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In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of schooling" and another in the net present value of potential increased lifetime earnings. The results show that in a sample of low- and middle-income countries, one standard deviation gain in literacy skill is associated with between 4.7 and 6.8 additional years of schooling, depending on the estimation method. In other words, over the course of a business-as-usual school year, students learn between 0.15 and 0.21 standard deviation of literacy ability. Using that metric to translate the impact of interventions, a median structured pedagogy intervention increases learning by the equivalent of between 0.6 and 0.9 year of business-as-usual schooling. The results further show that even modest gains in standard deviations of learning--if sustained over time--may have sizeable impacts on individual earnings and poverty reduction, and that conversion into a non-education metric should help policy makers and non-specialists better understand the potential benefits of increased learning. [This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region and the World Development Report 2018 Team.]

The private sector is playing an increasingly important role in financing and providing educational services in many countries. (Often the term "private sector" encompasses households' out-of-pocket expenses rather than describing for-profit or not-for-profit sectors.) Private sector development has not arisen primarily through public policy design but has been affected by the design and limitations of public policy. Analyses of case studies of 11 of 70 World Bank education projects in 1995-97 reveal that the World Bank's interest in private sector development is in capacity-oriented privatization to absorb excess demand for education. This is crucial to the bank's general strategy for education lending: promoting access with equity, focusing on efficiency in resource allocation, promoting quality, and supporting capacity building. Absorbing excess demand tends to involve poorer families, usually much poorer than those that take advantage of other forms of privatized education. The bank emphasizes capacity-oriented privatization, especially of teacher training for primary and secondary schools, as well as institutional capacity building for tertiary and vocational education. The underlying principle is that strengthening the private sector's role in noncompulsory education over time will release public resources for the compulsory (primary) level. (Case studies of World Bank projects in the following countries are appended: Dominican Republic, Maldives, Chile, Mauritania, Argentina, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Indonesia, El Salvador, and Comoros. Contains 74 references.) (KC)

This paper examines improvement in teacher education in Chile, which had an excellent system of teacher education until the 1970s. Educational change targeting elementary and secondary schools did not affect teacher education institutions, and there was no power to initiate such change. The national government pushed improvements by offering to fund projects presented by teacher education programs on a competitive basis. A small coordinating team was established in 1997 to conduct the selection process. The team also monitored and assessed the projects and institutions. Institutions could opt for a general overhaul of their teacher education programs or select just one area for improvement. Most opted for widespread changes. The paper examines how improvements have been occurring, focusing on four categories: theoretical focus, content and teacher preparation processes, learning to teach through continued practical experiences, and teacher educator and student teacher quality and instructional resource allocation. The paper highlights three ways in which this program illustrates the change process: policy-driven change, common constraints in institutional change, and mediations in change. (Contains 10 references.) (SM)

Learning analytics is a domain that has been constantly evolving throughout recent years due to the acknowledgement of its importance by those using intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections for predicting and advising people's learning [1]. Learning analytics may be applied in a variety of different cases, but their role in understanding the multilingual requirements of users of learning portals is of an outstanding significance. As the adaptation of existing portals in multilingual environments is a cost- and time-consuming aspect of the development of a portal, the outcomes of learning analytics may provide the requirements on which further multilingual services of a portal will be built, ensuring their efficiency. This paper aims to identify and interpret the behavior of users from developing countries in a multilingual learning portal using the log files of the portal by applying the methodology defined in a previous work by Stoitsis et al. [2] The paper also aims to identify the aspects that should be studied by future related works by focusing on specific regions and countries that exhibit special interest for further adaptation of the portal to additional multilingual environments.

This paper describes the lives of some notable women in the history of Chile from the time of the conquistadors to the present. The significant women described in the paper include: (1) Ines de Suarez (accompanied Pedro de Validivia in 1544); (2) Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua (wife of Incan leader Jose Gabriel Tupac Amaru, about 1780); (3) Gabriela Mistral (Nobel laureate poet of the early 20th century); (4) Amanda Labarca Hubertson (women's rights advocate of this century); (5) Matilde Urrutia (wife of renowned Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda); and (6) Ana Gonzalez (a famous actress in Chile). (EH)

Current educational policy in Latin America has been aiming to include community participation in a wider spectrum as part of decentralization reform. Much of the rhetoric of these policies seems to originate from neo-liberal policies of State modernization carried out under the auspices of international organizations. Based on a critical review of the literature relating to educational reform and participation in Chile and Brazil, this study examines current policies on school participation by parents and community members with reference to cases in both countries. Findings suggest that participation in school governance has been more a conquest of teachers than of parents, and community participation, in its broadest sense, remains an appealing maxim. (Contains 17 references.) (BT)

This book on educational management, is a collection of works that were presented at a 1991 international seminar. The papers are divided into three sections. The first section, the management in the crossroads of our time, contains three articles: (1) "Development Strategies and Education" (Juan Carlos Tedesco); (2) "Educational Management in the New Perspectives of Educational Policy" (Guiomar Namo De Mello; Teresa Roserley N. DaSilva); and (3) "Investigation and Innovation in the Educational Management of Teaching Materials" (J. Gimeno Sacristan). The second part, on the importance of research contains six articles: (1) "Problems and Theory Pertaining to Educational Management" (Justa Ezpeleta); (2) "Some Points" (Josefina Granja Castro); (3) "Educational Management" (Alfredo Furlan; And Others); (4) "Confusion, Hurt, Symbols of Intervention" (Eduardo Remedi); (5) "Conflict and Colectivism" (Bradley A. Levinson); and (6) "Educational Management in the Formal Curriculum in the Secondary School" (Rafael Quiroz). The third part, on studies and experiments has six articles: (1) "Educational Management of School Buildings from the Perspectives of Burocracy and the System" (Eduardo Weiss); (2) "Cooperation between the Technical Middle School and the World of Work in Mexico" (Maria de Ibarrola); (3) "Program To Better the Quality of the School Basics in the Poorest Sections of Chile" (Adriana Delpiano); (4) "Intermediate Education in Argentina" (Alicia Carranza); (5) "Academic Efforts as Support for Teachers in the Recovery of the Professional Identity of the Teaching Profession" (Maria Cecilia Fierro E.); and (6) "Steps in the Quality of Education." (Marta E. Teobaldo). (DK)

Chile's 1981 decentralization reforms kept most educational finance responsibility with the Ministry of Education, but transferred service-delivery responsibility to municipalities and nonprofit private schools. This paper examines this reform's effects. Municipal finance, tied to fiscal capacity, has created inequities in school expenditures. Cost-effectiveness influences are ambiguous. However, growth in private school enrollments may have improved overall efficiency. (10 references) (MLH)