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Erschienen in:
The (In)Effectiveness of Human Rights: Mapping Existing Research—An Introduction Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

2021 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

4. Does the Right to Education Lead to Better Primary Education Outcomes?

verfasst von : Bart Kleine Deters

Erschienen in: Myth or Lived Reality

Verlag: T.M.C. Asser Press

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the relationship between the right to primary education as a legal construct (right as structure) and education outcomes (right as outcome). The former is defined as the extent to which national legislation is in line with the minimum core obligations of the right to primary education. Since this information was not readily available, a dataset has been constructed containing information about the seven minimum core obligations (divided among 18 indicators) for 45 countries over the period 1990–2018. This information was then aggregated into the ‘right to education protection-index’, a summary score for a state’s national education legislation. There is a clear upward trend in terms of the legal protection of the right to education. The relationship between the rights-index and right-as-outcome (defined as primary net enrolment rates) was tested empirically, using fixed effects regression analysis. As there was no statistically significant direct effect, the hypothesis that the ‘right to education protection-index’ is positively related to the net enrolment rate had to be rejected at first. It was shown, however, that there is a statistically significant positive effect if we allow the effect to be delayed by a number of years. After seven years the effect becomes statistically significant, and it remains so over time, indicating that improvements in the right-as-structure can be effective in changing right-as-outcome—as long as we are patient enough.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Effective Distance: A Polish Dissident’s Encounter with Amnesty International and Its Western-Born Rules
Nächstes Kapitel Paving the Way for Effective Socio-economic Rights? The Domestic Enforcement of the European Social Charter System in Light of Recent Judicial Practice
Fußnoten
1
Banerjee and Duflo 2011.
 
2
For example Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Hathaway 2002; Simmons 2010.
 
3
Boli and Thomas 1997.
 
4
OHCHR 2006; this process can be more or less rights-based. Ideally, it should be done in a participatory manner, ensuring equality and non-discrimination.
 
5
OHCHR 2012.
 
6
Boyle and Kim 2009.
 
7
Korda and Pennings 2008.
 
8
Cole 2012.
 
9
Goodman and Jinks 2003.
 
10
Using primary net enrolment rates as the measure of the right-as-outcome does not capture the full width and depth of the possible enjoyment of the right to education, of course. At the same time, it is difficult to see any enjoyment of the right to education without at least the ability to attend primary school. It should thus be seen as a (but not the) prerequisite to the full enjoyment of the right to education.
 
11
Argentina, Barbados, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Comoros, Costa Rica, Cuba, Côte d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, São Tomé et Principé, the Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Zambia.
 
12
The author is grateful for the help of Orsi Balog, Diego Benitez Moreno and Maurice Stark in collecting the data necessary for this chapter.
 
13
We will start the statistical section with a short introduction on the idea behind causal inference.
 
14
Barsh 1993, p. 119.
 
15
Kalantry et al. 2010, p. 259.
 
16
Kalantry et al. actually prescribe five steps, as they also include the ‘setting of benchmarks to measure progressive realisation’ and ‘the identification of what constitutes a violation of the right in question’ (p. 259). Our conception is independent of the principle of progressive realisation, as will be shown in this chapter. Furthermore, we are hesitant to unequivocally determine violations through the index; the instrument was not designed to do that. For these two reasons we will not include Kalantry et al.’s last two steps.
 
17
In July 2019, the ICESCR had 169 ratifications.
 
18
Bantekas and Oette 2013; Pogge 2007; Tomuschat 2008.
 
19
CESCR 1999a, b.
 
20
See CESCR 1990, para 10. The Committee allows the lack of available resources as a valid excuse for not meeting the minimum core obligations, but only under strict conditions. “[The State Party] must demonstrate that every effort has been made to use all resources that are at its disposition in an effort to satisfy, as a matter of priority, those minimum obligations”. In the empirical part of this chapter we control for resource availability by including GDP per capita in the regression.
 
21
Sepúlveda 2003, p. 42.
 
22
“They agree that education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, and shall strengthen the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. They further agree that education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups, and further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace”.
 
23
“Primary education shall be compulsory and available free to all”.
 
24
3. “The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to choose for their children schools, other than those established by the public authorities, which conform to such minimum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the State and to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.” 4. “No part of this article shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principles set forth in para I of this article and to the requirement that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State”.
 
25
CESCR 1999a, para 57.
 
26
Cingranelli and Richards 2010.
 
27
OHCHR 2012.
 
28
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966, Article 2(2).
 
29
CESCR 2009, para 27.
 
30
Ibid.
 
31
Nor on any other arbitrary basis, of course.
 
32
If this were so, there is no reason not to include all other possible discrimination grounds as indicators as well.
 
33
Article 8. Translation of the constitutional text from https://​www.​constituteprojec​t.​org/​constitution/​Benin_​1990.​pdf, accessed April 2020.
 
34
There is no a priori reason why states could not restrict the right to access on a non-discriminatory basis for other groups than non-nationals. In practice, however, this was the only group for which we found any explicit evidence of legal discrimination.
 
35
CESCR 1999a, para 6.
 
36
CESCR 1999a, para 7.
 
37
While the indicator is open-ended, the three examples are the most common. ‘School uniforms’ is self-explanatory. ‘‘Voluntary’ contributions’ include all non-tuition fees that are a condition for receiving education, such as registration fees and teacher gratifications. ‘Schooling materials’ include all costs for physical materials needed in education, such as books, pencils, exercise- and notebooks.
 
38
CESCR 1999b, para 7.
 
39
Coomans 2002; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966, Article 13(1).
 
40
Tomasevski 2004.
 
41
Bangladesh National Report on Education 2004, p. 10.
 
42
CESCR 1999b, para 2.
 
43
Where ‘within the near future’ sees to the achievement of the goal, not the drafting of the plan. Article 14 of the ICESCR sets a hard deadline here; within two years of ratification.
 
44
It goes without saying that countries that have already mandated free and/or compulsory primary education need not have this as an explicit goal.
 
45
Letshabo 2000, p. 12.
 
46
CRCee 2001, para 2.
 
47
For those that argue that the generality of these goals precludes their effectiveness we would like to offer the CRCee’s response in its first General Comment from 2001, para 17: “The aims and values reflected in this article are stated in quite general terms and their implications are potentially very wide ranging. This seems to have led many States parties to assume that it is unnecessary, or even inappropriate, to ensure that the relevant principles are reflected in legislation or in administrative directives. This assumption is unwarranted. In the absence of any specific formal endorsement in national law or policy, it seems unlikely that the relevant principles are or will be used to genuinely inform educational policies”.
 
48
CESCR 1999a, para 5.
 
49
CRCee 2001, para 9. This sentiment is also echoed by the CESCR 1999a, para 4.
 
50
For an illuminating read on ‘lost in translation’ issues in human rights research, see Merry and Wood 2015.
 
51
CESCR 1999a, para 5.
 
52
CESCR 1999a, para 5.
 
53
CEDAW 2017.
 
54
CEDAW 2017, para 16.
 
55
CEDAW 2017 para 17.
 
56
Alkire and Foster 2011. The idea of commensuration is that since the underlying metric used to capture (in this case) legal protection of the right to education is numerical it is possible to aggregate the different indicators into one index number, that reflects information contained in all the separate indicators. This has two consequences. First, that since the scores are numerical there is an implicit correspondence in ‘importance’ between the indicators. For example, having an adequate national education strategy is three times as important as allowing private education (see also Footnote 57 below and Fig. 4.1). Second, that observations with the same index score might have different underlying indicator scores that happen to add up to the same total. Both consequences have led to considerable criticism on the measurement of human rights. See for example Barsh 1993; Merry and Wood 2015; Rosga and Satterthwaite 2009.
 
57
The ‘goals of education’-dimension has seven indicators, compared to only one for the ‘education is a right’-dimension. If we would not account for that, it would mean that in practice the seventh indicator would be seven times more important in determining the index-score than the first dimension.
 
58
Saint Lucia adopted a new education law in 1999, and followed it up with a quality education plan in 2000.
 
59
See also Figs. 4.3 and 4.4.
 
60
Fourteen countries showed one or more ‘dips’ in their score over the period under study.
 
61
Almost all national education plans have an associated timeframe with them, in which the goals of the plan should be attained. When the education plan expires without a follow-up plan the score for indicator 6.0 (which measures the existence and quality of education plans) automatically becomes zero, leading to a potential drop in overall index score (depending on whether the quality of the previous education strategy was sufficient to be awarded points in the first place).
 
62
This is especially true for the last years in the data (after 2015 the score drops for six countries), with the end of UNESCO’s Education for All initiative, which stressed the necessity of making detailed education plans. See also the Jomtien Declaration on Education for All 1990.
 
63
Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution no longer mentions the right to education in general and to free primary education in particular.
 
64
The score in 2018 is a slight drop from the high score in 2014, in all likelihood again due to the end of UNESCO’s Education for All initiative. See also footnote 62.
 
65
ICESCR, Article 14.
 
66
Note that for the minimum core obligations with multiple indicators attached, the score for each country has more options than just zero and one (i.e. the score for the minimum core obligation on the goals of education is divided into seven indicators, where each indicator can be fulfilled or not. This means that the score per country for this obligation can be zero, one, or any n/7th fraction of one).
 
67
The ‘right to education protection’-index score is given on the left vertical axis, and the net enrolment rate at the right vertical axis. Please be aware that neither axis starts at null.
 
68
This is not entirely surprising, given that the net enrolment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean are already very high in the beginning of the period.
 
69
2017 was chosen as the latest year for this graph (rather than 2018) since not all countries had yet submitted their primary net enrolment rates for 2018 to the data repository, leading to a distortion of the average.
 
70
The explanatory variable is also called the independent variable.
 
71
Van Velthoven 2016. Generally, regression analysis uses multiple explanatory variables.
 
72
For those who are interested in the precise explanation and mathematics behind regression analysis, see Stock and Watson 2012.
 
73
This is due to three possible factors: first, the design of the study does not allow for causation to be directly established. Second, there might be an omitted explanatory variable that drives both the variation in the perceived ‘causal’ factor and the dependent variable. Third, it might be the case that the dependent variable causes the change in the explanatory variable, and not the other way around. See Angrist and Pischke 2009; Blauw 2018; Van Velthoven 2016. In the current study, the first two factors might play a role, even though the use of fixed effects regressions goes quite some way in addressing this.
 
74
Data is taken from World Bank 2019. The net enrolment rate is calculated by taking the number children of official schooling age who are enrolled in primary school as a percentage of the total number of children of official schooling age.
 
75
Cubic spline interpolation has been used to fill in observations where the dependent variable was missing.
 
76
World Bank 2014. Education budget is measured as the log expenditure per pupil in constant US dollars.
 
77
Bird et al. 2008; Momo et al. 2019 Rule of law is defined here as the process whereby laws are enforced in a predictable, impartial, and transparent manner by both the courts and government officials. The measurement itself is an index of the Varieties of Democracy project, where a higher score means a stronger rule of law. Data is taken from Coppedge et al. 2019.
 
78
Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005.
 
79
Or tangible benefits for handing them in on time. See also Krommendijk 2014
 
80
Next to these explanatory variables, we include a number of control variables. GDP per capita, youth dependency rate (the number of youth as a percentage of the working age population), whether the government is left-leaning, and lastly the amount of international NGOs in a country. Data for the first two variables is taken from World Bank Open Data 2020. Data for the government orientation is from Cruz et al 2018, and the amount of INGOs is taken from the Union of International Associations 2020.
 
81
The figure is based on numerical output, hence the precision of this number.
 
82
Minus-values indicate that the relationship is negative; an increase in the explanatory variable is associated with a decrease in the dependent variable (and vice versa).
 
83
The statistical analysis was done in STATA version 15, using fixed effects regression with robust standard errors. The effects were fixed for countries and years.
 
84
Hill and Varone 2014. The delay can also help to understand why most of the other variables also show no statistically significant effect—the education budget excepted.
 
85
For the delayed regressions we use 90% confidence intervals. Those intervals allow for a greater margin of (statistical) error than 95% confidence intervals. The reason for this is that the delayed regression cannot take into account all observations (it is difficult, for example, to calculate the ten-year delayed effect of a change in the law in 2015). If there are fewer observations in a statistical model, the estimations need a bit more leeway.
 
86
The dataset will be made publicly available. For more information contact the author.
 
87
CESCR 1990, para 10.
 
88
‘In practice’ here should be interpreted as right-as-outcome.
 
89
CESCR 1990, para 10.
 
90
CESCR 1990, para 11.
 
91
Hopman et al 2017.
 
92
Krommendijk 2014.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Does the Right to Education Lead to Better Primary Education Outcomes?
verfasst von
Bart Kleine Deters
Copyright-Jahr
2021
Buch
Myth or Lived Reality

Print ISBN: 978-94-6265-446-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-94-6265-447-1

Copyright-Jahr: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-447-1_4

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