C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Relationships between Christian Schools and the State: A Comparative Analysis for Five sub-Saharan African Countries
(Taylor and Francis, 2022-01-28)This article provides a comparative analysis of Christian faith-based schooling in five African countries, including data on the proportions of faith-based schools, financing models, and forms of organization vis-à-vis the state. The case studies represent different forms and models. In all of the countries, at least one in six schools is run by a church. Christian churches do not see themselves as ‘private schools’ but as public providers working for the public common good. Faith-based schools contribute not only to making sure that children go to school and learn while in school, but also to sharing ideals ranging from social justice and equity, to peace and democracy, and social participation and inclusion. The article concludes with some reflections on future challenges for faith-based schools, mainly related to their funding and the lack of data to assess challenges and opportunities. -
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Delivering Education to the Underserved through a Public-Private Partnership Program in Pakistan
(MIT Press, 2020-12-20)We evaluate a program that recruited local entrepreneurs to open and operate new schools in 200 underserved villages in Sindh, Pakistan. School operators received a per-student subsidy to provide tuition-free primary education, and in half the villages received a higher subsidy for females. The program increased enrollment by 32 percentage points, and test scores by 0.63 standard deviations, with no difference across the two subsidy schemes. Estimating a structural model of the demand and supply for school inputs, we find that program schools selected inputs similar to those of a social planner who internalizes all the education benefits to society. -
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Teaching English as a Second Language in Sri Lankan Primary Schools: Opportunity and Pedagogy
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)Policy guidelines in Sri Lanka prescribe how and for how long English should be taught as a second language in primary education but practices on the ground may deviate. Opportunities for teaching and learning and pedagogy are key aspects of the process of learning. Using a large-scale survey this paper addresses (i) how much time is allocated to the teaching of English and how much time is lost, (ii) how English teachers use their time in primary education classrooms and (iii) the factors associated with student-centred learning and on academic learning in general. Around a quarter of the class time is lost through timetabling, teacher absenteeism, lesson start and finish times and teacher off task activity. Teachers who spend more time teaching in class are more likely to be in rural or estate schools and in schools with more facilities, and to have attended the Primary English Language Programme in the past. Teachers who spend more time on student-centred activities are more likely to be teaching Grade 3 than Grade 5, using remedial methods and holding an official ‘appointment’ as an English teacher. Policy implications for Sri Lanka are considered and points of comparison with policies and practices elsewhere raised. -
Publication
Support for Gender Stereotypes: Does Madrasah Education Matter?
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-01-11)This paper examines the influence of the institutional nature of schools on gender stereotyping by exploring contrasts between non-religious and Islamic faith (that is madrasah) schools among secondary school-going adolescents in rural Bangladesh. In particular, differences in gender attitudes across school types are explored to elucidate what about schools matters. Using a uniquely designed survey to assess the influence of school type on student characteristics, we find large differences in stereotypical gender attitudes by school type and student gender. Madrasah students in general, and unrecognized madrasah students in particular, show unfavorable attitudes about women and their abilities compared to their peers in non-religious schools. However, these differences are diminished considerably in ordered probit models suggesting that school-level differences are explained by teacher characteristics such as the nature of teacher training and average family size of teachers. These estimated effects are robust to conditioning on a rich set of family characteristics. -
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Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan
(Elsevier, 2017-02)We present evidence from the first three years of a randomized controlled trial of a government-administered pilot teacher performance pay program in Punjab, Pakistan. The program offers yearly cash bonuses to teachers in a sample of 600 public primary schools with the lowest mean student exam scores in the province. The bonus is linked to the change in the school's average student exam scores, the change in the school's enrollment, and the level of student exam participation in the school. Bonus receipt and size are randomly assigned across schools according to whether or not the teacher is the school's head. The program increases student exam participation rates in the second and third year and increases enrollment in grade 1 in the third year. We do not find that the program increases student exam scores in any year. Mean impacts are similar across program variants. The absence of positive impacts on test scores may be due to weaknesses in the program's incentive structure and/or limitations in the program's administrative data. -
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The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance: Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
(Elsevier, 2017-01)The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public investments in education over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In our data, 23.6% of teachers were absent during unannounced school visits, and we estimate that the salary cost of unauthorized teacher absence is $1.5 billion/year. We find two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel data that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Using these results, we show that reducing inefficiencies by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing the effective student-teacher ratio than hiring more teachers. Thus, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public education spending are likely to yield substantially higher marginal returns than those that augment inputs. -
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Impact of Private Secondary Schooling on Cognitive Skills: Evidence from India
(Taylor and Francis, 2016)We examine the effect of attending private secondary school on educational achievement, as measured by students' scores in a comprehensive standardized math test, in two Indian states: Orissa and Rajasthan. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to control for any systematic differences between students attending private secondary schools and public secondary schools, and assess the sensitivity of our estimates with respect to unobservables using the Rosenbaum bounds. We find that students in private schools in rural (urban) Rajasthan scored about 1.3 (0.4) standard deviation (SD) higher than their counterparts in the public schools. Importantly, the positive private school impact in rural (urban) Rajasthan survives a large (moderate) amount of positive selection on unobservables. We do not find statistically significant difference in urban Orissa, while a positive impact of 0.3 SD in rural Orissa is susceptible to small amount of positive selection on unobservables. -
Publication
Returns to Education in Sri Lanka : A Pseudo-Panel Approach
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-01-30)This study employs a pseudo-panel approach to estimate the returns to education among income earners in Sri Lanka. Pseudo-panel data are constructed from nine repeated cross sections of Sri Lanka's Labor Force Survey data from 1997 to 2008, for workers born during 1953–1974. The results show that for males, one extra year of education increases monthly earnings by about 5% using the pseudo-panel estimation rather than 9% as in the ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimation. This indicates that not controlling for unobservables such as ability and motivation biases the OLS estimation of returns upwards by about 4% on average, driven mainly by what happens in urban areas. It also suggests that males with higher ability seem to be acquiring more years of education. This is contrary to what has been observed recently in countries such as Thailand [Warunsiri, S., and R. McNown. 2010. “The Return to Education in Thailand: A Pseudo-Panel Approach.” World Development 38 (1): 1616–1625], where the opportunity cost of education seems to be high, such that high-ability individuals leave education for the labour market.