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Lemos, Renata

Education Global Practice, Latin America and Caribbean Region, World Bank
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Lemos, Renata
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0000-0001-7220-1344
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Education Global Practice, Latin America and Caribbean Region, World Bank
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
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Renata Lemos is a Senior Economist in the World Bank Education Global Practice where she has worked on operations and analytical activities in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Tanzania. Renata is a member of the core research team of the World Management Survey and her recent work focuses on topics in managerial and organizational economics in the public sector. Before joining the World Bank in 2016, she was a Lecturer in the Economics Department at Stanford University and a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and at Harvard Business School. She holds a PhD in Land Economy (Applied Microeconomics) from the University of Cambridge.

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    Managing for Learning: Measuring and Strengthening Education Management in Latin America and the Caribbean
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-04-28) Adelman, Melissa; Lemos, Renata
    How can countries make sustainable gains in student learning at scale? This is a pressing question for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) – and the developing world more broadly – as countries seek to build human capital to drive sustainable growth. Significant progress in access has expanded coverage such that nearly all children in the region attend primary school, but many do not gain basic skills and drop out before completing secondary school, in part due to low-quality service delivery. The preponderance of evidence shows that it is learning – and not schooling in and of itself – that contributes to individual earnings, economic growth, and reduced inequality. For LAC in particular, low levels of human capital are a critical factor in explaining the region’s relatively weak growth performance over the last half century. The easily measurable inputs are well-known, and the end goal is relatively clear, but raising student achievement at scale remains a challenge. Why? We propose that part of the answer lies in management – the processes and practices that guide how inputs into the education system are translated into outputs, and ultimately outcomes. While management (and related concepts, such as institutions, governance, or leadership) is often mentioned as an important factor in education policy discussions, relatively little quantitative research has been done to define and measure it. And even less has been done to unpack how and how much management matters for education quality. In this study, we begin filling these gaps, with new conceptual and empirical contributions that can be synthesized in four key messages: (1) Student learning is unlikely to improve at scale without better management. (2) Management affects how well every level of an education system functions, from individual schools to central technical units, and how well they work together. (3) Management quality can be measured and should be measured as a catalyst for improvement. (4) Several pathways to strengthening management are open to LAC countries now, with the potential for significant results. The study elaborates on each of these messages, synthesizing recent data and research and presenting the results of six new papers written to inform this report. The target audience for the Executive Summary is policymakers across LAC (and beyond) who are seeking approaches to strengthening their systems at scale. The target audience for the study overall includes the researchers and technical advisors who work on topics related to education management in development organizations, governments, think tanks, and other institutions across LAC.
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    Measuring and Explaining Management in Schools: New Approaches Using Public Data
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-11) Leaver, Clare; Lemos, Renata; Scur, Daniela
    Why do some students learn more in some schools than others? One consideration receiving growing attention is school management. To study this, researchers need to be able to measure school management accurately and cheaply at scale, and also explain any observed relationship between school management and student learning. This paper introduces a new approach to measurement using existing public data, and applies it to build a management index covering 15,000 schools across 65 countries, and another index covering nearly all public schools in Brazil. Both indices show a strong, positive relationship between school management and student learning. The paper then develops a simple model that formalizes the intuition that strong management practices might be driving learning gains via incentive and selection effects among teachers, students and parents. The paper shows that the predictions of this model hold in public data for Latin America, and draws out implications for policy.