Mucha suerte, Matt!

We hope that this piece serves as a conversation starter to better understand between-school heterog., to put it on researchers' and practitioners' radars, and to get the broader community to think of potential ways to address this issue when it is indeed a policy challenge.

that a large portion of classroom instruction time is currently being wasted as the curriculum only caters to a small share of students and schools — even if it is targeted towards a more realistic level within the system (i.e., even if the curriculum is not "overambitious").

But I fear that in the presence of meaningful bw-school heterog. —absent some intervention— either teachers need to improvise their approach to the curriculum given the learning levels in their own class w/o the support that central curricular guidance is meant to provide, or...

…(e.g., deciding on assessments used, how to deal with measurement error, ensure data fidelity etc.), designing proper grade-on-grade continuity of the content for specific cohorts of children, among other serious concerns.

W/my practitioner hat on: I'm the first one to admit that curriculum targeting for diff schools sounds great, but it's likely v. hard to pull. Think of: implementation capacity (e.g., getting the right books to the right classes, diagnosing precise levels at the school-level...

4) Finally, we show that when between-school heterog. *is* a serious challenge (e.g., some G3 classes at a G1 lvl, some at a G4 lvl), more-fine grain targeting of the curricular expectations can lead to a massive boost in the number of children reached by classroom instruction.

All of these findings suggest that the 1st step towards diagnosing how pressing of a policy challenge between-school heterog. is in a given context —perhaps frustratingly— is to collect context-specific data on learning outcomes, as typical predictors might not be very precise.

3) We also find that between-school heterogeneity is only weakly predicted by average system-wide performance and not very well predicted by local geographic areas or urban/rural status.

2) We find cases where within-class heterogeneity is a more serious challenge than between-school heterogeneity — suggesting very different policy prescriptions (e.g., cross-grade ability grouping-type interventions vs. differentiated curricula at the school-level).

In short, we find that 1) between-school heterogeneity *can* be a serious challenge to setting local curricula. Yet, this is not always the case, as sometimes kids in the same grade across a system are equally behind grade-level expectations.

We use a unique dataset representative of six public educational systems across West Africa and South Asia to better understand the potential extent and potential policy implications of between-school heterogeneity in foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) outcomes in LMICs.

Yet, at a macro-level, policymakers face a similar problem: they observe a range of school-level performance, and typically need to select a single level to pitch the curriculum at. So, ⬆️ between-school heterogeneity = harder to reach all schools with the same curriculum.

Plenty of research has explored the challenges of within-class heterogeneity: teachers observe a range of levels in their class, and then choose a level to pitch instruction at. So, ⬆️ within-class variation = harder to reach all children through regular classroom instruction.

It’s happening simultaneously in several places then haha

Ha! Nigeria?