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The main objective of this paper is to outline what policies matter most for an effective tertiary education (TE) system. It is crucial to ask not simply whether a system is working, but whether it is working to cope with current and expected demand in nations across the world. The paper presents the conceptual background and operational tools of the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER)-TE domain. These tools are intended to be used by government education policy makers to assess policy areas of relevance to a country’s tertiary education system, benchmarking national policies against international best practices. The instruments are designed to be sensitive not only to the aggregation and benchmarking of best practices, but also to the disaggregation of the often-unintended effects of traditional tertiary education policies and practices. SABER-TE is intended to collect, synthesize, and disseminate comprehensive information on tertiary education to enable policy makers, the World Bank Group (WBG) staff, and development partners to learn how countries address similar policy challenges. The paper first provides a historical perspective on the World Bank’s involvement in tertiary education. Next, it discusses the importance that tertiary education has in today’s society and presents a brief review of the most significant issues and trends in tertiary education worldwide. In the second part of the document, the SABER-TE guiding principles are discussed, as well as the policy areas that the framework assesses. The document then describes instruments for data collection; a rubric for scoring, benchmarking, and analyzing the data; and methodological approaches for collecting and disseminating the findings of a SABER-TE assessment.

This paper seeks to find an empirical explanation of Vietnam's outstanding performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012. Only a few developing countries participate in the assessment. Those who do, with the unique exception of Vietnam, are typically clustered at the lower end of the range of the Programme for International student Assessment scores. The paper compares Vietnam's performance with that of a set of seven developing countries from the 2012 assessment's data set, using a cut-off per capita GDP (in 2010 purchasing power parity dollars) of $10,000. The seven developing countries' average performance lags Vietnam's by more than 100 points. The "Vietnam effect" is difficult to unscramble, but the paper is able to explain about half of the gap between Vietnam and the seven countries. The analysis reveals that Vietnamese students may be approaching their studies with higher diligence and discipline, their parents may have higher expectations, and the parents may be following up with teachers regarding those expectations. The teachers themselves may be working in a more disciplined environment, with tabs being kept on their own performance as teachers. Vietnam may also be benefiting from investments in pre-school education and in school infrastructure that are disproportionately higher when compared with Vietnam's per capita income level.

Sri Lanka is increasingly seeking to ensure that its public school system not only delivers greater shares of students who have completed higher secondary and tertiary education, but also that all students obtain a much better education. Raising teacher effectiveness is considered as crucial for achieving these aims. This paper reviews the literature on teacher management in Sri Lanka, and points to what may be critical teacher management issues. The paper also outlines considerations and options for addressing these issues, informed by international evidence on approaches to improve teacher effectiveness.

To address the educational gap, many Latin American countries are focusing on extension of the school day and enrichment of the curriculum. In Brazil, a nationwide policy -- Mais Educação -- was implemented in 2008 with this objective. This paper explores the nationwide rollout of the program across the country and compares the performance of schools before and after implementation of the program. The paper quantifies the impacts of the program on student learning and dropout rates in urban areas, and investigates the heterogeneity of impacts by several characteristics of the program's implementation. Participating schools are compared with nonparticipating schools after controlling for school selection into the program based on observable characteristics using propensity score matching. The analysis finds that participation in Mais Educação has on average no impacts on school dropout rates and average negative impacts on mathematics test scores. The negative impacts on student achievement are stronger in the short term, which suggests that the negative effects may be reduced as the program improves its implementation. In addition, especially for fifth-grade schools, the level of student spending is associated with reduced dropout rates. Interestingly, in schools choosing the fields of Portuguese and/or sports in the added hours, the program is associated with lower test scores in Portuguese and mathematics. Finally, for the sample of fifth-grade schools, heterogeneous impacts are seen in the program according to the GDP per capita of the city where the school is located. The higher the GDP per capita, the greater the positive impact of the program on mathematics test scores and on dropout rates.

Improving the quality of education is one of today's main challenges for governments in the developing world. Based on a unique matched student-to-teacher panel data set on test scores this paper presents two empirical results for Indonesia. First, through detailed inspection of teacher-level responses to test questions, the paper concludes that subject matter knowledge of primary school teachers in Indonesia is low on average and that a 1.0, but also a 2.0 standard deviation increase in teachers' subject matter knowledge seem to be achievable medium-term goals for education policy making in Indonesia. Second, the paper presents the results of three types of value-added regressions, a (standard) level specification, a school fixed-effects specification, and a flexible student-teacher fixed-effects specification. The student-teacher fixed-effects approach estimates the parameters of a value-added model using test score variation within each student-teacher pair across three different subjects, mathematics, science and Indonesian language. The results suggest that a 1.0 (and 2.0) standard deviation increase in teachers' subject matter knowledge across-the-board can yield increases in student achievement by 0.25 (and 0.50) student-level standard deviations by the time students complete the six-year primary school cycle.

This paper analyzes the relation between public, education-related infrastructure and the quality of education in schools. The analysis uses a case study of the establishment of two large, high-quality public libraries in low-income areas in Bogotá, Colombia. It assesses the impact of these libraries on the quality of education by comparing national test scores (SABER 11) for schools close to and far from the libraries before (2000–02) and after (2003–08) the libraries were opened. The paper introduces a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition on difference-in-differences estimates to assess whether variation of traditional determinants of mathematics, verbal, and science test scores explains the estimates. The analysis finds differences that are not statistically different from zero that could be attributed to the establishment of the libraries. These results are robust to alternative specifications, a synthetic control approach, and an alternative measure of distance.

Countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean are reforming their education systems with the view of adding more hours to the school day. This paper examines the existing evidence on the relationship between instructional time and student learning, and reviews 15 studies measuring the effects of longer school days. It draws on examples throughout the region to characterize differences in the implementation of extended school day programs, and provides one detailed case study and cost-effectiveness exercise (for Uruguay). While the evidence suggests positive impacts across a range of outcome variables, including gains in student learning, reductions in repetition and dropout, and reductions in teenage pregnancy, there is considerable heterogeneity across programs and studies. Even using the most optimistic impact estimates, a cost-effectiveness exercise suggests that there are likely many more cost-effective reforms to achieve similar effects. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for policy makers and practitioners considering an extension of the school day.

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 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.

Previous research has shown that people with higher cognitive skills (mental abilities) and socioemotional skills (behaviors and personality) get better labor market outcomes. It is unclear, however, if this conclusion applies to low- and middle-income countries, given that existing literature builds on studies that are dominantly about highincome countries. In this paper, we explore how cognitive and socioemotional skills of adults, ages 15–64, relate to their labor market outcomes in the context of Colombia. Controlling for a range of confounding factors in a crosssectional survey, we do find that adults with higher skills also have better outcomes, while cognitive and socioemotional skills correlate with different ones and seemingly through different channels. Adults with higher cognitive skills have better jobs (with higher earnings, more formal, and highskilled) and are more likely to complete tertiary education. Socioemotional skills correlate more modestly with having a better job but more strongly with labor market participation and tertiary-education completion. Results suggest that adults with both cognitive and socioemotional skills tend to do better in the labor market and that policies boosting the development of both types may be beneficial in Colombia.

This paper estimates the impacts of secondary school on human capital, occupational choice, and fertility for young adults in Kenya. The probability of admission to government secondary school rises sharply at a score close to the national mean on a standardized 8th grade examination, permitting the estimation of causal effects of schooling in a regression discontinuity framework. The analysis combines administrative test score data with a recent survey of young adults to estimate these impacts. The results show that secondary schooling increases human capital, as measured by performance on cognitive tests included in the survey. For men, there is a drop in the probability of low-skill self-employment, as well as suggestive evidence of a rise in the probability of formal employment. The opportunity to attend secondary school also reduces teen pregnancy among women.

This paper develops and estimates an equilibrium model of charter school entry and school choice. In the model, households choose among public, private, and charter schools, and a regulator authorizes charter entry and mandates charter exit. The model is estimated for Washington, D.C. According to the estimates, charters generate net social gains by providing additional school options, and they benefit non-white, low-income, and middle-school students the most. Further, policies that raise the supply of prospective charter entrants in combination with high authorization standards enhance social welfare.

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.

This paper proposes three ways in which China and the World Bank could collaborate in the area of skills development in Africa, building on the experience of both and recent efforts at collaboration. First, under the PASET initiative, China and the World Bank could undertake joint analytical work to assess the skills needs for different sectors in individual countries, continue the benchmarking of African universities piloted with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, share the development experience of China through targeted learning visits, and share experiences in skills development through regional forums. Second, China could support the regional initiatives of the PASET such as the establishment of the Regional Scholarship Fund for postgraduate studies in applied sciences, engineering and technology; the proposed regional TVET centres of excellence; and co-financing of the regional Africa Centres of Excellence project, currently financed by the World Bank. This would supplement China’s on-going investments, which could also benefit from the experience of well-designed programs with strong monitoring and evaluation. Third, China could co-finance country-level projects which are being prepared with World Bank assistance, focusing on technical/vocational and higher education. This will enable Chinese Ministries and institutions to learn from the experience of the World Bank and contribute to the development of the education and training system in Sub-Saharan African countries, while also contributing China’s experience in a concrete fashion.

Education systems in developing countries are often centrally managed in a top-down structure. In environments where schools have different needs and where localized information plays an important role, empowerment of the local community may be attractive, but low levels of human capital at the local level may offset gains from local information. This paper reports the results of a four-year, large-scale experiment that provided a grant and comprehensive school management training to principals, teachers, and community representatives in a set of schools. To separate the effect of the training from the grant, a second set of schools received the grant only with no training. A third set of schools served as a control group and received neither intervention. Each of 273 Gambian primary schools were randomized to one of the three groups. The program was implemented through the government education system. Three to four years into the program, the full intervention led to a 21 percent reduction in student absenteeism and a 23 percent reduction in teacher absenteeism, but produced no impact on student test scores. The effect of the full program on learning outcomes is strongly mediated by baseline local capacity, as measured by adult literacy. This result suggests that, in villages with high literacy, the program may yield gains on students learning outcomes. Receiving the grant alone had no impact on either test scores or student participation.

Inadequacies in Tanzania's education and training systems compromise the quality of workforce skills, giving rise to skill shortages, and constraining the operations and growth of formal sector firms in the country. This study addressed these concerns using data from a unique Enterprise Skills Survey that asked Tanzanian employers about the education, training, and occupational mix of their workforce, the skill gaps in cognitive, noncognitive, and job-specific competencies affecting their operations, and the strategies they are using to overcome these skill gaps. The study investigates the consequences for firm productivity of employers' choices about their optimal skills mix, and their strategies to mitigate shortfalls in skills supply. Compared with noninnovators and firms primarily serving the domestic market, exporters and innovators face greater skill demand and suffer from skill shortages that are more likely to constrain their operations in such areas as quality assurance, use of new technology, and introducing new products and services. In analyzing firm performance and its relation to skill mix, the study found that firms with higher shares of tertiary-educated workers are more productive; it found no impact, however, from secondary education and technical vocational education and training qualifications, possibly reflecting the universally acknowledged poor quality of secondary education in Tanzania. Employers use a range of strategies to address skill deficiencies, from hiring new workers, to training current workers in-house or externally, using high-skill expatriate workers, or outsourcing professional services. Almost all were associated with higher labor productivity. The exception, employer provided in-house training, had no measurable impact on productivity.

This article examines how a policy oriented toward a specific group within the population can have collateral effects on the economic decisions of other groups. In 1996, the Chilean government approved the extension of the school day from half- to full-day school. This article exploits the quasi-experimental nature of the reform's implementation by time, municipality, and age targeting of the program in order to examine how the maternal labor supply is affected by the childcare subsidy implicit in the lengthening of the school day. Using data from the Chilean socioeconomic household survey and administrative data from the Ministry of Education for 1990-2011, the authors estimate that, on average, there is a 5 percent increase in labor participation and employment rates of single mothers with eligible children (between 8 and 13 years old) with no younger children, who are the group that would be mainly affected by the policy. No significant labor supply responses are detected among others mothers with eligible children.

Evidence on the impacts of a large-scale expansion in pre-primary education is limited and mostly circumscribed to high- and middle-income nations. This study estimates the effects of such an expansion on progression in primary school in rural communities in Guatemala, where the number of pre-primary schools increased from about 5,300 to 11,500 between 1998 and 2005. Combining administrative and population census data in a difference-in-differences framework, the analysis finds that access to pre-primary education increased by 2.4 percentage points the proportion of students that progress adequately and attend sixth grade by age 12. These positive although limited effects suggest the need for complementary actions to produce substantial improvements in adequate progression.

Results-based financing (RBF) has the potential to transform how education systems operate, and the types of results they achieve for children the world over. As a financing instrument, RBF shows much promise for helping clients enroll the 121 million children still out of primary and lower secondary school, and teach the 250 million in school but still unable to read or write. Indeed, RBF has dramatically improved the delivery of health services in over 30 countries to date. Although more nascent in the education sector, RBF programs can foster the right incentive structures in education systems, overcoming challenges that impede additional and better education services for the most excluded children and youth. In 2015, the World Bank Group (WBG) launched REACH, a multi-donor trust fund that strives to support country clients in this space, and accelerate the RBF agenda within the institution. This assessment reflects on lessons learned in 2015, and estimates the demand for future RBF in education. The lessons have been distilled from the early experiences with the 20 REACH-funded grants, as well as from the just-in-time support provided to Bank teams and country clients across the globe (about 20 countries in total). The assessment concludes with recommendations for the continued evolution of REACH.

This study presents evidence from a randomized control trial (RCT) in Mongolia on the impact of in-service teacher training and books, both as separate educational inputs and as a package. The study tests for the complementarity of inputs and non-linearity of returns from investment in education as measured by students test scores in five subjects. It takes advantage of a national-scale RCT conducted under the Rural Education and Development project. The results suggest that the provision of books, in addition to teacher training, raises student achievement substantially. However, teacher training and books weakly improve test scores when provided individually. Students whose teachers have received training and whose classrooms have acquired books improved their cumulative score (totaled across five tests) by 34.9 percent of a standard deviation, relative to a control group. Students treated only with books improved their total score by 20.6 percent of a standard deviation relative to a control group of students. On the other hand, extra teacher training did not have a statistically significant effect on the total test score. In addition, providing both inputs jointly improved test scores in most subjects, which was not the case when either input was provided individually. This study sheds light on the relevance of supplementing teacher training schemes with appropriate teaching materials in resource-poor settings. The policy implication is that isolated education investments, in settings where complementary inputs are missing, could deliver minimal or no return.

A randomized control trial was conducted to study whether providing 10th grade students with information about the returns to upper secondary and tertiary education, and a source of financial aid for tertiary education, can contribute to improve student performance. The study finds that the intervention had no effects on the probability of taking a 12th grade national standardized exam three years after, a proxy for on-time high school completion, but a positive and significant impact on learning outcomes and self-reported measures of effort. The effects are larger for girls and students from households with a relatively high income. These findings are consistent with a simple model where time discount determines the increase in effort and only students with adequate initial conditions are able to translate increased effort into better outcomes.

Parents and students from different socioeconomic backgrounds value differently school characteristics, but the reasons behind this preference heterogeneity are not well understood. In the context of the centralized school assignment system in Mexico City, this study analyzes how a large household income shock affects choices over high school tracks exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of the welfare program Oportunidades. The income shock significantly increases the probability of choosing the vocational track vis-a-vis the other more academic-oriented tracks. The findings suggest that the transfer relaxes the financial constraints that prevent relatively low-ability students from choosing the schooling option with higher labor market returns.

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.

A number of developing countries are currently promoting vocational education and training (VET) as a way to build human capital and strengthen economic growth. The primary aim of this study is to understand whether VET at the high school level contributes to human capital development in one of those countries—China. To fulfill this aim, a longitudinal data on more than 10,000 students in vocational high school (in the most popular major, computing) and academic high school from two provinces of China are used. First, estimates from instrumental variables and matching analyses show that attending vocational high school (relative to academic high school) substantially reduces math skills and does not improve computing skills. Second, heterogeneous effect estimates also show that attending vocational high school increases dropout, especially among disadvantaged (low-income or low-ability) students. Third, vertically scaled (equated) baseline and follow-up test scores are used to measure gains in math and computing skills among the students. The results show that students who attend vocational high school experience absolute reductions in math skills. Taken together, the findings suggest that the rapid expansion of vocational schooling as a substitute for academic schooling can have detrimental consequences for building human capital in developing countries such as China.

Improving education outcomes by disseminating information to parents and thereby encouraging them to become more actively engaged in school oversight is attractive, since it can be done relatively cheaply. This study evaluates the impact of alternative approaches to disseminating information about a school grants program in Indonesia on parents knowledge about the program in general, knowledge about the implementation of the program in their childs school, and participation in school activities related to the program as well as beyond it. Not all dissemination approaches yielded impacts, and different modes of dissemination conveyed different types of information best, resulting in different impacts on behavior. Specifically, the low-intensity approaches that were tried—sending a letter from the principal home with the child, or sending a colorful pamphlet home with the child—had no impact on knowledge or participation. On the other hand, holding a facilitated meeting with a range of school stakeholders or sending targeted text messages to parents did increase knowledge and participation. Facilitated meetings mostly increased overall knowledge and fostered a feeling of transparency on the part of parents, which resulted in greater participation in formal channels for providing feedback to the school. The text messages increased knowledge about specific aspects of the program, such as the grant amount, and tended to increase participation through informal channels.

Facing the prospects of rapid aging and demographic decline over the coming decades, Hungary needs a highly skilled workforce to help generate the productivity growth that it needs to continue fueling a convergence of its living standards with those of its West European neighbors. Skilling up Hungary’s workforce should start by equipping youth with the right cognitive and social-emotional foundation skills. International research has identified three dimensions of skills that matter for good employment outcomes and economic growth: cognitive skills, such as literacy, numeracy, creative and critical thinking, and problem-solving; social-emotional skills and behavioral traits, such as conscientiousness, grit, and openness to experience; and job- or occupation-specific technical skills, such as the ability to work as an engineer. Hungary can do significantly better in preparing its next generation with the right cognitive foundation skills. This report focuses on cognitive skills and examines results for Hungary from the program for international student assessment (PISA), which assesses the mathematics, reading, and science competencies of 15-year-olds. This report lays out a policy agenda consisting of two parallel elements: first, improving socioeconomic conditions for children and youth in general and in school through policies targeted to the poor and disadvantaged such as welfare and employment policies for parents and education support for children. Second, promoting equity and reducing socioeconomic segregation in basic education through inclusive education policies.