Publication:
What Matters Most for Engaging the Private Sector in Education: A Framework Paper

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (1.27 MB)
3,221 downloads
English Text (313.25 KB)
104 downloads
Published
2014-07
ISSN
Date
2015-04-17
Author(s)
Baum, Donald
Lewis, Laura
Lusk-Stover, Oni
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper provides an overview of what matters most for engaging the private sector in basic education. In many countries, private schools educate a substantial and growing share of the student population. The goal of this paper is not to advocate for private schooling, but to outline the most effective evidence based policies that governments can use to orient these non-state providers toward promoting learning for all children and youth. Systems approach for better education results (SABER) engaging the private sector (EPS) builds upon the framework for effective service delivery outlined in the World Bank's World Development Report 2004, making services work for the poor, as well as in the World Bank's education sector strategy 2020, learning for all. To assist countries in improving their policy frameworks for private education, SABER EPS analyzes and benchmarks four policy goals that, according to the global evidence, can strengthen provider accountability and promote learning for all. These policy goals are: (1) encouraging innovation by providers; (2) holding schools accountable; (3) empowering all parents, students, and communities; and (4) promoting diversity of supply. Each of these policy goals is benchmarked across four common models of private service delivery: (a) independent private schools, (b) government funded private schools, (c) privately managed schools, and (d) voucher schools. In its country level application of the framework and tools, SABER EPS assesses only the modes of private delivery that already exist in each country.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Baum, Donald; Lewis, Laura; Lusk-Stover, Oni; Patrinos, Harry. 2014. What Matters Most for Engaging the Private Sector in Education: A Framework Paper. Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) working paper;no. 8. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/21756 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Emerging Evidence on Vouchers and Faith-based Providers in Education : Case Studies from Africa, Latin America, and Asia
    (World Bank, 2009) Barrera-Osorio, Felipe; Patrinos, Harry Anthony; Wodon, Quentin
    The case studies in this book provide useful information on the characteristics of students and the performance of various types of schools that benefit from public-private partnerships. While these case studies are empirically grounded, their results are not necessarily of universal application, because context also matters. The authors are careful to point out that while one of the case studies is based on an experiment, the other case studies use instruments or matching methods that have their limitations. Yet a key result from this work is that sound analyses of existing data are feasible and can yield useful conclusions about the contribution that private service providers can offer to educational development. These case studies will encourage more researchers to undertake similar work to demonstrate the many options that developing countries have to reach their education goals.
  • Publication
    India : Education Sector Development in the 1990s, A Country Assistance Evaluation
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002) Abadzi, Helen
    World Bank lending in education has taken place through a unique working relationship in line with India's principle of self-sufficiency and domestic development. Until the late 1980s, the government of India strongly resisted external funding for education programs. Subsequently, the goal of universal elementary education resulted in demand for additional resources, leading the department of education (DOE) to review its policy on external funding in education. The Bank's continued efforts towards a dialogue with DOE aimed at confidence building also contributed to this change in policy. Since 1980, the Bank s investments in education in India have grown from an almost negligible amount to 2 billion dollars. The Bank has approved four vocational and technical education and training (TVET) projects and six basic education projects. Overall, their capacity increased more than 50 percent, by roughly 100,000 student places, and expansion often exceeded targets. The operations evaluation department (OED) has rated project performance as satisfactory or highly satisfactory, though substantial improvements are still needed in industry linkages, quality of trainers, and academic flexibility.
  • Publication
    Out-of-School Youth in Sub-Saharan Africa : A Policy Perspective
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-02-27) Taylor, Yesim Sayin; Inoue, Keiko; di Gropello, Emanuela; Gresham, James
    The economic and social prospects are daunting for the 89 million out-of-school youth who comprise nearly half of all youth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Within the next decade, when this cohort becomes the core of the labor market, an estimated 40 million more youth will drop out, and will face an uncertain future with limited work and life skills. Furthermore, out-of-school youth often are policy orphans, positioned between sectors with little data, low implementation capacity, lack of interest in long-term sustainability of programs, insufficient funds, and little coordination across the different government agencies. This report provides a diagnostic analysis of the state of out-of-school youth in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the 12- to 24-year-old cohort. This report also examines the decision path youth take as they progress through the education system and the factors that explain youth's school and work choices. It finds that individual and household characteristics, social norms, and characteristics of the school system all matter in understanding why youth drop out and remain out of school. In particular, six key factors characterize out-of-school youth: (i) most out-of-school youth drop out before secondary school; (ii) early marriage for female youth and (iii) rural residence increase the likelihood of being out of school; (iv) parental education level and (v) the number of working adults are important household factors; and (vi) lack of school access and low educational quality are binding supply-side constraints. Policy discussions on out-of-school youth are framed by these six key factors along with three entry points for intervention: retention, remediation, and integration. This report also reviews policies and programs in place for out-of-school youth across the continent. Ultimately, this report aims to inform public discussion, policy formulation, and development practitioners' actions working with youth in Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Publication
    Decentralized Decision-making in Schools : The Theory and Evidence on School-based Management
    (World Bank, 2009) Barrera-Osorio, Felipe; Fasih, Tazeen; Patrinos, Harry Anthony; Santibáñez, Lucrecia
    The school-based management (SBM) has become a very popular movement over the last decade. The World Bank's work on school-based management emerged from a need to better define the concept, review the evidence, support impact assessments in various countries, and provide feedback to project teams. The authors took detailed stock of the existing literature on school-based management and then identified several cases that the Bank was supporting in various countries. The authors present as well general guidance on how to evaluate school-based management programs. The Bank continues to support and oversee a number of impact evaluations of school-based management programs in an array of countries. Despite the clear commitment of governments and international agencies to the education sector, efficient, and equitable access remains elusive for many populations - especially for girls, indigenous peoples, and other poor and marginalized groups. Many international initiatives focus on these access issues with great commitment, but even where the vast majority of children do have access to education facilities, the quality of that education often is very poor. This fact increasingly is apparent in the scores from international learning assessments on which most students from developing countries do not excel. Evidence has shown that merely increasing resource allocation without also introducing institutional reforms in the education sector will not increase equity or improve the quality of education. One way to decentralize decision-making power in education is known popularly as SBM. There are other names for this concept, but they all refer to the decentralization of authority from the central government to the school level. SBM emphasizes the individual school (represented by any combination of principals, teachers, parents, students, and other members of the school community) as the main decision-making authority, and holds that this shift in the formulating of decisions will lead to improvement in the delivery of education.
  • Publication
    Bulgaria : Teachers
    (Washington, DC, 2013-01) World Bank
    Bulgaria implemented sweeping decentralization and efficiency-focused reforms in basic education in 2007 and 2008. The education system adjusted to the negative demographic trends by optimizing the network of schools (closing and merging schools), introducing per-capita based financing and delegating significant financial and decision-making autonomy to school principals. This policy reform package produced a number of benefits for the education sector; it accrued savings of over 100 million BGN and increased wages by 46 percent and reallocation of resources for capital investment (World Bank 2010). Despite the government's impressive achievements in terms of spending efficiency and high enrollment, lingering concerns remain about the quality and equity of the education system. The country has seen a negative trend in student learning outcomes as measured by international assessments. At the request of the Government of Bulgaria, the World Bank has implemented its newly developed tool for assessment and benchmarking of policies and programs affecting teacher's effectiveness Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) teachers. The key findings and policy options outlined in the present report are intended to inform the finalization of the new draft law and the development of the bylaws regulating teachers' policies in Bulgaria. This report presents results of the application of SABER-teachers in Bulgaria. It describes Bulgaria's performance in 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. Additional detailed descriptive information on Bulgaria's and other education systems' teacher policies can be found on the SABER-teachers website.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Spend Better, Spend More
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-24) Barón, Juan D.; Bend, Mary; Mirza, Fahad; Afzal, Nimra; Wolde, Hirut; Hussain, Nadeem
    Over the last three decades, Pakistan has expanded free and compulsory education to millions of students and increased female students’ attendance at school. Punjab alone doubled the number of 6- to 15-year-old children in school to 26 million between 1998 and 2020. The country has also introduced innovative reforms, most notably, merit-based recruitment of teachers and strategic use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to support the expansion of the system and improve teaching. In addition, the government has increased data availability and encouraged active participation of civil society organizations, promoting transparency and inclusivity and establishing a foundation for sustained improvement in the education system. These laid a solid foundation for sustained improvement in its education system.
  • Publication
    Measuring Education Pluralism Globally
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-06-09) Wodon, Quentin
    In education systems that support pluralism, students or parents can choose the type of school or university they attend. Given heterogeneity in priorities for what should be taught, education pluralism has a value in itself. It may also boost schooling and learning. The fact that there is heterogeneity is clear, otherwise we would not have different types of schools. What is less clear is the extent to which education systems are pluralistic. Rather than looking at inputs for pluralism such as laws and regulations, this article introduces a measure of education pluralism based on outputs, i.e. enrollment in different types of schools and universities. The normalized education pluralism index is inspired by the literature on market concentration. Estimates are provided based on data for public, private non-Catholic, and Catholic institutions.
  • Publication
    Digital Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13) Begazo, Tania; Dutz, Mark Andrew; Blimpo, Moussa
    All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.
  • Publication
    Predicting School Dropout with Administrative Data
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018) Ham, Andres; Adelman, Melissa; Vazquez, Emmanuel; Haimovich, Francisco
    School dropout is a growing concern across Latin America because of its negative social and economic consequences. Identifying who is likely to drop out, and therefore could be targeted for interventions, is a well-studied prediction problem in countries with strong administrative data. In this paper, we use new data in Guatemala and Honduras to estimate some of the first dropout prediction models for lower-middle income countries. These models correctly identify 80% of sixth grade students who will drop out within the next year, performing better than other commonly used targeting approaches and as well as models used in the United States.
  • Publication
    Ethiopia Poverty and Equity Assessment
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-13) World Bank
    Ethiopia has seen many changes since 2016, which until now, has been the reference year for data about the level and pattern of poverty in the country. The narrative around poverty was that years of high growth resulted in a significant reduction in poverty, but by less than expected because growth was uneven between rural and urban areas which received most of the gains from growth and there was a slow shift of labor from agriculture into the fast-growing segments of the economy. Since 2016, GDP per capita growth has decelerated—to 4.6 percent during 2016-2022 compared to nearly 7.4 percent during 2010-2016—not least because of multiple crises, including a global pandemic, droughts, locust infestation, conflict, and market shocks. This Poverty and Equity Assessment (PEA) updates the understanding of poverty and inequality in the country, using new data collected from 2021. This data was collected amidst security concerns, which posed challenges during the data collection process. Despite these challenges, data quality checks have verified that the collected information is reliable and representative of the country, excluding areas that were inaccessible, such as Tigray. The PEA updates statistics on poverty rates, inequality, the poverty profile, and identifies the drivers of these trends (Part 1). It provides an in-depth understanding of the key drivers of poverty in the country (Part 2) and charts the course for reducing poverty in the years to come (Part 3). Below are some high-level messages drawn from the analysis presented in the seven chapters of the report. Additional details are accessible in background papers accompanying the report.