Thinking about education and goal setting

Not everything that is measured is important.

Not everything that is important is measured.

In class last night, the success of the Education for All movement was discussed. Explicit goals were set at Jomtien in 1990 for 2000 and they were far from met. In Dakar in 2000 goals setting was revisited it is clear that the goals set for 2015 will not be met. Is this a failure?

This raises an interesting issue. I think everyone might agree that setting goals is not of value in itself, but is a tool to promote progress, in this case the expansion of educational services in developing nations. So one might ask whether the expansion of services would be greatest with goals:

• that could easily be met and surpassed
• goals that accurately reflected what could reasonably be achieved
• goals that were so ambitious that they would probably not be met

I don't know the answer, but I suspect that the most progress would not be achieved by the either of the first two options. Indeed, I am not sure that the goals had much effect at all. The importance of educating children is probably so clear that some international goal probably does not matter that much to policy makers at the national, regional nor local levels.

It is hard to manage

that which you can not measure.

The importance of the Education for All movement may well have been to change the mind set of national governments, donors, and NGOs, encouraging them to increase efforts and to regard education as filling many needs. I don't begin to understand how to measure the change in mind set, nor how to measure the impact of mind set on the energy and wisdom of people's efforts to improve education.

Does that mean that I can't manage efforts such as the Jomtien and Dakar conferences to maximize impact. Perhaps! So what? Perhaps management is over valued.