While South Africa has made significant improvements in basic and tertiary education enrollment, the country still suffers from significant challenges in the quality of educational achievement by almost any international metric. The paper finds that money is clearly not the main issue since the...

This paper compares for and non-profit operation of charter schools in Florida, where the for-profit share has grown by 80% since 2004-5 to nearly half of all charter schools. The unique dataset assembled combines the annual independent financial audits and accountability reports filed by all...

In Germany, around 94 percent of children between the ages of three and six attend a day care center. Regarding the remaining six percent, many experts have speculated that children, primarily those from socio-economically disadvantaged households, do not use day care. Based on data from the...

People with disability face considerable difficulty participating fully in work and the wider community, due in part to poor schooling outcomes. To enable students with disability to meet their potential, the governments provide extra funding to schools to help them meet their special learning...

Literacy has been conceptualized traditionally as having a major role in developing a nation. Literacy helps to spread awareness among the people of their rights. People with good literacy skills enjoy a higher standard of living, have better opportunities of finding jobs, and are able to...

This study developed an Education Efficiency Index for 31 countries, both developed and developing, which can be used by everybody involved and interested in education such as teachers, lecturers and policy makers. The index is used to demonstrate that countries which invest deeply in education...

The paper evaluates math performance at four high-need middle schools during a four-year intervention, which was designed to help math teachers diagnose students' areas of need and to design lesson plans responsive to those needs. Before the intervention began, the researchers pre-selected four...

Although one of the primary objectives of microfinance has been the reduction of poverty through the provision of credit for income-generating purposes, evidence of its impact on poverty has been mixed. Even if there is no direct impact of microfinance, there may be an indirect positive impact...

This paper characterizes the determinants and implications of private schooling in a large and detailed set of French data. Empirical models detect negative selection into private schooling on observable and unobservable ability, while State-provided education appears more suitable to students...

Public investments in repairs, modernization, and construction of schools cost billions. However, little is known about the nature of school facility investments, whether such investments actually change the physical condition of public schools, and the subsequent causal impacts on student...