Person:
Bruns, Barbara

Human Development Department, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, World Bank
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Education Economics; Brazil; Education for All
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Human Development Department, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, World Bank
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Last updated: February 1, 2023
Biography
Barbara Bruns is lead economist in the Education Global Practice at the World Bank, specializing in research on education quality in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is lead author of the books Great Teachers: How to raise student learning in Latin America and the Caribbean, with Javier Luque (October 2014) and Achieving World Class Education in Brazil: the Next Agenda (2012), with David Evans and Javier Luque. She also co-authored Making Schools Work: New Evidence on Accountability Reforms (with Deon Filmer and Harry Patrinos, 2011), a review of global evidence on interventions to improve school quality.   From 2007-2009, Barbara was the first manager of the $14 million Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) at the World Bank, launched to support rigorous research on education quality.  She also co-authored the World Bank/IMF MDG Global Monitoring Reports of 2005, 2006 and 2007, served on the Education Task force appointed by the UN Secretary General in 2003, co-authored the book A Chance for Every Child: Achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015, and headed the Secretariat of the global Education for All Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI) from 2002 to 2004.   Prior to joining the World Bank, Barbara was a staff economist on the US Senate Banking Committee and legislative assistant to Senator Adlai Stevenson III.  She holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago.

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  • Publication
    Great Teachers : How to Raise Student Learning in Latin America and the Caribbean--Overview
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-07-18) Luque, Javier; Bruns, Barbara
    While the importance of good teaching may be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade has education research begun to quantify the high economic stakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals of national education systems are being transformed, from a focus on the transmission of facts and memorization to a focus on student competencies for critical thinking, problem solving and lifelong learning the demands on teachers are more complex than ever. Governments across the world have put teacher quality and teacher performance under increasing scrutiny. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is no exception to these trends; indeed, in some key areas of teacher policy, the region is at the vanguard of global reform experience. The study aims to benchmark the current performance of LAC s teachers and identify key issues. It shares emerging evidence on important reforms of teacher policy being implemented in Lac countries. The study also analyzes the political room for maneuver for further reform in Lac. They focus on teachers in basic education (preschools, primary and secondary education) because the quantitative and qualitative challenges of producing effective teachers at these levels differ in key ways from university-level education, which has been addressed in other recent World Bank publications.