Across six Sub-Saharan African countries, grade 4 students of teachers who were hired after a free primary education reform perform worse, on average, on language and math tests—statistically significantly...
This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary...
There is considerable evidence that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have large impacts on school enrollment, including in very poor countries. However, little is known about what features...
This paper evaluates alternative approaches to disseminating information about a school-based management program in Indonesia. Low-intensity approaches, sending a letter from the principal or a colorful...
This paper uses machine learning methods to identify key predictors of teacher effectiveness, proxied by student learning gains linked to a teacher over an academic year. Conditional inference forests...
This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of two teacher incentive programs, which were conducted in a nationally representative sample of 420 public primary schools in Guinea. In 140 schools, high-performing...
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments...
This study evaluates the impacts of low-cost, performance-based incentives in Tanzanian secondary schools. Results from a two-phase randomized trial show that incentives for teachers led to modest average...
Four different classroom observation instruments -- from the Service Delivery Indicators, the Stallings Observation System, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, and the Teach classroom observation...
Pay levels for public sector workers—and especially teachers—are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while simple comparisons...
What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David...
This paper studies the impact of a preschool construction program and of two demand-side interventions in Cambodia. Within this context where other preschools are available, impacts are likely to differ...
In many low-income countries, teachers do not master the subject they are teaching, and children learn little while attending school. Using unique data from nationally representative surveys of schools...
Interventions targeting early childhood hold promise for reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Results from a randomized evaluation of a preschool construction program in Cambodia suggest...
Korea understood that education was the best way to pull itself out of economic misery, so it focused on overhauling schools and committed itself to educating every child, and educating them well. Coupled...
The main purpose of this evaluation was to study the impact of a supply-side intervention aimed at improving the quality of community preschools, combined with a demand-side intervention aimed at stimulating...
Korea understood that education was the best way to pull itself out of economic misery, so it focused on overhauling schools and committed itself to educating every child, and educating them well. Coupled...
Korea understood that education was the best way to pull itself out of economic misery, so it focused on overhauling schools and committed itself to educating every child, and educating them well. Coupled...
The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses—the average number of years of schooling in a population—is based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns...
This paper reports on a randomized experiment to investigate the long-term effects of a primary school scholarship program in rural Cambodia. In 2008, fourth-grade students in 207 randomly assigned schools...