Coaching is better than training, but there is still a questionmark on scalability

"So should governments switch to frequent coaching sessions? Possibly, but the next step should first be to try this type of intervention at scale. 

Finding three highly skilled coaches is one thing, but you might need hundreds or thousands of them if you were to run a similar programme across an entire country. 

One potential route to scale is through new uses of technology. A study in Brazil found positive impacts of a virtual-coaching programme run via Skype, for example. 

But perhaps the most straightforward type of technology to go for is scripts, which this paper suggests have positive effects on learning both when presented through centralised training and intensive coaching."

My latest at TES.com

Learning goals

Nic Spaull makes the case for one simple learning goal for South Africa:

“Every child must read and write by the end of grade three.”

I think he is absolutely right. You hear often from international education types that we must resist the simplification of goals, and account for broader objectives such as citizenship etc, but the fact remains that the majority of children in Grade 3 in South Africa, and by implication most other developing countries, can't read (and understand) a simple 30 word story such as this one below.  

I actually heard in a meeting at ODI last year that "it would be a tragedy if the post-2015 education goals were reduced to simply all children being able to read and write and do sums." On the contrary I think it would be a tragedy if we let there be any more distraction from ensuring children have the most basic and fundamental skill of being able to read to learn. 

On the political economy of education systems, Nic also posts an interview with a teacher explaining how unions in South Africa control appointments within schools. 

“When you are selecting a Head of Department (HOD) for the school there are 2 parents from the SGB and 1 teacher, the principal is there but cannot vote. In the rural Eastern Cape many of the parents are not well educated. They know nothing about laws so it is just the principal and the teachers. SADTU can very easily influence the parents through the teacher. If SADTU does not get the person that they want they will say there was an irregularity in the interview process. I once encouraged the parents to appoint a good mathematics teacher for my school and they did, but they were not SADTU’s choice so they had the teacher removed. They re-advertised the post but without subject specification because there was no SADTU member who had maths or science. I am now stuck with someone who is babysitting mathematics and my results are terrible. My ANAs are very low in mathematics. And you cannot challenge it.” [“Why can’t you challenge SADTU?”] They will go for you. They will accuse you of sexual misconduct and there must be an enquiry. They will accuse you of financial mismanagement. They will go for small things to catch you. You know you need 3 quotations if you buy something and you must write it down so that if you only have two or forgot to write it down, they will catch you. Most principals will make a small mistake. But these are honest mistakes. But they will catch you.” “The Department is listening and and the union is managing. SADTU does not want to listen, they want to lead and they want to manage.”

Are South African kids worse educated than Tanzanian kids?

Although South Africans are more likely to actually be in school, they are also more likely to be functionally illiterate. 

From an integration of measures of access and quality for primary education by Nic Spaull and Stephen Taylor. They call it "effective enrolment" and I like it. 

Social protection works: South Africa edition

UNICEF have just published the impact evaluation of the South Africa Child Support Grant programme (some colleagues of mine did some of the work on the evaluation).

The programme reaches over 10 million children, and pays 280 rand (£22) a month per child to households below a certain income threshold.

This payment improves early child nutrition, schooling, test scores, health, and reduces teenage pregnancy and drug use. For £22 a month. And that is transformative - immediate poverty reduction as well as an investment in economic growth when those children grow up to be smarter and healthier and more productive.

Black Economic Empowerment

Does anyone who knows more about the South African economy than me have an opinion on this assessment by Roger Southall?

Many black capitalists have been brought on board the corporate bandwagon because of their political connections, not for their Weberian entrepreneurial ethic, so many BEE deals collapse into cronyism and corruption, who-you-know mattering more than what-you-know. 

Meanwhile, corporate cynicism knows few bounds. Unbundled fragments are transferred to indebted black satraps, and black capitalist success hovers uneasily between dependence on state contracts and white corporate goodwill. Increasingly, too, large corporates are shifting major interests into private equity. 

BEE remains a necessary political project. Leaving white capital to transform itself is like asking the devil to convert to Catholicism. But the challenges are immense: can a well-intentioned but under-capacitated state shape a socially responsible capitalism, or is BEE creating an avaricious class of black capitalists tied to the coattails of international capital?

Segmented Labour Markets: South Africa

Andrew Kerr and Francis Teal at CSAE have an interesting paper exploring the differences between public and private employees in South Africa. 

Unionised public sector and formal private sector workers earn more than informal sector workers - the question is whether this is just because they are simply "better quality" or more productive workers and earn that extra pay, or whether the labour market is "segmented" and trade unions keep wages artificially high and erect barriers to competition from all those informal sector workers. 

To explore these competing hypotheses they control for a bunch of individual characteristics which might indicate the "quality" of the worker to see if an unexplained residual remains which we can attribute to labour market segmentation. This includes controlling for "unobserved" but fixed individual characteristics, which is a pretty cool technique you can use when you have a dataset tracking the same individuals over time.

Their analysis shows that the higher wages for private sector unionised workers can be entirely explained through individual characteristics. They are just higher quality, more productive workers. 

The higher wages for public sector unionised workers can't be explained this way. Similar workers seem to earn more in the public sector than they would in the private sector.