the teacher is male or female has no relationship to learning in science, but it does affect achievement in mathematics. Neither supervision nor school facilities are related to achievement. This unique study will be of great interest to those concerned with schooling effectiveness in developing countries as well as to economists, sociologists, and political scientists interested in human resources in those countries.

Reviews

"A major source of guidelines for policy options, implementation strategies, and monitoring and evaluation techniques for all levels of planning and management personnel at different stages of educational enterprise."- Ijaz Ahmad, Assistant Professor, Department of Education, University of Balochistan, Pakistan
"A most valuable contribution to the literature on the challenges of education development in low-income countries."- Adriaan Verspoor, Education Advisor, The World Bank
"This work demonstrates how a solid base of quantitative research can be woven into a sophisticated but highly readable book linking practice and policy at the school level. The authors, in clear straightforward language, interpret the environmental and organizational constraints and supports to pupil learning by drawing from analyses of hundreds of interviews, a large national survey of educators, and a number of school ethnographies."- Don Adams, Professor, University of Pittsburgh
"Warwick and Reimers have astutely discerned and cogently illustrated many of the complex issues impacting Pakistan's literacy and achievement rates. The book is highly readable, well documented, and thoroughly engrossing - and a rich source of information for all those interested in educational policy, international development and student learning in Pakistan."-Jerome T. Murphy, Professor and Dean, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

Author Bio

DONALD P. WARWICK is an Institute Fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development and teaches in Harvard's Department of Sociology and Graduate School of Education. FERNANDO REIMERS is an Institute Associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development where he specializes in education policy. Both authors have published extensively on education policy and schooling effectiveness.