Lee Crawfurd
Center for Global Development
Blog
The RISE World Tour (Education Links)
Authors
Measurement and the Learning Crisis
1 - First up, Rukmini Banerji from ASER (and part of the RISE Intellectual Leadership Team) has written a great blog on what we should learn from 10 years of citizen-led learning assessments in India. While assessments alone won’t be enough to improve learning, without them, nobody knew we even had a problem. Rukmini also presented at the Bihar Growth conference last week, highlighting the ignored “Rs 100 crore private tuition industry,” for which the government needs a strategy, and quick.
2 - The InterAmerican Dialogue has just launched a "Commission for Quality Education for All" chaired by former presidents of Chile and Mexico to investigate the learning crisis in Latin America and what can be done about it. RISE isn’t working in Latin America yet…
3 - The Shanghai Daily has an interview with DFID chief economist Stefan Dercon and OECD director for education Andreas Schleicher. “Education systems need to evolve to better serve students in developing countries” — that sounds like something from one of our vision documents.
What Works?
4 - What works to improve learning in South Asia? Researchers at the World Bank have put together yet another new systematic review and meta-analysis to add to the pile. Good job someone is keeping track.
5 - Mehtabul Azam and Geeta Kingdon have a new paper looking at the importance of teacher value-added in India. Their findings are similar to those from the United States — there is massive variation in teacher quality, and measurable characteristics such as experience and qualifications aren’t good at predicting which ones are good and bad.
6 - Azmat Khan reports for Buzzfeed on what happened to the $1 billion of US aid for schools in Afghanistan. Nobody really knows.
Learning and the Labor Market
7 - Eric Hanushek talks to Russ Roberts about the Sustainable Development Goals on Education, and the importance of learning not schooling for economic outcomes, so goals should be focused on outputs not inputs.
8 - Eric Maskin has a new simple theory of why globalization seems to be worsening inequality between low-skill and high-skill workers in poor countries — contrary to what your econ textbook taught you. More in the World Bank Economic Review.
9 - Simon Baptist and Francis Teal have a new paper asking “Does education explain why Korean firms are so much more productive than Ghanaian firms?” Spoiler —no, not entirely.
Author bios:
RISE blog posts and podcasts reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation or our funders.