Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school. Yet, in the face of compelling evidence that many students are not learning what they are expected to learn, how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of much policy debate in rich...

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school. Yet, in the face of compelling evidence that many students are not learning what they are expected to learn, how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of much policy debate in rich...

According to T.W. Schultz, the returns to human capital are highest in economic environments experiencing unexpected price, productivity, and technology shocks that create"disequilibria."In such environments, the ability of firms and individuals to adapt their resource allocations to...

More attention and resources have been devoted in recent years to early childhood development (ECD) in low- and middle-income countries. Rigorous studies on the effectiveness of ECD-related programs for improving children's development in various dimensions in the developing world are scant. The...

Using data assembled from the Demographic Health Surveys of over 50 countries and from the National Family Health Surveys of individual states in India, the authors create a new data set of comparable indicators of gender disparity. They establish three findings: 1) As is by now well-known, the...

From the mid-1950s to the 1960s, the Government of Peru undertook a major expansion of public education, increasing the number of schools, requiring primary schools that offered an incomplete cycle to add grades, and increasing school inputs (principally teachers and textbooks). The paper...

Since the mid 1950s, Peru's education policies have been designed to raise skill levels and make education available to more of the population. Those policies rested mainly on expanding the number of schools and as a result, school enrollment rates and attainment levels rose. However, an...

Many educators and policymakers have argued for lenient grade promotion policy - even automatic promotion - in developing country settings where grade retention rates are high. The argument assumes that grade retention discourages persistence or continuation in school and that the promotion of...