Public demand for education reform
By
Dr Faisal Bari

In a recent dialogue on education reform in Pakistan, organised by the Open Society Foundation (OSF), Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) and South Asia Initiative (SAI) of Harvard University at Harvard, where 30 odd politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, academics, and representatives of donors got together to discuss issues in education reform in Pakistan, a number of politicians mentioned that there was almost no pressure on them from their constituents to improve the performance of public sector schools in their constituencies.

These were politicians representing urban as well as rural constituencies — and all of them said that while they did get some demand for more schools, especially for girls, but other than that most of the demands relating to education were about teacher transfers and not about quality of education or even access.

This poses a bit of a paradox. We know that the demand for education, revealed in surveys as well as revealed through the willingness of parents to pay for education, is quite strong in Pakistan. And it does not matter where in Pakistan you do these surveys. The demand for education comes out to be fairly strong across all the usual divides that we talk of: income, gender, rural-urban, and geography. We also know that the general perception of the quality of education being imparted at public schools is poor, and most parents are aware of that. Yet, the politicians said that they do not have parents coming to them and breaking down their doors demanding better quality education through the public sector.

This points to a strong disconnect. If you know that the public school that your child goes to is giving poor quality education, why are you not putting pressure, individually and collectively, on elected representatives at the provincial and national level, to demand better quality? It is not the case that the representatives said people do not come to them per se. They do. They come to ask for help in intermediating with the police, they demand infrastructure provision (access to water, local roads, sewerage), they just do not ask for quality improvements in education delivery.

From the education area, the representatives said, the major demand that they get from their constituents is about teacher recruitments (jobs), and teacher promotions, transfers and placements. So, it is not the case that the constituents are not making demands from their representatives; they are just not making these demands regarding delivery of quality education from public schools.

This is a big issue. Everyone agrees about the need to educate all children in Pakistan. All of us are aware of the danger of having illiterate and unskilled citizenry. Education has been made a basic right recently through the 18th Amendment and the inclusion of Article 25A, whereby the state now has to provide education to all children between the ages of 5-16 years. But why is it that understanding of the importance of education and clear demand for education is not translating into pressure on public representatives?

It is important to unravel this paradox, if indeed it is one. When we asked the public representatives why they do not make the issue of education more important within their parties, in their political manifestos, in the promises they make to the electorate, and in things that they demand from their parties as well as from the government, especially if their party is in power, they replied that though they agreed that education should get higher priority, it is hard for them to make it into one of the top issues as the constituent demands — the ‘demands from the ground’ — are not about education delivery.

In fact, one representative actually said that never had any parent come to him to ask for any intervention on the side of education delivery. This, from the representatives’ point of view, also made it hard for them to take education access/quality issues to party leadership as a top demand from ‘the people’, and it made it hard for them to press for education issues through committees and sub-committees in the government or in the legislature. I do not want to generalise to say that this must be the experience of all legislators. But restricted to the small sample I mentioned, it does lead to an interesting paradox: when parents clearly think education is important and demand it and seem to be, where they have to and/or they can, willing to pay for it, as citizens why do they not articulate the demand for better educational facilities and delivery from their representatives? Why is the parent and voter space not connected where public sector education is concerned?

Is it that voters/citizens feel that given the patron-client basis for our political system they can only ask for well defined one-time interventions and hence should ask for private goods (transfers of officials, access to jobs)? Is it that public representatives can only have an effect through one-time interventions (getting schemes (schools) approved, getting transfers) while it is hard to deliver on changes in educational access/quality that require more sustained pressure and work and are also difficult to measure? Do citizens feel that their feedback on service delivery will not change anything?

We definitely need more work to understand why this disconnect exists, whether it exists in other areas too and how we can fix it. Improvements in education delivery, especially in the public sector, will be very hard to achieve unless the larger population demands them. And their demand will only have teeth if they can reward good behaviour and punish poor behaviour. Elected representatives in a working democracy are the most sensitive to this reward and punishment system. If this loop is not working, which at least in the case of education it does not seem to be, public sector reform will become much harder to implement and public sector performance much harder to improve. The problem does not seem to be of law or administrative issues, but of how the citizen-representative relation is structured. Media, civil society and NGOs should have a role here in developing the link between citizen demands and elections as well as performance of representatives. I look forward to hearing if others also feel that this paradox exists and if so, how we can start resolving it.

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