Overview
Education Policy in Developing Countries
This assignment asks you to draft a short memo identifying an important challenge and advocating a potential
policy intervention in a developing country of your choice.
Advising an education minister
The field of education is replete with claims about what works, what is cost-effective and what can be scaled
up relatively easily. However, few of these claims are supported by reliable evidence. Given the low levels of
learning and school participation in developing countries, one way of generating a reliable evidence base is to
carry out lots of interventions in the education sector. There are many voices of caution about going
headlong down the interventionist path. For the purpose of this assignment, I would like you to assume that
this advice has been suitably incorporated into a more comprehensive development policy. You have been
tasked with making the case for whether the government should implement a pilot program that will become
the basis for a national program drawn from a toolkit of education interventions (see below). In making the
case, you will be required to address the following questions:
1) How does the intervention you propose address any of the pressing educational challenges in the country
of interest? Where possible, please use data from the World Bank website or PISA/TIMMS/PIRLS (and
other national and international assessments) - see www.gapminder.org to demonstrate the challenges. Please
provide a rationale for why this intervention is better than other interventions (is this the best use of scarce
ministry resources)
2) Describe the main features of the intervention that you have in mind and how they affect the educational
attainment outcomes of interest. An example o
f this might be to state your intervention as one that provides additional
income to teachers. The channel through which this intervention ‘works’ is that teachers with higher salaries have higher job
satis
faction and possib
l
y
exert more e
ffort to produce a higher quali
t
y
o
f instruction. [1-2 pages]
3) Has this intervention been implemented elsewhere? If yes, please provide a quick review of the results of
these interventions in up to 3 countries/contexts. Explain what the results were and how the results might
have been influenced by context or design variation. Where possible use information from the education
profiles website (above) to demonstrate the impact of this intervention in those other countries. Anywhere
includes the whole world including developed countries. While the lessons from the developed world are much less generalizable to
developing countries, to the extent that they are the on
l
y
places where the particular intervention has been tried, developed
countries are legitimate examples.[1-2 pages]
4) Discuss key issues associated with scaling up the intervention. In particular, are there any resource
constraints (teachers, classrooms, schools) that make this a problematic national policy (at least in the short
run)? What is the appropriate time-frame before we can expect results at a national level? Are there any
distributional concerns (are the benefits of the intervention uniformly (or progressively) spread across the
wealth/gender spectrum? What about sustainability? [1-2 pages]In thinking about the kinds of interventions that you could discuss, the following list is only meant to serve as
a set of guidelines. It is by no means exhaustive. Feel free to discuss interventions not mentioned below.
i) School Vouchers to enable parents to go to a better school
ii) Conditional cash transfers linked to school participation
iii) Reducing the cost to households via:
a. Abolition of school fees
b. Bursaries/scholarships targeted at the household level
iv) Improving school quality via:
a. Providing funding, textbooks, and other instructional materials
b. Performance incentives for schools/teachers/students
c. Teacher selection, training, and deployment
d. Community involvement in school management
v) Building more schools/expanding existing schools
vi) Hiring more teachers (class size reductions)
Ideally you should choose a country that you may have interest in but one for which access to sufficient levels
of data is generally good. In particular, I would encourage you to look at the list of countries covered on the
education attainment profiles website as a start. [See http://iresearch.worldbank.org/edattain/index.htm]