Cassette tapes "cause" conflict

Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian published a very worrying paper in 2014 showing that US food aid causes conflict in recipient countries. Their research design used total US wheat production as a source of quasi-experimental variation in the amount of food aid countries received, to show causality rather than just correlation.

A new paper by Paul Christian and Christopher Barrett apparently debunks the study, showing that the "causal" correlation is spurious. Replace "US wheat production" with "US tape cassette sales" and you can almost exactly replicate the results.

Which reminds me of an earlier paper showing that "average male organ length" is a strong predictor of GDP growth. We only have about 200 countries, which is not a lot of observations to power a robust statistical analysis, so you should take most cross-country empirical analyses with a pinch of salt. These "male organ" and "cassette sales" papers are helpfully colourful reminders.

HT: Jeffrey Bloem

The Latest Economics Research on Global Education

Last week I was at the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) conference. Alex Eble made a big and apparently successful push to increase representation by researchers focused on developing countries. In time-honoured Dave Evans style, here's my one-sentence roundup of 22 idiosyncratically selected studies presented at the conference. You can see the full programme here. 

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Public-private partnerships

A subsidy for private schools in Haiti lead to higher enrolment (Adelman, Holland, and Heidelk) #Haiti

Chile has a universal school voucher and a higher voucher targeted at low-income students. The universal voucher is better for aggregate efficiency but worse for equity (Sanchez) #Chile #StructuralModel

Giving out vouchers to attend 5 years of low-cost private primary school in Delhi led to worse Hindi scores and no change in English or Maths (Crawfurd, Patel, and Sandefur) #India

Contracting out management of public schools to NGOs in Liberia led to a 60% increase in learning (Romero, Sandholtz, and Sandefur) #Liberia

School management

A mobile-phone based support programme for school councils in Pakistan led to no improvement for students (Asim) #Pakistan #Diff-in-Diff

A major school inspection reform in Madhya Pradesh led to no improvement in schools (Muralidharan and Singh) #India

Independent monitoring of teachers led to better student performance (Kim, Yang, Inayat) #Pakistan #Diff-in-Diff

Mindfulness

Mindfulness interventions reduced sadness and aggression of children in Niger (Kim, Brown, De Oca, Annan, Aber), improved concentration and prosocial behaviour in Sierra Leone (Brown, Kim, Annan, Aber), and increased prosocial behaviour amongst Syrian refugees (Keim and Kim) #Niger #SierraLeone #Syria

Information for parents

Giving parents information about their child’s performance led to some temporary improvements (Barrera-Osorio, Gonzalez, Lagos, Deming) #Colombia

Incentives for teachers 

The theoretically optimal “Pay for Percentile” incentive scheme works to increase effort, which is complementary to inputs (Gilligan, Karachiwalla, Kasirye, Lucas, Neal) #Uganda

BUT A simpler “threshold” incentive scheme can be as effective as the theoretically optimal “Pay for Percentile” (at least in the short-run) (Mbiti, Romero, Schipper) #Tanzania 

Methodology

Studies commissioned by the developer of an intervention find effect sizes 80% larger than studies commissioned independently (Wolf, Morrison, Slavin, Risman) #USA #MetaAnalysis #EvaluatorIndependence

Tests designed specifically for evaluations produce effect sizes 63% larger than generic tests (Pellegrini, Inns, Lake, Slavin) #USA #MetaAnalysis #TestDesign

External validity bias (non-random selection of schools into trials) is twice as big as internal validity bias (from using observational not experimental methods) (White, Hansen, Lycurgus, Rowan) #USA #ExternalValidity

Technology

The One Laptop Per Child programme in Peru had zero effect on learning (Cristia, Ibarrarán, Cueto, Santiago and Severín) #Peru

In addition, providing internet had no effect on student learning (Malamud, Cueto, Cristia, Beuermann) #Peru

Peer effects

Being the weakest student in a better (selective) school can be worse than being the strongest student in a worse school (Fabregas) #RDD #Mexico

Finance

Temporary subsidies can have permanent effects on enrolment (Nakajima) #Indonesia #Diff-in-Diff

Merit-based scholarships have bigger effects than need-based scholarships (Barrera-Osorio, de Barros, Filmer) #Cambodia

Heat

Each 1 degree Fahrenheit of school year temperature reduces learning by 1 percent. Air conditioning entirely offsets this. (Goodman, Hurwitz, Park, Smith) #FE #USA  

CfEE Blogging: Giving students information on future wages improves school outcomes

As of this January and following last year's Annual Research Digest from the Centre for Education Economics, I'll be co-editing the Monthly Digest, along with Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren.

This is basically an excuse and commitment device to get me actually blogging again on at least a monthly basis. Each issue will include commentary on new papers, plus a selection of abstracts from recent publications (lightly edited for jargon).

Here's the link.

My first comment is on a new paper by Ciro Avitabile and Rafael de Hoyos: 

Did you know what career you wanted to do when you were in secondary school? I didn’t. Most pupils make critically important choices that will affect their lives throughout their educational career, often on the basis of poor information about what those choices will mean for their future. In most countries, there is little transparency on the costs and benefits of pursuing education and information on the various career paths available. 

In this paper, Ciro Avitabile and Rafael de Hoyos study whether or not providing pupils with better information about the earnings returns to education and the options available lead to greater effort and learning. Several studies have previously shown that providing information about the wage gains from schooling leads pupils to stay in school a bit longer, and affects their educational choices, but there is limited evidence that such information can affect learning per se, at least in a slightly longer-term perspective.

PubhD Kigali

For any readers in (or visiting) Kigali (presumably a niche audience), I've started a monthly research talk event, using the PubhD format that is going in around 20 European cities now.

3 speakers get 10 minutes each to present their research, followed by Q&A. It's a great way to learn a bit about some random subjects you might not have considered much before, for the speakers to practice their extended elevator pitch, and a pretty low-effort way of organising some kind of regular academic vaguely seminar-like discussion for me.

The next one is this Thursday at 7.30pm, see here for more details, and get in touch if you'd like to speak sometime.

Does temporary migration from rich to poor countries cause commitment to development?

Nevermind that none of the journals I've sent it to so far are interested, my new working paper got picked up by Marginal Revolution the king of economics blogs, which is probably way better anyway right?

Public support in rich countries for global development is critical for sustaining effective government and individual action. But the causes of public support are not well understood. Temporary migration to developing countries might play a role in generating individual commitment to development, but finding exogenous variation in travel with which to identify causal effects is rare. In this paper I address this question using a natural experiment - the assignment of Mormon missionaries to two year missions in different world regions - and test whether the attitudes and activities of returned missionaries differ. Data comes from a unique survey gathered on Facebook. Missionaries assigned to treat regions (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are balanced with those assigned to the control region (Europe) on high school test scores and prior language and travel experience. Those assigned to the treatment region report greater interest in global development and poverty, but no difference in support for government aid or higher immigration, and no difference in personal international donations, volunteering, or other involvement.

Here's the link to the paper and the twitter discussion. 

Probably the best new research in global education economics

A couple of months ago the Centre for Education Economics asked me to edit their Annual Research Digest - a series of essays by leading thinkers on their favourite research paper from the past year.

The Digest is out today and I'm really pleased with how its come out, a fantastic set of blogs summarising a fascinating set of papers.

Here's the summary, and you can download the full report here.

JOB: Research Assistant on Global Education Policy

I’m hiring a full-time research assistant based in London, for more details see the Ark website here.

 

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Research and evidence are at the heart of EPG’s work. We have:

• Collaborated with JPAL on a large-scale field experiment on school accountability in Madhya Pradesh, India
• Commissioned a randomized evaluation by IPA of Liberia’s public-private partnership in primary schooling
• Led a five-year randomized trial of a school voucher programme in Delhi
• Helped the Ugandan National Examinations Bureau create new value-added measures of school performance
• Commissioned scoping studies of non-state education provision in Kenya and Uganda 

Reporting to the Head of Research and Evaluation, the Research Assistant will contribute to EPG’s work through a mixture of background research, data analysis, writing, and organizational activities. S/he will support and participate in ongoing and future academic research projects and EPG project monitoring and evaluation activities.

The role is based in Ark’s London office with some international travel.

The successful candidate will perform a range of research, data analysis, and coordination duties, including, but not limited to, the following: 

• Conduct literature and data searches for ongoing research projects.
• Organize data, provide descriptive statistics, and run other statistical analysis using Stata and preparing publication quality graphics
• Collaborate with EPG’s project team to draft blogs, policy briefs, and notes on research findings.
• Support EPG’s project team in the design and implementation of project monitoring and evaluation plan
• Provide technical support and testing on the development of value-added models of school quality
• Coordination and update of the EPG/GSF research repository
• Organise internal research and policy seminars
• Perform other duties as assigned. 

The successful candidate will have the following qualifications and skills: 

• Bachelor’s (or Master’s) degree in international development, economics, political science, public policy, or a related field.
• Superb written and verbal communication skills.
• Competence and experience conducting quantitative research. Experience with statistical software desired.
• Familiarity with current issues, actors and debates in global education
• Proven ability to be a team player and to successfully manage multiple and changing priorities in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, all while maintaining a good sense of humor.
• Outstanding organization and time management skills, with an attention to detail.
• Essential software skills: Microsoft Office (specifically Excel) and Stata
• Experience working in developing country contexts or international education policy -- a plus
• Experience designing or supporting the implementation of research evaluations and interpreting data -- a plus
• Fluency or advanced language capabilities in French -- a plus

 

A research agenda on education & institutions

From Tessa Bold & Jakob Svensson for the DFID-OPM-Paris School of Economics research programme "EDI"

 

1. A focus on learning in primary is still essential - don’t get too distracted by secondary and tertiary

2. More focus on teachers’ effort, knowledge, and skills

3. How do we go from pilots to scaled-up programs? (and related - can we design interventions that explicitly allow for existing implementation constraints at scale)

4. How can we use ICT to bring down the cost of sharing information on performance?

5. More research on public-private partnerships such as voucher programs

Answering THE big question in global education: Why is Vietnam such an outlier?

This post first appeared on the RISE website

Why do Vietnam school children score over 100 points better on comparable tests than the average for low-income countries?

Vietnam is basically the only low-income country in any of the internationally comparable tests that performs at the same level as rich countries. Vietnam is a massive outlier, performing substantially better than should be expected for a country at that level of income. Rich OECD countries such as the UK and US flock to see the top performing places in the world on the PISA test to try and understand what is so special about education systems in Shanghai and Finland that enables them to perform 100 points better than the OECD average. Vietnam scores over 100 points better than the average for low-income countries.

And this isn’t just on one test - other research by Abhijeet Singh has linked the Oxford Young Lives survey with the international TIMSS test, and again Vietnam massively outperforms the other low-income countries (see chart). Singh’s study shows that the advantage starts early, with Vietnamese children slightly outperforming those in other developing countries before they even start school at age 5, but this gap then grows each year. A year of primary school in Vietnam is considerably more ‘productive’ in terms of skill acquisition than a year of schooling in Peru or India, the paper finds. The question this research raises - and the Vietnam experience suggests - is: “Why is learning-productivity-per-year so much greater in some countries than others?” Or to put it more simply, why are schools so much better in some countries?

A new paper by World Bank researchers Suhas D. Parandekar and Elisabeth K. Sedmik shows just how difficult the “Vietnam effect” is to unscramble. With a statistical decomposition using available measured factors, the research suggests that a combination of targeted investments and “cultural factors” explain roughly half of the huge ~100 point gap between Vietnam and the other low-income countries on the PISA test.

The main factors are:

Investments

1. Higher level of access to pre-school.
2. Investment in school infrastructure, especially in cities and small towns.

And Cultural factors

1. Students work harder - skip fewer classes, spend the same or more time in school, plus substantial extra time studying after school. Students are more disciplined and focused on their studies.
2. Teachers appear to benefit from closer supervision of their work by the school principal and others.
3. Parents may have an important role to play, by taking an active part in combining high expectations of their children, following up with their children’s teachers and contributing at school.

All this only gets us part of the way toward explaining the Vietnam phenomenon. The other half of the answer remains a Vietnam enigma, which we’re hoping the RISE Vietnam research team can help to unravel, ultimately possibly even providing some useful lessons for other low-income countries.

* The chart here shows the average proportion answering a TIMSS question correctly, averaged across 6 questions focused on the number content domain, taken from the 2003 TIMSS assessment

Grit: Probably not that important in developing countries

“Angela Duckworth’s new book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance has been launched with great fanfare, reaching number two on the NY Times Nonfiction bestseller list. She recently gave a very polished and smooth book launch talk to a packed audience at the World Bank, and is working with World Bank colleagues on improving grit in classrooms in Macedonia.”

That’s David McKenzie in a great book review, considering what development economists can learn from this hot psychology research trend. Grit - the ability to keep going when things get tough and you aren’t successful straight away - can help explain all sorts of individual outcomes beyond tests of skill or ability. David notes amongst other things how U.S. - centric the research on grit is, and questions how large the effect of grit is even in this context.

So what do we know about the importance of grit in developing countries?

Fortunately, a separate team at the World Bank has recently been rolling out a series of surveys measuring psychological traits including grit alongside measures of skills, income, and other demographics. Data is currently available for 10 countries; Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Yunnan Province (China).

Here’s what I found from some very quick analysis.

Grit and income

I started by looking at the relationship between adults’ grit and their earnings. For seven countries there is no relationship. For the three where some relationship exists, grit explains very little of the variation between the income of individuals. (That is, in the table below, the r2 statistic is less than 0.005.)  Adding in a few basic control variables (age, parents’ education and socio-economic status) makes even that weak correlation disappear altogether.

Grit and schooling

Moving next to years of schooling, something more substantial emerges. Grit has a statistically significant relationship with schooling in every country, and throwing in a bunch of control variables doesn’t seem to make it go away. I’m not sure what to make of the magnitude though - less than half a year of extra schooling for a 1-standard-deviation increase in grit. Maybe that’s a lot, maybe it isn't. I suppose the policy-relevant question is how responsive grit might be to interventions.

Grit and learning outcomes

Finally, looking at the correlation with answers on a reading comprehension test. Grit scores pretty poorly here too; one positive correlation, one negative, and eight statistically insignificant. Other control variables by comparison do have the kind of statistically significant relationships you might expect - people tend to score better with more schooling and if they grew up in wealthier families.

I’ll spare you some of the snarkier comments from the office, needless to say that unsurprisingly to some, from a quick look the data does not seem to suggest that grit is all that important in explaining important outcomes in developing countries. Unsurprising, because all the grit and resilience and perseverance in the world is unlikely to help a child succeed at school if they haven’t eaten that day and their teacher hasn’t turned up due to a dysfunctional school system. Similarly in the labour market, individual motivation and grit by itself isn’t going to create any well paying jobs in places where the demand for labour is low because of systemic factors such as bad infrastructure and bad governance.

I will offer one caveat - this measure of grit is based on only three questions rather than Duckworth’s preferred ten, so it is possible that a better measure of grit would matter more. But I doubt it.

And finally - this is not meant as a counsel of despair. For individuals living in low-income countries, of course they should try and persevere as hard as they can to try and achieve their goals. But when it comes to making policy - we should focus on the systemic constraints that are critical to shaping people’s opportunities, rather than just telling them to try harder. Bad schools, infrastructure, and governance, are all fixable public policy problems.

Content knowledge vs pedagogy in Teaching

A fascinating abstract from Roland Fryer. In many school systems you have a single teacher for most subjects in primary school, but increasingly specialised different teachers for each subject in secondary school. This RCT tried out having subject specialist teachers in primary, finding that this worsened outcomes, in theory because at least at primary level it is more important that the teacher knows the kids’ and their ability and is therefore better able to target their teaching, than that they have more specialised knowledge of the subject matter.

Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, I conducted a randomized field experiment in fifty traditional public elementary schools in Houston, Texas designed to test the potential productivity benefits of teacher specialization in schools. Treatment schools altered their schedules to have teachers specialize in a subset of subjects in which they have demonstrated relative strength (based on value-add measures and principal observations). The average impact of teacher specialization on student achievement is -0.042 standard deviations in math and -0.034 standard deviations in reading, per year. Students enrolled in special education and those with younger teachers demonstrated marked negative results. I argue that the results are consistent with a model in which the benefits of specialization driven by sorting teachers into a subset of subjects based on comparative advantage is outweighed by inefficient pedagogy due to having fewer interactions with each student. Consistent with this, specialized teachers report providing less attention to individual students (relative to non-specialized teachers), though other mechanisms are possible.

— The 'Pupil' Factory: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools, Roland G. Fryer, Jr

Top 10 Must-Read Articles on Education & Development

What should you read first if you’re a new policy advisor in a Ministry of Education? Here is my response to a couple of recent emails along these lines on the CGD blog.

Does it help to be African to study Africa?

For sure there is tacit local knowledge, but how you define “local” matters. Ken Opalo writes:

"As a social scientist, my knowledge of Kenya is largely informed by my experience as a Nairobian. Over the years I have had to learn a lot about the rest of Kenya, in much the same way an Australian would. In doing so I incurred a lower cost than a hypothetical Australian would, for sure, but the cost was not zero. And who is to say that I would necessarily be able to articulate a research agenda on whatever subject in Malawi better than a Southern Californian? What proportion of Kenyans can locate Bangui on a map?"

Why are people so opposed to immigration? #142538

As the evidence piles up that migrants don’t steal jobs (one of the implications of them being human beings is that migrants also buy stuff - so they create exactly as many new jobs as they “take”), some of the more sophisticated immigration opponents turn to the negative impacts of immigration on other things such as housing or public services instead to support their case.

So what does the research evidence say about the impacts of immigration on public services? Really very little actually. The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory says that there is “no systematic data or analysis.” In health, we know that many healthcare providers are immigrants, but it’s hard to know the impact of migrants as users of health services as (rightly) nobody records people’s migration status when they go to the doctor.

Using household survey data, Jonathan Wadsworth at Royal Holloway found that (shock!) immigrants tend to use GP services and hospitals at roughly the same rate as natives (via Ferdinando Giugliano in the FT).

Taking another approach, a new paper by Osea Giuntella from the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, combines household survey data with administrative data on NHS waiting times. Do you need to wait longer for a referral or in A&E in places where there are more immigrants? Come find out at the CGD Europe research seminar on Weds 18 Nov (there will be sandwiches).

Does foreign aid harm political institutions?

Good news for reflective aid business -types who like agonising about what the point of it all is and sometimes wondering whether we’re even making things worse (err... talking about a friend... not me...). Also even good news for developing countries I suppose.

A new paper in the Journal of Development Economics by Sam Jones & Finn Tarp* using new data on aid (from aiddata.org) and institutions (from the Quality of Government Institute) finds no evidence that aid has undermined institutions on average, if anything there seems to be a positive relationship. I’m less confident in the positive findings than reassured that in *none* of their various different approaches is the relationship negative.

Now you’re probably thinking “what about the 2006 CGD review paper by Todd Moss, Gunilla Pettersson & Nicolas Van de Walle, described by Blattman as "the best summary I know of the evidence”, which concluded that aid could have a harmful effect on institutional development”? Well the word “could” is important there - that conclusion was somewhat speculative, and this new evidence from Jones & Tarp fills an important gap in terms of systematic quantitative evidence on this topic, and should probably shift your priors at least a little in that direction.

I wonder what Angus Deaton would say?

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* Thanks to UNU-WIDER the paper is open-access, which is great for what it is, but obviously having public institutions pay private journal owners something greater than the cost of production isn’t an ideal long-run equilibrium, and we really need something that fundamentally shifts the whole publishing industry.

New education economics papers

A few papers caught my eye from last month's repec new education economics papers feed. All from developed countries, but such is economics, a lot of the interesting new research happens on rich countries where the researchers are more likely to know about interesting policies and institutional features to study, and where there is better data (both problems which RISE is seeking to address, by encouraging collaborations between developing country-based researchers and leading academics based at top universities in rich countries, and also by funding new data collection in developing countries).

"Quantifying the Supply Response of Private Schools to Public Policies” by Michael Dinerstein and Troy Smith looks at a reform in New York which increased the budget for some public schools, finding an increase in enrolment at these schools, and that nearby private schools lost business and were slightly more likely to shut down. In an interesting twist, whilst the reform improved quality at the public schools that received extra money, the movement of some students from higher quality private schools to lower quality public schools meant that overall outcomes from the school system were not improved. All of which reminds me of the recent story from Rwanda that some private schools seem to be going out of business by the growth of public schools. What is that shift doing to the overall quality mix?

“The Information Value of Central School Exams” by Guido Schwerdt & Ludger Woessmann compares students in Germany who graduated from states which use a centralized common school-leaving exam to those with a local school-set leaving exam. Better grades are roughly three times more valuable in the labour market when they come from centralized exams than from school-set exams. In Lagos, private school associations are currently in the process of joining together to put their students through common school leaving exams for partly this reason.

Nicola Bianchi’s Job Market Paper looks at "The General Equilibrium Effects of Educational Expansion” - when Italy expanded STEM higher education in 1961, enrolment increased by 200%. However - those students who enrolled didn’t earn any more than they would have had they not enrolled, because the massive increase in the supply of qualified students reduced the labour market premium for that qualification, as well as the quality of education suffering due to congestion and peer effects. Which of course should remind you of Lant’s classic “Where has all the education gone?"

Calling Education Researchers…

I just got back from the fourth of seven events being held around the world drumming up interest in bidding for the RISE “Research on Systems of Education” project. There is £21 million of DFID money to be split between 5 country research teams (with a preference for bids from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, or other DFID focus countries) to study reforms that are happening to education systems that might credibly have a big impact of student learning. EOIs due 23rd August. 

strong turnout for Abuja @riseprogramme meeting and #educationsystems reform discussion! @LeeCrawfurd pic.twitter.com/GV3gsNQQvX

— Mari Oye (@marimoye) July 13, 2025

There is plenty more information on the CGD website and the new RISE website,  but to make things really easy, here are a few key links about the project and how to bid (very helpfully put together by Mari).

• RISE Research Director Lant Pritchett and Justin Sandefur presenting the research agenda (Video)
• Slides (PDF)
• Expression of Interest scoring criteria  (PDF)
• Full RISE Terms of Reference (needed for proposal due November) (PDF) 
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Online form for submitting any additional queries
• Registration for matchmaking for looking for research partners (optional) 
• Lant Pritchett's book, "The Rebirth of Education"

What do (cutting-edge, leading, academic) development economists do?

Apparently not what developing country policy-makers want to know about. Jeffrey Hammer has a fairly damning report from the recent IGC conference in Lahore on the World Bank blog. The IGC funds research by many of the world's top development economists, and apparently none of them are answering the kind of policy questions that were posed at the conference by the Chief Minister of Punjab, Pakistan (a state of more than 100 million people). He wanted to know about how to allocate resources across sectors (which requires value for money and cost-benefit analysis, not just impact evaluation), and how to raise more revenues. What he got was precisely identified studies on the impact of policy tweaks, without any costing. 

"The Chief Minister posed serious questions that have traditionally been the bread and butter of the economics profession. Unfortunately, we are not even trying to answer them any more. The specific question was “Should I put more money into transport? Infrastructure (power, roads, water)? Law and order? Social services? Or what? And where am I going to get the money?” What questions could be more solidly part of the core of economics than these? Unfortunately none of these were even remotely the focus of the “evidence-based” policy making discussed. 

Almost all of the cases analyzed were single, simple policy “tweaks” that were, first of all, isolated from the broader market context in which they occurred and, second, had no conception of opportunity cost - what we would have to give up to pursue these things?"

New DFID Education Policy

DFID released a new "position paper" on education policy yesterday, with lots to like, and lots that chimes with how we are thinking about education at OPM.

First and foremost, the paper rightly places learning front and centre. It's really quite astonishing how neglected actual learning has been in the race to get kids into school, though as this paper shows this is starting to change.

Then there are mentions of the importance of noncognitive skills, of conceiving of education as a process of lifelong learning - including early child development, preschool, through to tertiary and technical education - and focusing on value for money*.

Then there are interesting innovations, such as Payment by results (reminiscent of CGD's "cash on delivery"), and exploring new ways of working with low cost private schools in Lagos and Sindh (OPM is working on research and evaluation for the Lagos project).

And lots of emphasis on research, including highlighting the Young Lives survey, talk of further longitudinal surveys, and a mention of the ESSPIN Nigeria survey some of my colleagues have been working on.

So what's missing?

Although the paper is right to place learning at the heart of the agenda, I don't think it really acknowledges just how little we actually know about how to improve learning. As Lant Pritchett demonstrates in his new book - if you add up all of the results from individual evaluations of various inputs, the total impact on learning outcomes just doesn't come close to getting us to where we want to be. 

This implies we need some radical experimentation. Payment by results and low cost private schools are two promising avenues, but given that this is, in DFID's words, a "learning crisis" - are these enough?

So what to do? Well firstly just more experiments, both large and small, and urgently. 

One idea would be to listen to the one thing that J-PAL and IPA are really pushing. After over a hundred large scale experiments and evaluations of education projects, they have one big idea, which happens to fit pretty neatly with DFID's agenda. This is remedial education, using young low-cost teaching assistants to help the weakest kids catch up. This is an idea developed by Indian NGO Pratham and with rigorous experimental evidence of impact, which IPA has taken and is working with the Government of Ghana to replicate and evaluate on a national scale, working through government systems. Why isn't DFID funding the next programme like this?

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*As a sad little footnote, unsurprisingly DFID's worst value for money in education seems to be coming from, you guessed it;

"The cost of classroom construction, for example, ranges from $1,400 in Ethiopia to $30,400 in South Sudan, where years of conflict have dramatically increased the cost of materials and the mobility of skilled personnel.

The revolution might not be televised, but what about development?

One of the latest big things in education research is the importance of what economists have labelled "non-cognitive skills," psychologists call "psychosocial competencies", and humans have been known to call "character." Various studies have found that "cognitive skills" - literacy, numeracy, etc, actually don't do a fantastic job of explaining success later in life, and that it is a bunch of other soft skills which really do matter - things like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control (perhaps someone should tell Michael Gove?).

All of this was the subject of Stefan Dercon's plenary at Young Lives last week (slides here). The good news is that these characteristics appear to be malleable even into adulthood.

Apparently there is one question to measure "locus of control" which correlates highly with aspirations and investing in the future. The question is simple - which of the following two statements do you most agree with:

1. “Each person is primarily responsible for his/her success or failure in life.”
2. “One’s success or failure in life is a matter of his/her destiny/fate.”

If how you think about this question determines how much you save and invest for the future and your attitudes towards this can be positively shifted, then maybe there is a "fatalism trap" which intervention can break. Stefan presented results from an experiment run in Ethiopia to see if optimism could be cultivated by showing poor remote villagers mini-documentaries of inspirational success stories on TV. The shows told the stories of local people who had worked their way out of poverty. The experiment also included both a regular control group and a "placebo" regular TV show, without the particular success stories.

Six months later - the villagers were still talking excitedly talking about the TV show, and more importantly actually spending more on investing in education for their kids.

Of course, the tragic danger is whether these newly raised aspirations will turn out to be a false hope if the economic opportunities to make these investments pay off aren't available.

Yet another reason why TV will save the world?