Publication: Well Begun, but Aiming Higher: A Review of Vietnam’s Education Trends in the past 20 Years and Emerging Challenges
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Date
2018
ISSN
0022-0388
Published
2018
Author(s)
Glewwe, Paul W.
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Abstract
Given its modest position as a lower-middle-income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. We provide an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance both from an institutional viewpoint and by analyzing several different data sources, some of which have rarely been used. Some of the highlights are universal primary school enrollment, higher girls’ net enrollment rates, and the role of within-commune individual factors. We further discuss a host of challenges for the country – most of which have received insufficient attention to date.
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School-level factors played an important, but diminishing, role in determining students' test scores, which was likely caused by a convergence in school quality in the country. The paper further discusses a host of challenges for the country—most of which have received insufficient attention to date—such as little school choice, a low secondary enrollment rate (compared with other Programme for International Student Assessment participants), inadequate training for the labor market, and the necessity of strategic planning for systemic reforms.Publication The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity : Household Size and Household Investment in Education in Vietnam(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. 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Finally, the results suggest that tutoring may be a better measure of quality-oriented household investments in education than traditional measures like enrollment, which are arguably less nuanced and household-driven.Publication School Access, Resources, and Learning Outcomes(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-05)This study reports evidence from an unusual policy intervention- The Reaching Out of School Children (ROSC) project in Bangladesh where school grants and education allowances are offered to attract hard-to-reach children to schools comprised of a single teacher and a classroom. The operating unit cost of these schools is a fraction of that of formal primary schools. Panel data is used to investigate whether ROSC schools are effective in raising enrolment and learning outcomes. The findings suggest that there is a modest impact on school participation: ROSC schools increase enrolment probability between 9 and 18 percent for children in the two age cohorts 6 to 8 and 6 to 10. They perform as well as non-ROSC schools in terms of raising test scores, and even have positive impacts on academically stronger students. There is also strong evidence of positive externalities on non-ROSC schools in program areas. These results point to the effectiveness of a new model of non-formal primary schools that can be replicated in similar settings. This paper consists of following sections: section one gives introduction. The context for the country and the program description is provided in section two, and the data is described in section three. The impacts of the ROSC project on education outcomes as measured by student enrolment and test scores are discussed in section four and other program effects are considered in section five, with the empirical estimation frameworks being respectively detailed in each section. The relative efficiency of ROSC schools versus non-ROSC schools is discussed in section six and section seven gives conclusion.Publication How to Interpret the Growing Phenomenon of Private Tutoring : Human Capital Deepening, Inequality Increasing, or Waste of Resources?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-02)Private tutoring is now a major component of the education sector in many developing countries, yet education policy too seldom acknowledges and makes use of it. Various criticisms have been raised against private tutoring, most notably that it exacerbates social inequalities and may even fail to improve student outcomes. This paper surveys the literature for evidence on private tutoring-the extent of the tutoring phenomenon, the factors that explain its growth, and its cost-effectiveness in improving student academic performance. It also presents a framework for assessing the efficiency and equity effects of tutoring. It concludes that tutoring can raise the effectiveness of the education system under certain reasonable assumptions, even taking into account equity concerns, and it offers guidance for attacking corruption and other problems that diminish the contributions of the tutoring sector.Publication Private Tutoring in Vietnam: A Review of Current Issues and Its Major Correlates(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2013-09)Building on the earlier work, this paper provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam in several aspects, including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, the paper offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 where data are available. Several (micro-) correlates are examined that are found to be strongly correlated with student attendance at tutoring, including household income, household head education and residence area, student current grade level, ethnicity, and household size. In particular, the analysis focuses on the last three variables, which have received little attention in the previous literature on the determinants of tutoring.
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