The “Washington Consensus” started from John Williamson’s 1989 attempt to briefly summarize some things that were driving the development agenda and then became, even in the pre-“meme” or “viral” era a two word viral meme that has elicited strong reactions ever since. With more bravery than I have, LSE professors Andres Velasco, Tim Besley, and Ricky Burdett are attempting to construct a new, better, more sophisticated statement of where thinking about improving the human condition is, calling this a “London Consensus“.
As I spent eight years as the head of a large research project, Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) they asked me to do a chapter on where was the “consensus” about basic education in the developing world relative to the Washington Consensus. So, in the usual way of global discourse, boil down an enormous topic (or even the over 500 works produced by RISE) into 10,000 words. While I wrote lots of things for RISE (papers, notes (e.g. on “evidence” and the challenges of internal and external validity), presentations, synthesis reviews on key topics (e.g. framework for system accountability, teachers, politics of learning)), even including co-authoring a RISE “policy brochure” that tried to boil down the action implications of RISE into acceptably brief nuggets, this is my first post-RISE writing, where I am just me, Lant Pritchett, not representing anyone or anything.
The overall direct of the shift in consensus is clear, but what follows is more contested.
Williamson’s summary of the Washington Consensus was (as advertised) just the consensus of the day, both among economists and educationists (e.g. the Jomtien Declaration on Education for All)–roughly that “governments should spend money to expand access to schooling to reach universal completion of primary (and basic, maybe secondary) schooling in order to expand human capital.” This consensus is not longer particularly relevant in three regards.
One, it is a victim of its own success as, since so many countries have expanded schooling so much the remaining incremental gain possible from expansion of access/enrollment/attainment alone for building human capital is pretty limited.
Two, if we take one aspect of “human capital” to be the school acquired cognitive skills that school curriculums aim to teach and which assessments of learning on reading, mathematics, science (and other topics) measure then the “learning crisis” is now front and center. Arithmetically the stock of cognitive skills a youth has at age 15 (or 17 or 19 or 23)–but 15 is the PISA assessment age–is just the number of years times the (net) gain in the stock per year and the net gain in stock per year from school is the number of years enrolled in school times the (net) gain per year of schooling. The “learning crisis” is the realization that in many countries the “learning profile” (the description of stock of cognitive skills by year of schooling) is show shallow (so little learning per year of schooling) that even if youth are enrolled at age 5 and stay in school until age 15 they are still far from what are widely regarded as the skills need to cope successfully as adults in the world today (and, even less so, of the future they will live in).
{This is a topic I have been writing on for a long time (e.g. 2006 (with Deon Filmer and Amer Hasan), 2013) with more and better evidence being generated on stocks of learning over time (among the many, there are four key recent additions to the body of knowledge about learning outcomes are the PISA-D (analyzed in Pritchett and Viarengo 2023), ASER’s work on assessing youth skills in rural India in “Beyond Basics” (2023), the use of DHS data to create information on trends on learning over long periods in Le Nestour, Moscoviz, and Sandefur (2022), and the efforts to amalgamate the existing assessments into a single measure for (nearly) all countries by the World Bank in the Human Capital Index (N. Angrist et al 2021) and separately by Gust, Hanushek and Woessmann (2022 ).}
Three, the idea that government “spend” was a sufficient statistic for learning or creating human capital or that “spend more” is, in and of itself, useful policy advice has been completely discredited through evidence across countries, across regions, across sectors, and over time. McKinsey’s latest report (2024) on improving education “Spark and Sustain” (2024) opens with Exhibit 1 that shows that there are countries with public expenditures per student between $2,000-$4,000 (Vietnam) and over $14,000 per student (USA) achieving roughly the same results and among countries spending between $2,000 and $4,000 the learning outcomes range from “below poor” (Dominican Republic, South Africa), to “Poor” (Brazil) to “Fair” (China) to “Good” (Turkey, Vietnam).
If one concedes that “access” has been successful but one needs “every child in school and learning” and that “spend” alone may be necessary but is far from sufficient for improving learning outcomes, where is a new consensus?
The first element is that while it is an obvious truism that for learning outcomes to improve there must be “better” spending on teaching and learning practices (and materials) that are “evidence based” and “cost effective” this is insufficient as a guide to action. This “proximate determinant” of learning approach that “recommends” doing this or that particular action (e.g. hire teachers this way, use textbooks of this type, generate and use this kind of information on learning) has to acknowledge that the existing status quo and its proximate determinant outputs and outcomes are the result of the way the system of education now operates. To scale better teaching and learning practices and processes one needs those efforts to be embedded in a system that allows, facilitates, and rewards that. So the first element of consensus is that if we want large, sustained, improvements over time in learning outcomes one needs to change the system so that it is geared to, and coherent for, achieving that goal.
Beyond that, what exactly are the ways to change education systems such they endogenously produce the dynamics of accelerated learning, I recommend five broad “principles” for action. But I will be the first to admit these are broad principles and how to achieve the granular instantiation of those principles in practices in any given country (or regional) context is far from known (and hence any “consensus” on particulars is pre-mature).
Attached is the text where it stands now.