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The purpose of our study was to evaluate the indicators that characterize the number and structure of the teaching staff that provides students with higher education programs in the regions of Russia. The initial empirical data were the results of official statistical surveys conducted on the basis of information on the number of teachers in higher educational institutions, students in these organizations, as well as on the working-age population in eighty-two regions of Russia in 2020. In the course of the study, four mathematical models were developed. The study showed that on average, no more than two teachers work in higher educational institutions per million people of working age in the regions. It is proved that three out of four professors were candidates of sciences and Doctor of Sciences (that is, they had academic degrees). In 2020, there were an average of twenty students per teacher. The regions with the maximum and minimum values of the considered indicators were identified. It is shown that higher education has received significant development in Russia.

The effect of increasing school resources on educational outcomes is a central issue in the debate on improving school quality. This paper uses a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which allowed schools to apply for funding for improvements of their own choice. The analysis finds positive effects on test scores at lower grades that persist at least two years. These effects are concentrated among schools that focused funds on human resource improvements rather than school materials, suggesting that teachers and principals may be a central determinant of school quality.

The relative return to input-augmentation versus inefficiency-reduction strategies for improving education system performance is a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, this paper shows that the large investments over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In the data, 23.6 percent of teachers were absent during unannounced visits with an associated fiscal cost of $1.5 billion/year. There are two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel data that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Simulations using these results suggest that investing in better governance by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing teacher-student contact time (net of teacher absence) than hiring more teachers. Thus, at current margins, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public spending in India are likely to yield substantially higher returns than those that augment inputs.

This paper reports on the quality of early childhood education in rural Indonesia. On average, the paper finds that centers created under the Indonesia Early Childhood Education and Development Project provide higher quality services than other types of preschools, as measured by a comprehensive instrument of preschool quality based on direct observation of classrooms in session (the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised). The paper also examines the relationship between preschool quality and childrens early development using three commonly applied measures of quality: (i) the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised; (ii) teacher characteristics; and (iii) structural characteristics of preschool services, such as their size and amount of class time. First, correcting for measurement error using an instrumental variables approach, the findings suggest that preschool quality is a significant and meaningful positive predictor of childrens developmental outcomes. Second, the findings for teacher characteristics are mixed, suggesting that policies focused solely on hiring teachers based on experience and training will be insufficient to improve childrens learning. Instead, policies must address the quality of professional development activities for teachers. Third, the amount of class time spent in early childhood programs is a significant positive predictor of children’s developmental outcomes. This suggests that in rural Indonesia—where early childhood programs are relatively low dose—children are likely to benefit from attending longer hours of preschool, either playgroups or kindergartens. Lastly, the paper compares items in the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised with Indonesias national minimum service standards for early childhood education and development, and finds that the relationship between this alternative, context-appropriate measure of preschool quality and children’s development outcomes strongly corroborates the earlier conclusions.

This paper seeks to understand what drove the trends in learning outcomes in Argentina between 2000 and 2012, using data from four rounds of the Program for International Student Assessment. A year-specific education production function is estimated and its results used to decompose the changes in learning outcomes into changes in inputs, parameters, and residuals via microsimulations. Estimates of the production function show the importance of socioeconomic status, gender, school autonomy, and teacher qualifications to determine learning outcomes. Despite an important increase in the level of resources invested in public education, learning outcomes in public schools decreased vis-à-vis private schools. According to the results presented here, the increase in the number of teachers in the system, pushing the pupil-teacher ratio in Argentina to 11, had no effect on learning outcomes. The microsimulation further confirms that changes in the system’s ability to transform inputs into outcomes accounted for most of the changes in test scores. Overall, the study shows the ineffectiveness of input-based education policies to improve learning outcomes in Argentina.

In 2009, the Mexican state of Colima implemented a low-stakes accountability intervention with diagnostic feedback among 108 public primary schools with the lowest test scores in the national student assessment. A difference-in-difference and a regression discontinuity design are used to identify the effects of the intervention on learning outcomes. The two alternative strategies consistently show that the intervention increased test scores by 0.12 standard deviations only a few months after the program was launched. When students, teachers, and parents in a school know that their scores are low, and this triggers a process of self-evaluation and analysis, the process itself may lead to an improvement in learning outcomes. Information on quality, without punitive measures but within a supportive and collaborative environment, appears to be sufficient to improve learning outcomes.

Over the past two and a half decades, Thailand has made great progress in expanding basic education, closing the gap in attendance between socioeconomic groups, and putting more focus on the quality of education. Building on this progress, it appears that even more can be done to maximize the potential of Thailand’s students to become productive workforce participants. Functional illiteracy can be seen across the various types of schools in Thailand, indicating that there are still system-wide issues affecting the quality of education. Improving educational outcomes among these poorer-performing students can have major impacts at the individual level and for Thailand’s economic growth prospects. Having a workforce with stronger analytical reasoning and problem solving skills - skills that extend well beyond simply being functionally literate - can help Thailand move up the value-added ladder to a more knowledge-based economy. Therefore, addressing the remaining gaps will enable Thailand to improve its competitiveness, economic growth, and prosperity.

This paper presents evidence from the first three years of a randomized controlled trial of a government-administered pilot teacher performance pay program in Punjab, Pakistan. The program offers yearly cash bonuses to teachers in a sample of public primary schools with the lowest mean student exam scores in the province. Bonuses are linked to three school-level indicators: the gain in student exam scores, the gain in school enrollment, and the level of student exam participation. Bonus receipt and size are also randomly assigned across schools according to whether or not the teacher is the school’s head. On average, the program increases school enrollment by 4.1 percent and student exam participation rates by 3.4 percentage points, both in the third year. The analysis does not find that the program increases student exam scores in any year. Mean impacts are similar across program variants. The positive mean impact on school enrollment is mainly seen in urban schools and the positive mean impact on student exam participation rates is only seen in rural schools.

The main objective of the report is to provide recommendations for policy makers and sector managers to help improve service delivery and the resultant outcomes in primary education. The fundamental premise of this analysis stems from Punjab Social Sector Public Expenditure Review conducted in FY2013.

Education management information systems (EMISs), usually located within the ministry of education, are tools that can help governments improve education system administration by providing information that can be used in strategic planning, resource allocation, and monitoring and evaluation. Frequently, however, they are underutilized and become merely a reporting mechanism. Using the data at the point of collection usually individual schools in a decentralized environment and feeding them into service improvement action plans can circumvent problems with the national EMIS, and allow the data to become instrumental in improving local education service delivery outcomes.

As Dubai has grown over the last two decades, the demand for private education has grown with it, a reflection of the number of expatriates settling in the city. Today, 88 percent of all students attend private schools. The surge in demand over this period had in fact been so significant that authorities, recognizing the need to establish a specific governmental entity to oversee the sector s expansion, moved to create the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) in 2007. Given the city-state s unique context (in which a majority of the population are expatriates, not Emiratis), the immediate challenge for this new public institution was to identify an appropriate approach for regulating a private education sector. The main objective of the present review is to understand what has motivated KHDA s policy initiatives, what principles have guided design, how they were operationalized, and how they function in real life situations today. In what follows, we look first at the broader context of the issue by giving a brief overview of: (i) the growth of private sector education; and (ii) the rise of public governance reform initiatives in the global education policy agenda. The authors then turn to the case of Dubai: the authors present the argument in the road not traveled before reviewing how that policy framework was translated into its present institutional configuration in Dubai through the development of the institutions that came into being. The authors then reflect on the policy framework in operation, showing how the constituent components function together. The authors end by suggesting some options on potential ways forward that will further enhance the system.

This report presents results of the application of SABER teachers in Papua New Guinea. It describes Papua New Guinea’s performance in each of the eight teacher policy goals, alongside comparative information on education systems that have consistently scored highly on international student achievement tests and have participated in SABER-Teachers. Additional detailed descriptive information on the teachers policies of the education systems of Papua New Guinea and other education systems can be found on the SABER-teachers website.

Providing at least basic education to all children especially those coming from poor or disadvantaged families is an important factor for increasing chances to improve their lives in the future. Many countries recognize the need to better educate their populations and do so by trying to improve the equity and quality while taking care of efficiency. The provision of equal educational opportunities is a challenge for every society, where specific solutions typically depend on a number of factors. The intention of this document is to raise awareness and provide support to decision makers in planning the measures that will secure access to quality education for all children above all to those who are under higher risk of dropping out of the education system through a set of transportation and education policy measures. The document aims to equip municipal authorities, as well as transport and education stakeholders, with a systemized approach for assessing the access and accessibility of education services, and tools for the selection of the most appropriate options for improvements. The document is organized as follows: chapter one provides a short introductory review of the demographic changes in South East Europe (SEE) countries; chapter two is a valuable source of information on the experiences of countries in the SEE region and worldwide; chapter three gives decision-making framework for local authorities; chapter four provides a summary and a set of recommendations for local- and national-level authorities on the most effective ways of fulfilling legal obligations and ensuring a basic children's right- access to education; chapter five and six sets paths for making chosen policy options sustainable and for future developments based on innovative transport and education approaches and proven practices; and chapter seven gives literature and data sources.

A well-designed communication plan proved to be critical in implementing successful education reform efforts in El Salvador (World Bank 1998). El Salvador's experience with the Education with Community Participation Program (EDUCO) demonstrated that special emphasis on communication strategies can build consensus, inform communities, and improve public support for complex reforms. During the 1990s, efforts to reform El Salvador's failing schools mobilized a number of actors that included rural communities, education stakeholders, and government officials. The results revealed acute shortages in basic resources that were largely tied to conditions caused during El Salvador's civil war (1980-92). At that time, many public schools in rural areas were forced to close because of security concerns and lack of public resources. The teachers that were contracted were not paid consistently and often unable to teach in the impoverished conditions. This project was financed by the World Bank along with other multilateral organizations from 1995 to 2007 (World Bank 2007). In this program, local school-based parent associations (community education associations [ACEs]), given appropriate training, were granted control over the administration of schools. This proved to be a challenge as low literacy rates were common among members of the ACEs. A lot of parents especially mothers were not able to read and write. Therefore, a training program was developed to improve literacy among parents and increase the participation among women. Financial management was also a part of these capacity-building efforts, where parents were trained to manage the funds of the associations.

This study examines the changes in Vietnam's primary and secondary education over the past 20 years as well as key factors that affect such critical educational outcomes as attendance, grade attainment, and student achievement in order to derive implications for public education policy. It is divided into an analytical report and shorter overview/policy report. The study finds significant improvement in attendance, attainment, and achievement across all populations. Nonetheless, vulnerable populations (in particular the poorest and ethnic minorities) continue to fare poorly as a result of persistent, and in some cases, increasing inequalities in educational attainment and poor student achievement. Educational attainment and achievement are also shown to be complementary to a large extent. Despite the methodological limitations, evidence consistently confirms that certain characteristics of schools and teachers are significantly related to both educational outcomes. This opens the door for public policy and provides multiple (potential) policies 'entrance points' for addressing the remaining challenges. Some measures have implications for public funding, its priorities and/or efficiency, and others are more closely related to the management of public institutions. Some of the main policy implications derived from the analytical findings are re-asserting or expanding priorities for public funding through expanding support for the Fundamental School Quality Level (FSQL), and supporting full day schooling and conditional cash transfers for vulnerable groups; improving spending efficiency through better targeted fee exemptions and the strengthened application of teacher standards; and improving the management of public sector schools through higher principals' management capacity, strengthened accountability of schools to their communities and better information.

The 'Quality of Education in Madrasah' (QEM) study aimed to provide high quality research into various dimensions of quality of education in Indonesian Madrasahs. The study focused on final year students in Islamic Junior Secondary Schools (Madrasah Tsanawiyah, MT). One hundred and fifty MTs were sampled from across Indonesia, with equal numbers selected from Java and the East and West of the country. Systematically selected intact classes were sampled within schools, involving a total of 6,233 students. Eight instruments were developed for use in the study. Four were achievement tests designed to assess performance in Mathematics, Science, Indonesian and English. Australian Council for Educational Research's (ACER's) School Life Questionnaire (SLQ) was used as an affective measure of school quality. ACER developed an instrument to assess student background characteristics, and a Principal Interview Schedule and a School Inventory were also developed by ACER to collect information on MTs. Mean scores showed that students in Java performed better than students in the East and West regions on each of the four achievement tests, with students in the West performing marginally better than students in the East on all tests. The largest correlations between student background factors and achievement across the three regions were observed for number of home resources and study materials available to students.

The World Bank's Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) for 2009-2012 marks Indonesia's re-emergence as a confident middle-income country, and one that is enjoying a rising regional and global standing. Ten years ago, Indonesia was in the middle of an extremely severe economic crisis. Today, Indonesia has embarked upon a far-reaching institutional transformation and has become one of the region's most vibrant democracies. Its sub-national governments are now major players in service delivery. This booklet highlights the World Bank's portfolio of activities that support the Government of Indonesia in the Human Development sector, which encompasses both health and education. The World Bank's Human Development sector work covers almost the entire human life cycle, from maternal and neo-natal health, health insurance, early childhood education, school health and nutrition, basic education, to teacher reform, secondary education and youth skills, higher education, medical and health professional education and lifelong learning.