Research shows that comprehensive preschool and elementary school classes will help students from low-income backgrounds not only raise academic aptitude in the short run but attain higher incomes, lower crime rates, higher educational attainment, and even longer life expectancy in the long run. For example, American high school graduates live about 9.2 years longer than high school drop-outs. Much of this increase in life expectancy is due to increases in the skills and cognitive abilities conferred by education, as well as preventive care, income, occupational safety, and access to healthcare.(1) Although most of the benefits of schooling have been studied in developed nations, research on the importance of high-quality schooling has shown even more impressive results in contexts where few safety nets exist, such as Thailand and Burma.(2)

An intervention like the Banyan School is especially important for refugees because education has proven to be pivotal in helping youth to engage in age-appropriate activities, restore a sense of connectedness with others, perceive positive opportunities for leadership in the family, and support community- rather than individual-level development programs.(3) For example, in the Pai Valley refugee population, around 70% of Shan children in a study we conducted showed borderline or abnormal peer functioning.(4) While literacy and numeracy remain important goals, especially in longer-term situations, the psychosocial aspects of schooling also take precedence in education. For the most part, partly because it usually transpires in the context of displacement or state conflict, this sort of education is rarely meaningfully provided by governmental agencies. Further, there is a dearth of good documentation on refugee education, let alone rigorous studies on what works.(5)

The Montessori approach is especially appropriate for a school that seeks to provide an academically challenging curriculum to a truly diverse student body with special psychosocial needs. Based on the research of Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori (pictured above right), classrooms are organized not by the children’s specific ages but by their developmental stages. Lesson plans are constructed every day around individualized needs. A class unit on geography for 3- to 6-year-olds, for instance, might involve helping one student on cartographic puzzles and another on a country-themed suitcase filled with cultural artifacts, depending on each students’ skills and interests. The Montessori approach focuses on self-direction and normalization of childhood development and socialization. Over time, the approach has been shown to improve student outcomes both in traditional areas (like standardized language, science, and math exams) and in less traditional areas like motivation, cognition, executive control, and social relations.(6)

Unfortunately, the school will not be able to provide enough seats for all of the age-appropriate refugee children in the area. This, however, also provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to implement and evaluate the school as a randomized educational and health intervention, with the refugee children who attend the School being selected by lottery. We plan to follow local refugee children—those enrolled in the Banyan School, those enrolled in local Thai public schools, and those not enrolled in any school—until age 20, to measure and evaluate the impact of this model of schooling upon Burmese refugee children in northern Thailand.

Because hundreds of thousands of Burmese refugees in Thailand currently live outside of refugee camps, there is no scalable model for their education. The Banyan School provides an exceptional occasion to implement best practices and measure their impact in a scalable manner.

Footnotes

(1) P Muennig (2007), “The health consequences of inadequate education,” The Price We Pay: Economic and Social Consequences of Inadequate Education, Brookings Institution Press; P Muennig and SH Woolf (2007), “Health and Economic Benefits of Reducing the Number of Students per Classroom in US Primary Schools,” American Journal of Public Health, 97(11):2020-2027.

(2)  H Patrinos & G Psacharopoulos (2010), “Returns to education in developing countries,” International encyclopedia of education, Elsevier; J Hartog and H Maassen van den Brink (2007), Human capital: advances in theory and evidence, Cambridge University Press; R Myers (1995), The twelve who survive: Strengthening programmes of early childhood development in the Third World, Routledge.J Crisp, C Talbot, and D Cipollone (2001), Learning for a Future: Refugee Education in Developing Countries, UNHCR.

(3) N Verma, R Lee, C Su, C Chan, and P Muennig (2010), “The Psychosocial Health of Shan Children in Northwest Thailand,” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 8(4):445-449.

(4) C Talbot (2005), “Education in emergencies,” Forced Migration Review, 1(22):5-6.

(5) A Lillard A, N Else-Quest (September 2006), “The early years: Evaluating Montessori education,” Science, 313(5795):1893–4; KR Dohrmann, T Nishida, A Gartner, D Lipsky, K Grimm (2007), “High school outcomes for students in a public Montessori program,” Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 22:205-17; K Rathunde, M Csikszentmihalyi (2005), “Middle School Students' Motivation and Quality of Experience: A Comparison of Montessori and Traditional School Environments,” American Journal of Education, 111(3):341-71.

Photo credit

Picture of Maria Montessori from the frontispiece of The Montessori Method , via University of Pennsylvania Digital Library, here.