School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading,...

The number of countries that regularly participate in international large-scale assessments has increased sharply over the past 15 years, with the share of countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment growing from one-fifth of countries in 2000 to over one-third...

The Sustainable Development Goals set a triple educational objective: improve access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This paper documents the effectiveness of a multifaceted educational program, pursuing these three objectives simultaneously, in rural India. Using an experiment...

To address the educational gap, many Latin American countries are focusing on extension of the school day and enrichment of the curriculum. In Brazil, a nationwide policy -- Mais Educa??o -- was implemented in 2008 with this objective. This paper explores the nationwide rollout of the program...

In 2009, the Mexican state of Colima implemented a low-stakes accountability intervention with diagnostic feedback among 108 public primary schools with the lowest test scores in the national student assessment. A difference-in-difference and a regression discontinuity design are used to...

Even as primary-school enrollments have increased in most low-income countries, levels of learning remain low and highly unequal. Responding to greater parental demand for quality, low-cost private schools have emerged as one of the fastest growing schooling options, challenging the monopoly of...

This working paper presents a benchmarking analysis of School Based Management (SBM) using empirical data from the Philippines. School based management is widely used as a policy tool in many countries that seek to improve the quality of service delivery through decentralization. School based...

This study evaluates the effect of four randomized interventions aimed at strengthening school committees, and subsequently improving learning outcomes, in public primary schools in Indonesia. All study schools were randomly allocated to either a control group receiving no intervention, or to...

Conditional cash transfers are programs under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks. Although there is significant evidence showing that they have positive impacts on school participation, little is known about the long-term...

Very few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. This paper examines the impacts -- half a century later -- of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War....