EQUIP2 Final Report.pdf - Education Policy Data Center

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12 3. Expansion of complementary education research into the secondary sub-sector, including a new focus on the secondary education teacher shortage. EQUIP2 Leader Award Final Report The second topic, decentralization, was a primary research area for the first five years of EQUIP2, from 2003 to 2008. Work in this area featured numerous publications and collaboration with the World Bank Institute to engage donors and officials through a distance-learning and videoconference series on education decentralization in Cameroon, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia. Work in the third area, improving access and use of data for education strategic planning, remained on the Leader agenda for the first year until 2004 when EQUIP2 received an associate award for the creation of the Education Policy and Data Center. The new center took over responsibility for that line of research and worked together with the Leader award to create tools for data aggregation, analysis, and presentation. Donor effectiveness replaced data use on the Leader’s research agenda in 2005. The first project was an influential meta-evaluation of fifteen years of USAID education projects. The publication revealed that although USAID had recorded significant accomplishments in terms of improving education access and quality, there was little documentation of impact. In 2006, EQUIP2 continued with the donor effectiveness research with a revision of a USAID document on the provision of reform support to governments. This revision led to more in-depth work in the area of education systems reform. Numerous case studies on how to approach long-term reform from a systems perspective culminated in a 2010 capstone publication, The Power of Persistence. Additionally, EQUIP2 did a great deal of work in monitoring and evaluation over the years, including the development of an institutional rubric to measure sustainable change. The rubric was introduced and used in several EQUIP2 associate awards. EQUIP2 also had the opportunity to respond to several of USAID’s Economic Growth and Trade (EGAT) Office of Education’s specific research needs. One of these was a pattern analysis of EQUIP projects by type, emphasis, and operational strategies, providing USAID with important data about the breadth of their education portfolio. The analysis was conducted once in 2006 and again in 2009. In 2005, USAID requested EQUIP2’s assistance in gathering and analyzing data on the role of school fees and school fee abolition vis-à-vis improving education access and quality, which involved extensive research and the creation of a knowledge map. In 2010,
USAID requested a major retrospective Lessons Learned activity to analyze the work of the EQUIP2 associate awards and providing state-of-the-art knowledge on a number of topics related to education policy, systems, and management. While the Leader award was pursuing research on the topics described above, the EQUIP2 associate awards were also generating knowledge on their own, often informed by the work of the Leader award. For example, Egypt’s Education Reform Project (ERP) conducted a historical review of education reform in the country, revealing attempts to decentralize the education sector since 1883. The study identified three reasons why previous efforts had not succeeded: 1) a lack of willingness among participants to cooperate; 2) a lack of familiarity with the concepts underlying a decentralization system; and 2) inadequate pedagogic purpose, with an over-emphasis on political expediency or economic necessity. These findings helped illuminate a way forward for the project, including raising public awareness and establishing a documentation system. In Ghana, an evaluation of the Basic Education Comprehensive Assessment System (BECAS) project revealed that although the assessment system designed by the project was both robust and cost-effective, it was being undermined because of limited access to full instruction. Many teachers were covering less than half of the prescribed curriculum during the school year. Research findings demonstrated that greater attention paid to improving students’ opportunities to learn would allow teachers to complete the curriculum, which in turn could substantially improve student performance on national assessments. 13 Thh e Research: Evidence, Application, and Impact Overall, EQUIP2’s research agenda was characterized by continuity and depth. Though the research areas evolved over time in response to the changing global agenda and the needs of USAID, the education policy expert team successfully honed in on several specific research areas, demonstrating true expertise in each one. Each of the EQUIP2 Leader award’s research areas is described in the following sections in greater detail, including its primary initiatives, main findings, and the perceived contribution of the work to the larger field of education. An annotated bibliography of all of EQUIP2’s publications, published as a separate document, provides a more detailed summary of nine years of research. REACHING UNDERSERVED POPULATIONS TO ACHIEVE EDUCATION FOR ALL When EQUIP2 was created in 2003, the global education landscape was focused on achieving Education for All. Getting children into primary schools, especially the chronically underserved, was the top priority. Over time, however, major donors and development agencies increasingly
Page 1 and 2: Educational Quality Improvement Pro
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of the Education Sector Plan was co
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to fulfill their designated mission
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ensure the adoption of new ways of
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of major accomplishments. Coordinat
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Although the HEC-FAD program was sc
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and encourage community stewardship
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SOUTHERN SUDAN: TECHNICAL ASSISTANC
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UGANDA: EVALUATION OF TEACHER DEVEL
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• Completion of Wide Area Network
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The project targeted four instituti
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83 Annex: EQUIP2 Associate Awards
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