Person:
Sabarwal, Shwetlena

Education Global Practice, World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Education economics, Climate change and education, Teacher effectiveness, Learning outcomes

Last updated: October 22, 2024

Biography

She is the lead author of World Bank’s flagship report, Choosing our Future: Education for Climate Action; and was a co-author of the World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. She has co-authored several other World Bank flagship products, including the Learning Adjusted Years of Schooling metric and estimates of COVID-related learning losses. Her research has been published in prominent journals like the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Economics of Education Review etc. She leads the World Bank’s global solution group on Education and Climate Change and has led the World Bank’s education engagement in Bangladesh, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, and Uganda. She holds a PhD in applied economics from the University of Minnesota.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 28

Choosing Our Future: Education for Climate Action
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-04) Sabarwal, Shwetlena; Venegas Marin, Sergio; Spivack, Marla; Ambasz, Diego
Education can propel faster and better climate action in two crucial ways. First, education can galvanize behavior change at scale - not just for tomorrow, but also for today. Second, education can unlock skills and innovation to shift economies onto greener trajectories for growth. At the same time, education needs to be protected from climate change. Extreme climate events and temperatures are already eroding hard-won progress on schooling and learning. Climate change is causing school closures, learning losses, and dropouts. These will turn into long-run inter-generational earnings losses putting into jeopardy education’s powerful potential for spurring poverty alleviation and economic growth. Governments can act now to adapt schools for climate change in cost-effective ways. This report outlines new data, evidence, and examples on how countries can harness education to propel climate action. It provides an actionable policy agenda to meet development, education, and climate goals together, recognizing that tackling climate change requires changes to individual beliefs, behaviors, and skills – changes that education is uniquely positioned to catalyze.
The Impact of Climate Change on Education and What to Do about It
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-02) Venegas Marin, Sergio; Schwarz, Lara; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Education can be the key to ending poverty in a livable planet, but governments must act now to protect it. Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires. These extreme weather events are in turn disrupting schooling; precipitating learning losses, dropouts, and long-term impacts. Even if the most drastic climate mitigation strategies were implemented, extreme weather events will continue to have detrimental impacts on education outcomes.
Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do about It
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023) Schady, Norbert; Holla, Alaka; Sabarwal, Shwetlena; Silva, Joana; Yi Chang, Andres
Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an enormous shock to mortality, economies, and daily life. But what has received insufficient attention is the impact of the pandemic on the accumulation of human capital—the health, education, and skills—of young people. How large was the setback, and how far are we still from a recovery? Collapse and Recovery estimates the impacts of the pandemic on the human capital of young children, school-age children, and youth and discusses the urgent actions needed to reverse the damage. It shows that there was a collapse of human capital and that, unless that collapse is remedied, it is a time bomb for countries. Specifically, the report documents alarming declines in cognitive and social-emotional development among young children, which could translate into a 25 percent reduction in their earnings as adults. It finds that 1 billion children in low- and middle-income countries missed at least one year of in-person schooling. And despite enormous efforts in remote learning, children did not learn during the unprecedentedly long school closures, which could reduce future lifetime earnings around the world by US$21 trillion. The report quantifies the dramatic drops in employment and skills among youth that resulted from the pandemic as well as the substantial increase in the number of youth neither employed nor enrolled in education or training. In all of these age groups, the impacts of the pandemic were consistently worse for children from poorer backgrounds. These losses call for immediate action. The good news is that evidence-based policies can recover these losses. Collapse and Recovery reviews governments’ responses to the pandemic, assessing why there was a collapse in human capital accumulation, what was missing in the policy architecture to protect human capital during the crisis, and how governments can better prepare to withstand future shocks. It offers concrete policy recommendations to recover losses in human capital—programs that will end up paying for themselves in the long term. To better prepare for future shocks such as climate change and wars, the report emphasizes the need for solutions that bring health, education, and social protection programs together in an integrated human development system. If countries fail to act, the losses in human capital documented in this report will become permanent and last for multiple generations. The time to act is now.
Impacts of Extreme Weather Events on Education Outcomes: A Review of Evidence
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2024-04-08) Venegas Marin, Sergio; Schwarz, Lara; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Extreme weather events are increasingly disrupting schooling. Yet, these are underrepresented in the climate change literature. Of 15 review articles on the economic impacts of climate change published since 2010, only three mention the impacts of climate change on education. We review available literature on the effects of weather extremes on education. We outline key pathways through which these events impact education outcomes, as well as the magnitude of those impacts. Evidence implies a significant and adverse relationship between heat and learning. Studies suggest surpassing a high temperature threshold makes learning difficult and results in learning losses. Across studies, each additional day subject to extreme heat reduces learning. Tropical cyclones, floods, and wildfires precipitate school closures, which halt learning. Evidence suggests that one day of school closures leads to one day of learning lost. Weather extremes also negatively impact education outcomes through health, nutrition, poverty, and fragility, among other distal pathways. We discuss the implications of this evidence for policy, including the need to adapt education systems to climate change. Mitigation and adaptation are both urgently needed as extreme weather events become more frequent and severe in the context of climate change.
Teacher Beliefs: Why They Matter and What They Are
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-14) Sabarwal, Shwetlena; Abu-Jawdeh, Malek; Kapoor, Radhika
Teacher effectiveness is low in many developing countries. How can it be improved? We show that understanding teacher beliefs may be an important but overlooked part of the puzzle. Our review of recent evidence shows that teacher beliefs can impact student outcomes directly; they can also mediate policy implementation. Despite this, we find that teacher beliefs are seldom accounted for or even measured in impact evaluations of teacher-focused programs. Most of these programs ultimately fail to change teacher behavior. Next, using survey data from 20,000 teachers across nine developing countries, we discuss teacher beliefs about their role, their effort, and their students’ learning. We uncover four insights. First, teachers exhibit fixed mindsets on the learning potential of disadvantaged students. For instance, nearly 43 percent of teachers believe that “there is little they can do to help a student learn” if parents are uneducated. Second, in most countries, more teachers believe that students deserve additional attention if they are performing well than if they are lagging behind. This suggests that teachers may be reinforcing rather than compensating for baseline gaps in student levels. Third, there is some normalization of absenteeism—nearly one in four teachers believe it is acceptable to be absent if students are left with work to do. Finally, teacher support for pay-for-performance varies widely across countries.
How to Improve Education Outcomes Most Efficiently? A Comparison of 150 Interventions Using the New Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling Metric
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Angrist, Noam; Evans, David K.; Filmer, Deon; Glennerster, Rachel; Rogers, F. Halsey; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. Some studies report changes in years of schooling; others report changes in learning. Standard deviations, the metric typically used to report learning gains, measure gains relative to a local distribution of test scores. This metric makes it hard to judge if the gain is worth the cost in absolute terms. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) -- which combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard -- as a new metric for reporting gains from education interventions. The paper applies LAYS to compare the effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness, where cost is available) of interventions from 150 impact evaluations across 46 countries. The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.
Preparation, Practice, and Beliefs: A Machine Learning Approach to Understanding Teacher Effectiveness
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11) Nahata, Vatsal; Filmer, Deon; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
This paper uses machine learning methods to identify key predictors of teacher effectiveness, proxied by student learning gains linked to a teacher over an academic year. Conditional inference forests and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator are applied to matched student-teacher data for math and Kiswahili from grades 2 and 3 in 392 schools across Tanzania. These two machine learning methods produce consistent results and outperform standard ordinary least squares in out-of-sample prediction by 14–24 percent. As in previous research, commonly used teacher covariates like teacher gender, education, experience, and so forth are not good predictors of teacher effectiveness. Instead, teacher practice (what teachers do, measured through classroom observations and student surveys) and teacher beliefs (measured through teacher surveys) emerge as much more important. Overall, teacher covariates are stronger predictors of teacher effectiveness in math than in Kiswahili. Teacher beliefs that they can help disadvantaged and struggling students learn (for math) and they have good relationships within schools (for Kiswahili), teacher practice of providing written feedback and reviewing key concepts at the end of class (for math), and spending extra time with struggling students (for Kiswahili) are highly predictive of teacher effectiveness. As is teacher preparation on how to teach foundational topics (for both Math and Kiswahili). These results demonstrate the need to pay more systematic attention to teacher preparation, practice, and beliefs in teacher research and policy.
Learning-adjusted years of schooling: Defining a new macro measure of education
(Elsevier, 2020-08-01) Rogers, Halsey; Filmer, Deon; Angrist, Noam; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses is a quantity-based one: The average number of years of schooling in a population. But as recent research shows, students in different countries who have completed the same number of years of school often have vastly different learning outcomes. We therefore propose a new summary measure, the Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS). This measure combines quantity and quality of schooling into a single easy-to-understand metric of progress, revealing considerably larger cross-country education gaps than the standard metric. We show that the comparisons produced by this measure are robust to different ways of adjusting for learning and that LAYS is consistent with other evidence, including other approaches to quality adjustment. Like other learning measures, LAYS reflects learning, and barriers to learning, both inside and outside of school; also, cross-country comparability of LAYS rests on assumptions related to learning trajectories and the validity, reliability, and comparability of test data. Acknowledging these limitations, we argue that LAYS nonetheless improves on the standard metric in key ways.
Low-Cost Private Schools in Tanzania: A Descriptive Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08) Sabarwal, Shwetlena; Sununtnasuk, Celeste; Ramachandran, Deepika
This paper discusses the potential role of low-cost private secondary schools in Tanzania. The share of private enrollment has been negatively correlated with the availability of public schools. With the 2016 Fee-Free Basic Education Policy, the public secondary education system is experiencing significant demand pressures. The government has limited resources to address these pressures. Using micro-data from the Morogoro region, the paper finds that private schools have excess capacity that can allow for absorption of additional students at relatively low cost through potential public-private partnerships. The paper finds no evidence that service delivery or student performance is worse in private schools relative to their public counterparts. These findings provide empirical evidence on some key enabling conditions for potential public-private partnerships for secondary education in Tanzania.
Teacher Performance-Based Incentives and Learning Inequality
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Habyarimana, James; Filmer, Deon; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
This study evaluates the impacts of low-cost, performance-based incentives in Tanzanian secondary schools. Results from a two-phase randomized trial show that incentives for teachers led to modest average improvements in student achievement across different subjects. Further, withdrawing incentives did not lead to a "discouragement effect" (once incentives were withdrawn, student performance did not fall below pre-baseline levels). Rather, impacts on learning were sustained beyond the intervention period. However, these incentives may have exacerbated learning inequality within and across schools. Increases in learning were concentrated among initially better-performing schools and students. At the same time, learning outcomes may have decreased for schools and students that were lower performing at baseline. Finally, the study finds that incentivizing students without simultaneously incentivizing teachers did not produce observable learning gains.