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 in seven Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper proposes a methodology to assess the effect...

Over the past decade, China's transition rate from lower secondary education to higher secondary education has increased significantly, from 80.5 to 93.7 percent. In light of this impressive progress, the Chinese government aimed at raising the gross enrollment rate in senior high schools to...

Many developing countries use employment guarantee programs to combat poverty. This paper examines the consequences of such employment guarantee programs for the human capital accumulation of children. It exploits the phased roll-out of India's flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment...

Working with the Mexican Ministry of Education, this study piloted a scalable program to reduce high school dropout rates by focusing on socio-emotional skill development and mathematics tutoring. The intervention was evaluated through a randomized field experiment with more than 5,000 youths at...

It is imperative that students learn to read in the early grades, yet many fail to do so in developing countries. Early grade reading interventions have emerged as a common means to attempt to address this problem. This paper presents a definition of early grade reading interventions as...

The gender gap reversal in educational attainment is ubiquitous in high-income countries, as well as in a growing share of low- and middle-income countries. To account for the reversal, this paper proposes a theoretical framework in which the interplay between the distributions of academic...

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 out to be a major omission. As recent research shows, students in different countries who...

"Back to School: Pathways for Reengagement of Out-of-School Youth in Education" focuses on a social and global problem--200 million adolescents and youth are out of school, live in adverse life circumstances, and face multiple disadvantages. It analyzes the available evidence for what works,...

Education, which has been at the heart of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's history and civilizations for centuries, has a large untapped potential to contribute to human capital, well-being, and wealth. The region has invested heavily in education for decades, but it has not been...

Education is a source of national pride in Lebanon. When the general public was asked how the education system was performing, 76 percent of respondents had a positive opinion; and these satisfaction rates have been consistently high over the years. However, perception of education quality does...