Institutionalizing Tusome in Kenya: promise and pitfalls

Improving learning outcomes at scale is the most pressing challenge facing national governments and the international education community. The Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity is an example of a national scale literacy program that has been shown to increase learning outcomes at scale inside of government systems (Freudenberger & Davis, 2017; Piper et al, 2018). This essay is an examination of the Tusome program’s design and elements that were essential to effectively improve outcomes at scale in government systems. The following three research questions are addressed: 1.) How did the programme achieve to communicate a vision for learning outcomes in the administration, from the centre to the schools? 2.) How did the programme succeed in supporting CSOs, given that inspection and academic support to schools are usually the weakest links of education systems? 3.) What were the factors that made the government, USAID and RTI succeed in collaborating and scaling up, given that so many other programmes of this kind do not usually make it past the pilot phase? The essay is organized in the following way. First, the background and design of the Tusome program is described. Next, historical evidence is presented of how Tusome was institutionalized. Then, a few frameworks are used to evaluate how the Tusome program was institutionalized in the system. Finally, results from an external evaluation (NORC, 2021) are used to examine how implementation changes affected learning outcomes over time. A few lessons learned are shared.