Person: Breeding, Mary E.
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Last updated: March 20, 2025
Biography
Mary E. Breeding is a consultant in education at the World Bank, where she has worked
on multiple types of education projects since 2010. Her primary areas of specialization are
teacher policy, school accountability, and monitoring and evaluation. She has also worked
to provide support on a range of policy projects in the areas of student assessment and
school finance. Before joining the World Bank, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University (2008–10), and she held the William E. Miller Fellowship at the American Political
Science Association in 2007–08. She received her doctorate in political science and public
policy from American University in 2008.
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Publication Search Results
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Publication Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-20) Afkar, Rythia; Béteille, Tara; Breeding, Mary E.; Linden, Toby; Mason, Andrew D.; Mattoo, Aaditya; Pfutze, Tobias; Sondergaard, Lars M.; Yarrow, NoahCountries in middle-income East Asia and the Pacific were already experiencing serious learning deficits prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-related school disruptions have only made things worse. Learning poverty -- defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text -- is as high as 90 percent in several countries. Several large Southeast Asian countries consistently perform well below expectations on adolescent learning assessments. This report examines key factors affecting student learning in the region, with emphasis on the central role of teachers and teaching quality. It also analyzes the role education technologies, which came into widespread use during the pandemic, and examines the political economy of education reform. The report presents recommendations on how countries can strengthen teaching to improve learning and, in doing so, can enhance productivity, growth, and future development in the region.Publication What I Really Want: Policy Maker Views on Education in East Asia Pacific(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-17) Cahu, Paul; Yarrow, Noah; Breeding, Mary E.; Afkar, RythiaThis paper reports the views and perceptions of randomly selected education policy makers in the East Asia Pacific region, based on surveys of 651 senior public officials in 14 middle-income countries. The findings show that officials tend to prioritize increasing secondary school completion over improving learning quality, and they severely underestimate learning poverty and do so by a larger margin than officials in other countries. Officials were most likely to cite system capacity as the primary constraint to improving learning. The findings show that officials’ support for gender equality and disability inclusion is high. Interviewed officials tend to oppose violence against students and prefer to invest in in-service teacher training or early-grade reading compared to other options, such as EdTech or inclusion for students with disabilities. This mix of alignment and misalignment between policy makers’ goals and the stated goals of development partners can inform future engagement in policy dialogue, analysis, and information campaigns.Publication Teacher Professional Development around the World: The Gap between Evidence and Practice(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-04) Popova, Anna; Evans, David K.; Arancibia, Violeta; Breeding, Mary E.Many teachers in low- and middle-income countries lack the skills to teach effectively, and professional development (PD) programs are the principal tool that governments use to upgrade those skills. At the same time, few PD programs are evaluated, and those that are evaluated show highly varying results. This paper proposes a set of indicators—the In-Service Teacher Training Survey Instrument—to standardize reporting on teacher PD programs. An application of the instrument to 33 rigorously evaluated PD programs shows that programs that link participation to career incentives, have a specific subject focus, incorporate lesson enactment in the training, and include initial face-to-face training tend to show higher student learning gains. In qualitative interviews, program implementers also report follow-up visits as among the most effective characteristics of their professional development programs. This paper then uses the instrument to present novel data on a sample of 139 government-funded, at-scale professional development programs across 14 countries. The attributes of most at-scale teacher professional development programs differ sharply from those of programs that evidence suggests are effective, with fewer incentives to participate in PD, fewer opportunities to practice new skills, and less follow-up once teachers return to their classrooms.Publication Teacher Professional Development around the World: The Gap between Evidence and Practice(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08) Popova, Anna; Evans, David K.; Arancibia, Violeta; Breeding, Mary E.Teachers, like all professionals, require ongoing professional development opportunities to improve their skills. This paper provides evidence on effective professional development characteristics and how at-scale programs incorporate those characteristics. The authors propose a standard set of 70 indicators—the In-Service Teacher Training Survey Instrument—for reporting on professional development programs as a prerequisite for understanding the characteristics of those programs that improve student learning. The authors apply the instrument to rigorously evaluated professional development programs in low- and middle-income countries. Across 33 programs, those programs that link participation to career incentives, have a specific subject focus, incorporate lesson enactment in the training, and include initial face-to-face training tend to show higher student learning gains. In qualitative interviews, program implementers also report follow-up visits as among the most effective characteristics of their professional development programs. The authors then apply the instruments to a sample of 139 government-funded, at-scale professional development programs across 14 countries. This analysis uncovers a sharp gap between the characteristics of teacher professional development programs that evidence suggests are effective and the global realities of most teacher professional development programs.Publication Mozambique Teachers: SABER Country Report 2014(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01) Breeding, Mary E.Evidence on the impacts of many teacher policies remains insufficient and scattered, and the impact of many reforms depends on specific design features. In addition, teacher policies can have very different impacts, depending on the context and other education policies in place. A new tool, systems approach for better education results (SABER) - teachers, aims to help fill the gap by collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and disseminating comprehensive information on teacher policies in primary- and secondary-education systems around the world. SABER - teachers collects data on 10 core teacher policy areas to offer a comprehensive, descriptive overview of the teacher policies that are in place in each participating education system. To offer informed policy guidance, SABER - teachers analyzes the information collected to assess the extent to which the teacher policies of an education system are aligned with policies shown by research evidence to have a positive effect on student achievement. This report presents results of the application of SABER - teachers in Mozambique. It describes Mozambique’s performance for each of the eight teacher policy goals, alongside comparative information from education systems that have consistently scored high results in international student achievement tests and have participated in SABER - teachers.Publication Bangladesh: World Bank Country-Level Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-12) Wescott, Clay; Breeding, Mary; Breeding, Mary E.Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest and most densely populated countries, and subject to annual cyclones and flooding. Despite these challenges, it benefits from strong economic growth, good performance on health and education, and poverty reduction, alongside weak governance and pervasive corruption. The reasons include strong macroeconomic policy, pro-poor spending, credible elections, export growth and remittances, improved capacity for managing natural disasters, and a stronger civil society than comparable countries. After over a decade of intense engagement with the Bank on governance, Bangladesh adopted in 2006 a governance-oriented Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) with four main objectives: to improve implementation capacity; to 'tackle corruption' by fully operationalizing the Anti-Corruption Commission; to lay the foundation for comprehensive legal and judicial reform; and to strengthen 'voice, empowerment and participation.' The choice of a wide range of instruments and areas of intervention was appropriate, given the political instability at the time of 2006 CAS preparation. The Bank signaled it was ready to engage in all areas, and could scale up or pull back depending on emerging political and bureaucratic commitment. The 2006 CAS yielded mixed results, and the subsequent Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) has been more selective on GAC issues. At the project level, governance has been a key priority, in line with the South Asia region's heavy emphasis on GAC-in-Projects. Investments in GAC-in-primary education, a local government project, anti-corruption efforts in the power sector, and projects strengthening the investment climate have yielded positive results. Investments in GAC-in-roads projects have had mixed results in terms of effectiveness. GAC activities were mainly adopted prior to the 2007 GAC strategy. Although Bangladesh was a Country Governance and Anticorruption (CGAC) country, the country team chose not to use CGAC funds because the country had already been intensively using GAC approaches well before the GAC strategy was adopted.