MD RABIUL ISLAM

Bangladesh, with Education Development Index (EDI) below 0.80, is one of the thirty-five countries in the world who are far from achieving the Education For All (EFA) Millenium Development Goals by 2015, says the Global Monitoring 2005 report published by the UNESCO recently.

The report identifies high teacher absenteeism and low number of learning hours as the major challenges for the country to achieve the EFA goals.

Although data are not collected systematically, random surveys in Bangladesh confirm that teacher absenteeism remains a persistent problem. They need to hold second jobs, lax professional standards and lack of support by education authorities are the common causes.

Teachers, the report repeatedly emphasises, are the strongest influence on learning. Available data suggest that large proportions of primary school teachers, especially in developing countries like Bangladesh, lack adequate academic qualifications, training and mastery over content.

In some countries including Bangladesh, specially trained teachers are paid less than the standard rate because they attend to fewer children. Good inclusive education involves costs ?for adapting curricula, training teachers, developing materials and making schools accessible. While inclusive education remains the overarching goal, the two can be reconciled in a twin track model giving learners a choice between these approaches within an inclusive policy context, it said.

Education for all cannot be achieved without improving quality. In many parts of the world, an enormous gap persists between the numbers of students graduating from school and those among them who master a minimum set of cognitive skills.

Bangladesh has made impressive progress in access to primary schools. The Net Enrolment Ratio in Bangladesh is 86.6 per cent in 2001 while it was 71.2 per cent in 1990.

Any policy aimed at pushing net enrolments towards 100 per cent must also assure decent learning conditions and opportunities. Lessons can be drawn from countries that have successfully addressed this dual challenge, the report said.

Teaching and learning take place in social context. Organisational weakness of schools are increasingly pointed to as a cause of low learning achievement, especially in government schools of developing countries. Some analysts advocate radical changes in the structure of teacher incentives for boosting learning outcomes. Evidence suggests a weak relationship, however, between merit pay and teacher effectiveness.

In 2001, the average secondary Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) for developing countries was 57 per cent - only about half that of developed ones. The gap is more pronounced at tertiary level, with the median GER at 55 per cent among developed countries and 11 per cent among developing ones, the report added.