 We are cosponsoring today a talk by Elizabeth King. We're very pleased to have her here. She's an economist and has been recently selected to be the director of education at the World Bank. Earlier she was the manager of the research group at the bank that focuses on human development. She has a BA from the University of the Philippines and a PhD in economics from Yale University. In her work at the World Bank she's worked on issues in a number of countries from Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and the Philippines. She's worked in a number of areas kind of in human capital and development, economics of education. I think she brings to us both a vast amount of kind of academic and technical expertise but also I think some very interesting real-world experience working with countries and organizations to help them further develop their education systems. I look forward to hearing her talk. The way we usually do these events is Dr. King will have a bit of time to talk. You could say whether you take questions during or after. We go till 5.30 and so we probably maybe leave 20 minutes or 25 minutes at the end for questions. And I think that's it. Before we start I'd like to thank again the International Policy Center for helping support this event and organize it and to Bonnie Roberts and Tomovako of Close Up for doing all of the hard logistical work. So thank you very much and Dr. King. Good afternoon. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to have been invited to give this talk. I'm terribly excited to be able to share with you some of the things that I've been doing at the World Bank, that the World Bank does for development and in particular for education. As Professor Jacobs said, I've just gotten a new job within the World Bank. The World Bank is a very active internal labor market. So I've just been selected to be the director for education for the bank, which means to say I'm the, I guess the senior spokesperson for the work that we do on education and also supposedly to try to think about the strategy that the World Bank is going to be doing on the education sectors and the countries that we work in. So I'm here talking about an issue in a very enthusiastic way because this is sort of the honeymoon in my period in this new job and I'm really very excited about the challenges that it presents. So let me be instructed in the technique of this presentation. I thought I would share with you one part of a book that I really loved which I read before I even thought about writing anything on education. This was, I don't know how many of you have read this book by Nepal called A House for Mr. Biswas. This was a quote from that book which I thought was a wonderful thing. It says, this education is a hell of a thing, the main character says. Any little child could pick up. There's no typo there, that's the exact quotation. And the blasted thing referring to education does turn out so down important later on. And I thought that that, even when I read it, when I wasn't that interested in education I thought that that was a very nice summing up I thought of what education does for people. So I wanted to start with that and to say that this is not really a roadmap it's really basically a list of some of the things that I would like to discuss with you. One is the current issues in education right now. One, another is the obstacles and challenges that face governments in trying to improve education in their countries. And then third would be some of the solutions that governments have been doing and some of the things that the World Bank has been participating in as well. So I'll start with a bunch of numbers basically laying out some of the issues that confront the countries in the developing world. Here's a graph that just shows the percentage of household heads with no education. And you can see from the left side going from the industrial world to Southern Africa not exactly Southern, in fact it's West Africa, Mali, Burkina Faso being on the right most. So you can see in Benin 60% of household heads still have no education. And here also I've selected four countries, two on this graph and two more later which show a very different progress over time in years of schooling. So one of the things we will notice for these four countries is that years of schooling have been rising for men and women, for urban and rural residents. So the four curves in each graph stands for rural, male, rural, female, urban, male, urban, female. You can see for Brazil how that has been, you can see that the urban and basically it's an urban rural difference rather than a male, female difference over this period. Although you do see that there's some catch-up happening with respect to rural females for the later years. I'm sorry about the years are kind of overlapping there but it goes from 1935 to the late 70s. So these are for adults, that's why the data seem to be older. These are cohorts, these are birth cohorts of people. These are the years when the adults were born. And you see in Zimbabwe that looks quite different from the profile in Brazil. You see much more of a dispersion between men and women even within urban or within rural areas. And take a look at Jordan and take a look at the Philippines over time. So in Jordan you see the beginning, for the oldest adults, patterns look a lot more similar to Zimbabwe earlier. But the ending and part for the youngest adults you see really a convergence of male and female urban and rural years of schooling. In the Philippines you see also a bit of a convergence but really the differences are very similar to what we saw earlier for Brazil which is a lot more difference between urban and rural than between men and women. So urban rural gaps are very large but we see that they are closing over time. And this table just indicates what's happening here. So for these are percentage differences between urban rural, these are population weighted differences. And you see that from the older group it was 33 percentage points difference going down to 28 percentage points difference. And male female gaps are a lot smaller on average and they are also closing over time. So I'm one person who's actually looked a lot at gender differences but really those gender differences are much larger when you look at rural areas than when you look at urban areas. Here are school survival rates. So the way to read this for example for Indonesia is that almost everyone in Indonesia goes to grade one. And then this is the proportion of students who remain in school. And we see that this big drop between grade six and seven. And really that's the end of the primary level. And the different curves here correspond to different income groups. So the highest curve pertains to the 20 percent richest group in Indonesia. And the lowest one pertains to the 20 percent poorest group in the population. And that's the same for these four graphs. But you can see how different again Indonesia looks from Nicaragua where even at the beginning you see a big difference between the poorest and the richest quintile. But you still see the point of this figure is really to look at what a big transition obstacle going from primary to secondary level is for these countries. We see that in Indonesia and Nicaragua and Tanzania and Pakistan although here it's not quite as pronounced because in fact you do have over even from the early grades at the primary level. You already see a children leaving school every year. They don't stay in school to complete the primary cycle. What are the challenges then? What's going on here? So one is that you have growing enrollment rates over time. But what that means is also a bigger demand for more classrooms, more teachers, more textbooks. And we are talking about countries that still have pretty high fertility rates. And you can see that first a global picture is take a look at the population distribution between more developed countries and less developed countries. And you can see that by the year 2000 how many more, you know, the world is much more of the world is really in the less developed countries. This is an age pyramid, age and sex pyramid, and you can see the huge difference in the demographic profile between West Africa and Western Europe. And this different demographic profile correspond to very different challenges for the education systems in these two regions. You might guess from this that because the bottom of the pyramid for West Africa is very much larger, very much wider, that for many years to come the government will have to build classrooms, higher teachers provide textbooks for a much larger proportion of their population than Western Europe. And even within countries there will be changes. India in the year 2000 is going to look different from India in 2020. You can see that certainly an aging of the population that the bulk here, you have the widest part of the pyramid and that's going to start moving up as fertility rates come down. And you don't see it as much for the Congo, so that means to say that the fertility rates aren't going to be changing very much. So again, for India and for Congo the challenges for the future for the government will be quite different. A second obstacle is poverty in these countries. Poverty reduces the demand for education because education, even though public education is free, it's not really free. First there are still direct costs that families have to pay for but also there are opportunity costs of going to school. The families want to have their children at home to take care of younger children or to work on the farm or earn extra money in whatever way. I've shown you some of the differences between the richest quintile and the poorest quintiles in the population. This is an example from Indonesia. You do see that over time even the poor are actually experiencing an increase in enrollment rates at the primary level, the junior secondary level and even at the senior secondary level. Those are big improvements over time. But yet when you compare the richest with the poorest you still see that gaps remain. Again, just emphasizing, bringing back the graphs I showed you earlier, here you see that there are big differences between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of the populations. But they show up in different places. In some countries such as Pakistan you see those differences even at the beginning of the primary cycle. Whereas in Indonesia you see the gaps mainly beginning at the junior secondary level. Third is that just bringing the students to school doesn't mean that they actually learn something. The poor quality of schools and poor instruction do not guarantee that students will come out being able to read or do simple math. Here's a picture, a comparison across different countries again. This left side shows the proportion of students 15 to 19 who have completed different grade levels. This is their corresponding probability or percentages who can read a simple sentence. You can see that this Mali which has the lowest curve here also has the lowest proportion of students who can read. But isn't it amazing that even though some of these students reach grade 4 or grade 5, that not everybody can read a basic simple sentence. So here lots of numbers to look at but if you just take a look at the last column, these are the proportion of the population who are literate. This is the adult population but you have numbers that are 15% from Mali, 25% for Benin, 35% for Nepal. These are low literacy rates. So I said many students also don't learn what the curriculum contains. We've been focusing on literacy and reading. Here's math. This is a study recently completed at the World Bank. Here are at the bottom are simple math functions, part of a test that was given to students who finished class 3. This is the proportion of students at the end of class 3 who were able to do the simple math functions. You can see that 3 plus 4 doesn't get you to 100%. Then here is an international test given mostly to OEC, the Western Europe, Japan, Korea and a few developing countries. This just gives us a comparison in math and in reading, comparing let's say Indonesia and Thailand with countries like Korea and the United States. You see here the middle points here are the average scores of students. So you don't get 100% for the US either, but you do have sort of this middle income countries of Thailand who are still pretty far below the achievement in the United States and in the Czech Republic. This is in honor of Jan here. So why do we care about education? So I thought I didn't need to show you a slide about education and earnings and economic development, but I did want to show you a slide about education and child development and something that for example a lot of probably economists in the government would not necessarily recognize that we have this positive effect of educating in particular mothers, and these are the ways that mothers' education can affect child's growth. Lower fertility rates, better antenatal care, better nutrition for children, more hygienic practices, more cognitive stimulation, that means a cold word for more reading to young children for example, and more use of health services. So these are actually results from many different studies from many countries around the world. Then I was saying that it's not just putting children in classrooms, that's a challenge for countries, it's also making sure that the children learn something, and something that we often don't see from the literature is the benefits from educational quality, it means from the learning itself. And so I wanted to show this slide which shows that educational quality besides just completing years of education has a powerful effect on individual earnings and on economic growth. In the US a one standard deviation increase in math performance at the end of high school has been shown to translate into 12% higher annual earnings. Now this were from studies by Hanna-Shack and Musman, they are also showing that this kind of result you see also from looking at a cross country study which includes several OECD countries. And finally at the bottom here you see that even the quality of education as well can be associated or is associated with reduced crime improved health of children and improved civic participation. So not just years of schooling but also the quality of education. So end of part one. So I wanted to show a very simple school system because I want to show you what needs to get done to do something about these various educational challenges. And I wanted to emphasize that in this simple, simplified, simplistic school system households are a big player. And so because in recognition of that governments have been using demands what are known as demand side interventions. So it's not the case that if you build a school children will come. That's the premise is that there's no guarantee that if there are schools children will be there and so therefore there's need for demand side interventions. And different governments, different countries have experimented with various interventions. So among them are stipends which are cash payments made to families to offset the direct schooling costs as well as the opportunity costs of going to school. There are also targeted vouchers. So these are cash payments to families based on enrollments allowing for enrollment in public or private schools. So not necessarily cash payments in addition to the cost of the tuition. This is really the cost of the tuition. Another one, a third one is just abolished school fees and several countries have really done that and have seen increases in enrollment rates. A fourth is for beyond the primary level and also beyond the secondary level are student loans allowing students a chance to go to higher education. And finally community grants and community financing these are funds given to the community and usually linked to enrollment numbers. So I'll say something more about these demand side interventions. So I said they are meant to address some of the root causes of low schooling attendance that come mainly from the pressures on the family. So addressing low family income, addressing high opportunity costs of sending kids to school and sometimes also the cultural barriers. They are saying that if you pay families to send their children to school some of the costs that are not economic some of the costs that are might be cultural barriers such as let's say the reasons why girls do not stay in school that you can offset some of that cost by subsidy. In the best programs therefore the subsidies vary by grade and gender. Again to be able to target specifically what's causing children not to go to school what's causing children to drop out early from school. What the experience from some of these demand side interventions show is that by giving transfers to family families are empowered to improve their own welfare and some of these programs actually give the payments directly to mothers rather than to fathers. Again because of evidence that resources given to the mothers are more likely to go to children than resources given to fathers. Now one problem with these programs is that leakage can be large and so a big part of the cost of running these programs is to make sure that the actual beneficiaries are reached. And in some of the cases that I've seen sometimes just this monitoring, the cost related to stopping the leakage is about 15% of the total cost of the program. And I've seen in some cases where you have basically a big industry just to make sure that the subsidies do go to the actual beneficiaries. So here's a list of demand side education programs I know of in developing countries from Argentina's Bono Escolar to Mexico's Progresa, Colombia's Becas Pazes, Haiti's, I'm not going to try to pronounce that, to Venezuela's Subsidio Familiar. And I want to focus on three very quickly and what I know about them in terms of their features and also the impact that have been shown from various evaluations of these programs. Let's start with the Mexico's Progresa or Opportunidadis program which is actually very famous now, as I would say. It's not actually focused only on education. In fact it has a multi-sectoral focus. Health, there's nutrition, there's education. But for the education part the emphasis is to improve school enrollment especially for girls and for kids to stay in school. The emphasis on girls' education is shown by the fact that by the time students get into the secondary level there's a higher subsidy, there's a higher transfer for girls than there is for boys in recognition of the fact that there are stronger pressures for girls to drop out of school. There's also an improvement. There's also grants to improve supply and the quality of schools. And there's also a cultivation of parental responsibility and appreciation for education which really translates to parental training programs that come with this subsidy. There have been many studies, many evaluations of the Mexico program. The impact shown has been higher enrollment in secondary school, lower grade repetition and dropout, higher rates of re-entry, even when students have dropped out. The program has run long enough that studies have also looked at long-run impact and the long-run impact is that there's been an increase in completed schooling for 14-year-olds. See, this grant starts from grade three. If you just follow the kids over time what you see is an increase in the number of years completed by almost a year, almost a grade. There's also been reduced repetition rates even for children who were too young to be in the program. So even for children who are grade one and grade two they've also seen that they are less likely to drop out in the areas where the program exists. So the parents are anticipating the benefits that they will receive from the program. Bangladesh's female stipend program is directly targeted only to girls in secondary education. And when I first became acquainted with this program it was when it was just being taken over by the government and by the donor community. It had actually started as a family affair, as a family donation to one sub-district. And then USAID came and expanded it to I think three or five districts more. And then at that point in time it got attention and the larger donor community became interested. Norway became interested, the World Bank became interested, USAIDB, Asian Development Bank became interested. And it went from five to six sub-districts to covering all rural sub-districts. So they were targeted to the secondary level. The stipend is actually quite small but it covers 50% of the cost of textbooks, uniforms. I guess what I said was small was really there's an amount deposited in the name of the beneficiary in the bank, in a rural bank. And that is really small. And when I went around to interview some of the beneficiaries some of the girls in the rural areas said, you know, you should not just be targeting rural areas, you should be targeting the poorer girls in the rural areas because really the pocket money that you give, this program gives us is so small and it will actually make much more of a difference to the poor girls. But this was a political, that's a political risk for the government to actually target even within rural areas. And that's why the government itself, even in spite of the advice of the donor community did not want to target within sub-districts. Once they picked a rural sub-district, they wanted to just give it to all the girls in the sub-district because they felt that otherwise, how do you measure who's poor, who's not poor and they wanted to not get into that. That is, by the way, one of the challenges of these kinds of interventions. Yes? Zoe? Yes. So in the schools, so there were schools that were admitting these girls and they were the program schools. I saw it myself because earlier in the program, basically the girls are in the back of the classrooms and there are only a few of them. By the time the program was more mature, really half or more of the classrooms were girls. Yes, that was the case. I think most of it was that you had larger classrooms. You had larger classrooms, you also had boys transferring to some of the schools where maybe we're not part of the program. Because there wasn't space available. Possibly because there were not space available in those. But I have a feeling that what's going on is that there was some trading off as well. Actually, if you send your daughter to school and the daughter got the stipend, that daughter has money in the bank. No, enrollment rates increased a lot. First of all, the government abolished fees at the primary level. So that itself really increased enrollment rates at the secondary level. Secondly, once they got to the secondary level, you had this program kicking in. This study is based on Mark Pitts and Shahid Khankar's work. Unfortunately, some of you who have been involved in impact evaluation know that if you come kind of in the middle or late in the program, you're not able to do all the kinds of controls you want. So they themselves are, you know, they apologize for, not quite apologize, but they're not so sure about some of the magnitude of this impact. But I think there was a reduction in the participating schools in the male enrollment rates. So Columbia's targeted voucher program was in the mid-90s when I got involved. And this was a targeted only to urban areas because the premise was that the urban schools were overcrowded, especially in the poorer areas in the cities. And so the voucher program was going to be targeted to allow the poor kids in the cities to go to use the excess capacity in the private sector. So the voucher was given to students themselves. Only to those who completed the primary level in a public school. And then they had to be accepted in a public, in a private high school that was participating. And they would then have to prove that they are eligible by bringing a utility bill which indicates the socioeconomic stratum of their neighborhood. And only the children who lived in the two bottom socioeconomic strata in the community were eligible for this program. There were also several studies of the impact of this program and the studies found that there were the voucher winners. And I'm calling them winners, by the way, because in fact these evaluations were based on the municipalities which did conduct lotteries. And they conducted lotteries because the demand for the voucher exceeded the supply of the vouchers. And why was there not enough supply? It was because the municipalities had to co-fund the cost of the vouchers. So they were limiting the supply of the vouchers and the demand exceeded and the way the municipalities dealt with that was to conduct lotteries. Which was handy because for people who do impact evaluation that gave the randomization needed to try to estimate an impact. And there were also, we then developed a test and conducted a test both for the students who were the voucher winners as well as for the losers. And we found that there was an increase and the winners were more likely to have a higher test score than the voucher losers. And then my co-authors have then proceeded to do longer term analysis looking at the probability that the same students who got the vouchers early on in their secondary schooling were going to complete secondary schooling then take the school leaving test and then go to college. So there have been impact evaluations of that as well. So you can see that demand side interventions are actually, by the way, under this global economic downturn these kinds of programs have really been very good platforms for governments to put more money in because they tend to be targeted towards poorer students. And so for example, the Mexico Progresa Oportindades program is just expanding now and has just actually asked for a loan from the World Bank Indonesia also has a school grant program and again they have just are using this existing school program school grant program to help families who are moving from private schools I'm sorry, moving from private schools to public schools because of these tendencies to do this governments now don't want to overcrowd the public schools so they're trying to give grants to the private schools. So these kinds of programs have been very good platforms for the measures to try to address the impact of the global economic crisis. So again a reminder of what the simple school system and the various players in this and let me focus on interventions that are targeted towards schools. So first, very simply, governments build school buildings. They establish schools, build school buildings, add classrooms. There's a wide diversity across the countries we work in about the supply of public schools and one indication of this is the large variation in the average distance to primary schools from households across the different countries we can go from an average of much less than a kilometer in Bangladesh to over seven kilometers in Chad. And at the secondary level the distances are larger of course and they tend to be positively correlated that means to say in some places that are let's say more sparsely populated there are longer distances to primary schools and therefore also longer distances to secondary schools. And what they found in Chad is that a distance more than one kilometer was sufficient actually for girls to leave school. Then in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India the government has adopted a norm of 1.2 kilometers as sort of something that they want to be able to maintain and so I guess what that means is that would signal to them bigger distance than 1.2 kilometers would signal a need to build another school. There was just one example of a school construction program that was evaluated in Indonesia in the early 70s it was a massive school construction project and an evaluation has looked at what such a simple but big school construction project could do about enrollment rates and you could really see the impact of that over time as you look at the average schooling and then the wages of the birth population cohort that was affected by that increase in the school construction. But schools are not schools without teachers or at least in the kinds of schools we can think of right now. So teachers are critical participants in the learning process but here's some information about some of the problems related to teachers one of which is that there's actually large absenteeism rates in several countries. Absences are considerably higher than could be accounted for when you take into account non-official teaching duties such as staffing, election polls, stations or training and this study which was conducted by some of my colleagues and some people at Harvard found that if you do a spot check of schools because there are absenteeism records but we normally I certainly suspect those administrative records myself how accurate they really are but a spot check was done in these countries so schools were visited unannounced and then if the teacher was supposed to be there and the teacher was not that teacher was marked as absent and this study so was there was a lot of uptake of this study in the press especially in the local press I was in Indonesia at the time that the study was launched was announced and the editorial pages was full of the discussion about this numbers why is it that in Indonesia how can the government allow 20% of the teachers not to be where they are supposed to be how could that be and apparently my colleagues who were in India at that time also saw a huge you know to do about the numbers in India of 25% and I think it's not because people the government doesn't know about teacher absences it's just that giving this problem numbers is very important I think it varied quite a bit in some cases they were there but not studying no there are no substitute teachers because usually when there are substitute teachers it's because those absences are actually excused they are expected so somebody has arranged for a substitute teacher so when governments have limited capacity to deliver even though education is thought to be the province for government still governments cannot actually address all of the challenges all of the needs of the education sector and so private sector choices make sense and they make sense even for poor communities and for poor people so our assumption that private school private schooling is mainly for the elite isn't actually true in many cases because even in the poorest communities private schools can be the only choice for students and that's because the private sector is not necessarily a for-profit they can be run by non-profit local and international NGOs they can be faith-based they can be owned, managed by faith-based organizations and also individual donors and the share of enrollment in private schools is actually not even that one is not an accurate measure of the degree of private sector participation because think of who runs buses who provides school lunches who provides textbooks or produce textbooks etc etc so the private sector is much more involved in the education process even in the public education system and so markets the way they are regulated is also an important question to address even in public education I don't imagine that you would be able to see all of this but this was just a typology of the different types of private sector involvement in education so the first one is the one that we usually think of the privately managed private schools but there are many others and in the US you can see you can think of charter schools for example you can have service delivery contracts such as the one that I described for Columbia you can have in some cases the community builds the school provides the building but then the government pays for the teachers and then the auxiliary services I was mentioning which is lunch textbooks, transportation so I wanted to make sure that when you think about public education it doesn't mean that the private sector enterprise sector is not at all involved because they are and I think that there are so many myths and one of the myths is that we have a clear dichotomy between public and private education but we don't because you can have provision who is going to provide, who is going to manage, who is going to finance we might agree that for basic education the government should be financing because of the social returns let's say to education but it doesn't mean that the government has to manage their schools especially in places where the management capacity is limited if we want to actually expand education especially at the secondary level we have to think about how to bring in the private sector so these are the myths all private schools are expensive elite schools no, in Indonesia when I did a study of the public financing of schools the private schools and schools outside Java outside Jakarta and outside Java received more public financing than the public schools in Jakarta so that tells you that you have to sort of dissociate provision and management and financing I won't even look at this all I wanted to show is that basic education remains the province of governments but increasingly sub-national governments are taking over especially in centralized governments and also that poor families are willing to pay especially when the public schools do not meet the quality do not teach students what they are supposed to learn households, families are willing to send their children to private schools and pay what it takes and the cost may not be the high cost that we usually associate with private schools this is just a comparison of the this is from a recent study again in Pakistan and showing the differences in the test scores of students in public schools and private schools in the province of Punjab showing that in fact the private schools were doing better than the public schools and so there's been an unprecedented increase in private schooling in rural areas in the Punjab and this study speculates that it's because the quality of the public schools have decreased so much that parents do not want to keep their students their children in public schools but more resources so we've been talking about some financing but actually what's a very big challenge for people who want to improve the education systems in developing countries is actually to change institutions and what do we mean by this? so one is that we need to think about players in the system and I kept bringing to you that oval figure which shows the different players in the system you had central government and local governments and you can have an assignment of different functions between the central government and the local governments where the central government let's say might hire teachers but then the local governments provide the schools or in some case in some countries even the local governments and even the schools are able to hire and fire teachers so different countries are experimenting I wouldn't say experiment they've reformed their education systems and so the power of hiring and firing teachers procuring materials may have shifted from the central government to the local government and trying to undertake such a large reform as this moving the authority and power and responsibility from one part of the government to another is really a huge challenge and one of the challenges there for the central government when it decides to do that is whether it has the system of information and evaluation so that even though the authority and the power has been devolved to the local level and even to school management committees in the schools that the central government is still able to make sure to ensure that the quality of education being received by the students is of some level of quality so this kind of change in a shift of authority and power and responsibility has to be accompanied also by an accountability system that works and then there are these incentive mechanisms within education systems for example if the teachers are hired and can be fired only by the central government what does it really mean to devolve power to the local government when teachers actually take up the salaries of teachers usually account for 80 to 90% of the budgets for education what does it really mean to decentralize to devolve education to the local government or to the schools so these kinds of incentive mechanisms have to be thought through they're not easy to it's not easy to make sure that all of them are aligned and consistent and I was working on Indonesia when the government was decentralizing in 2001 2002 and there were laws different laws and it was very difficult to see how some of the provisions of the law could actually be implemented given where particular functions were located so who was hiring teachers who was evaluating teachers etc etc so it was very difficult to see to what extent the reform could really be implemented given what the relationships of power what sort of relationships of power existed but such big reforms cannot be done really without strong political commitment and this is probably one of the both most heartwarming as well as the most heartbreaking experiences for working in this area is that it's heartwarming when finally a minister of education comes who is a real reformer and who wants to do the right thing and it's really heartbreaking when that minister because he or she has done such a good job is promoted to something else higher level and then that position becomes vacant and then we have to do it all over again because really the strong political commitment of a reformer is necessary because that simplified school system is actually a very complex school system and education is something because teachers tend to be probably the biggest part of the civil service and it's a very important political source of political power for politicians and so many of these decisions are not about the education systems it's not independent of the fact that we are only let's say 10 months from an election the other lesson I think is that time is essential to affect systemic change but again reform or politicians have four years or six years they have their mind focused on I'm going to do something where I can see a change in four years or within the time that I'm in office and many of these changes take time the new U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was in the Chicago Public Schools and if you read the history of the reform of the Chicago Public Schools you will see that you think you've got it right and then you reform it and you reform it again and you don't always get it right the first time weak institutional capacity you have poor countries usually have a lower a smaller group of educated people who are going to be the people who will implement the reform weak institutional capacity is one of the biggest challenges I think of implementing then change such as this will create conflict and anxiety when I was working on Nicaragua for a school autonomy reform the teachers in the schools were very anxious because the idea of the reform was to give more power to parents because before there was the school they were only advisors there were only consultants in the school consultative councils they were not managers they were not directive they could not take decisions with the school autonomy reform those parents who were sitting in the school committees got power so all of a sudden they had the same number of votes as teachers do and that if you read the colleague who wrote about the anxiety the angst the teachers suffered during that time because how dare these parents who are uneducated themselves be in the same having the same power as we do in making decisions about the school so that's sort of a small version of these conflict and anxiety that change can produce teachers unions are one of the most powerful groups in some of the countries we work in and I think reforms are not possible deep reform is not possible unless there is support from teachers and then I've already mentioned central conflicts let's say between central and local governments so finally what does the World Bank do and what does more broadly what can development aid do for education because let's face it even though let's say the World Bank is the largest external funder for education our aid is just a drop in the bucket the real financing of education comes from governments themselves so the big challenge for us is how do we use development aid given it's only a small part of funding for example in sub-Saharan Africa 18% of total funding for education and larger for some countries much smaller for other countries so what can we do well one is that we can support an advocate for specific reforms and experience says that it's possible to do that for example education for all the support for girls education support for better governance in education and the focus on poor populations that's something that I think the donor community has been able to do secondly assist in developing and implementing more evidence based education policies as I mentioned sometimes many policies are actually based on political considerations and I think that it's possible to change this experience from working in several countries indicate that there are people who there are policymakers who would like to know what they can do and what policies are supported by evidence for example Mexico's Progresa is one case in point so data collection, knowledge creation and exchange of information is one of the other things that development aid can do we can help countries pilot new education policies because politicians are impatient they want things right away and a little bit of success they want it to expand, scale up a project immediately but we need to be able to say look let's pilot these new ideas let's adapt them to local conditions let's evaluate them and we need to do more of that I don't think the development community does enough of that and lastly we can do facilitate more learning across countries because the term people use is the south-south learning I think it really is important to realize that there are many more commonalities across countries than there are I think we would accept and that Chile experiences can be valuable to El Salvador it can be valuable to Botswana there are things we can learn from across the countries even given even accepting the differences across them so I'd like to end with a slide that I began with just to say that this was I think education is a hell of a thing I think it's a very difficult thing to I think we've made a lot of progress but it's really difficult to to make sure that the gains from that progress we've achieved in the last two decades will not be threatened by this global economic downturn that's something that we are worrying very much about that those gains are going to be threatened that schools will close that house families will pull their children out of school that the quality of schools will suffer because non-salary inputs are not going to be available the teachers' salaries are not going to be paid on time and that will actually slow down I believe the ability of countries to recover faster if you go back to the experience of Europe after the Second World War human capital was very important to the experience of recovery and reconstruction and we have to use the lessons from that experience to say we have to try to make sure that the gains from education we've seen over the past couple of decades are not threatened and we are able to sustain the positive progress thank you very much so I'm open to questions Thanks for the wonderful presentation I'm a doctoral student from the School of Education I used some data from work back like work development I wonder how the work back clapped and processed that data from each country and we wrote paper using the statistical method instead of descriptive data to analyze those data but some researchers don't recognize the method because they think the data collection method is very rough and different countries using different methods and conceptions to collect that data so they don't support a different method Thanks for the question do you mind if I collect a couple more questions before I answer Hello, I'm from South Africa and so I was very interested in your presentation and a big piece that was missing for me was around HRB and AIDS and I know that adds a whole complex layer extra layer to what you're talking about but I'd just like to hear some of your thoughts about that and with regard to the institutional context and governance does the World Bank have what it views as a best practice model for the assignment functions to different levels or do you go in and every context is so different there is no such thing as a best practice model of institutional design Thank you Let me then answer this first so for data collection in the world development indicators those are actually coming from UNESCO by agreement with UNESCO education data there are from and UNESCO collects them directly from the countries absolutely right that although they train UNESCO is supposed to train the people who provide the education data there will be some variation across countries that's right and there's been a big improvement in the quality of data I think from UNESCO there's a UNESCO Institute for Statistics is in Montreal and there's a lot of progress with support from the World Bank in terms of collecting data now having said that having said that there are also many more household survey data that actually provide that allow a serious researcher to look at to check enrollment rates and years of schooling and I tend to do that I tend to look to see whether patterns are very different between the numbers that are given by the government and numbers that I get from household survey data so is that sort of answer of the WDI well it's the best that you're going to get in terms of sort of accepted data I myself and besides you will get them at the country level if you want to do research at the micro level you won't be using that you will be using household survey data but for across the countries I tend to use I like some of these things I use I go directly to either the demographic and health surveys plus the mixed survey plus the living standards measurement survey so a combination of household surveys and you get about 50, 60 70 countries you don't get the same number of countries as you would from the world development indicators which is from the UNESCO data HIV AIDS there are two things that I can think of first and I did have a slide actually on HIV AIDS which is to show that in places where there's a larger gap in the education level between men and women they're the countries that tend to have higher prevalence of HIV AIDS so I didn't want to it was from the mid 90s I don't have more new data but HIV AIDS is also very important when you think about the supply of teachers a colleague of mine has looked at absenteeism for example in Zambia and it has found that a lot of teacher absenteeism is because of HIV AIDS and there there's no hope of those teachers actually coming back you don't just say you have to improve your absenteeism because they're sick so HIV AIDS really has an effect on the supply of teachers and also orphanhood and so orphanhood and the fact that especially double orphans have lower I believe lower levels of enrollment rates and education and in places where let's say what children see as if children don't or in families don't see a big return to education it will take a lot from of incentives to actually make sure that the kids remain in school so I think there are many many many ways that the two interact and I have a colleague in where my new place that has looked at some of these issues and if you want his name is Don Bundy and he's been working with some people at the London School of Tropical Medicine and if you want to get some of the things that they've just produced I'll be happy to send them to you is there a best practice for governance I think there isn't because first the countries tend to decide the main where we should be straight about is that there should be consistency that when you give when you give responsibility accountability if you make schools accountable for what they produce you have to give them some power if they don't have power over teachers they can't choose teachers, can't fire teachers can't evaluate teachers cannot train teachers what does it mean to give them the responsibility and I think that's in the work for example that I did for Indonesia and for East Asian countries that was what I was looking at was the consistency of where the power lay lies and where the responsibility lies and they just have to be aligned but countries it's usually the countries we don't decide whether the country is going to decentralize or not but it is however a trend towards more devolution of responsibility and power to local governments and to schools focusing on primary and secondary education but on higher education and vocational training will be a major challenge for middle-income countries but I may be wrong but I think I have read the report about assistance local and consistent vocational training where the result was mixed Chinese so could you tell me about the challenges of higher education vocational training thank you yes professor do you have a chance to consider the question of languages as instruction and learning and the production of teaching materials as well as the other variables to mention and then considering the educational gap between people thank you yes my question is about curriculum development I know the World Bank has engaged in a process with local governments such as Lebanon and engaging or kind of collaborating the efforts in order to develop the curriculums to what level is the World Bank involved in such effort do they play a mandate role consultative role okay thank you yes in higher education definitely for the middle-income countries sorry I keep going back to my work in Indonesia but although that work focused very much on the government's issues the first time I presented the work to a large group bigger than your group of government officials the very first question I was asked had nothing to do with governance does the World Bank recommend general education or vocational education and so it's very much I realized that it's a question that's very much in the minds of officials because of this link between school and work skill education you know education is not just for you know enjoying the arts and so forth it's supposed to lead to productive skills it's supposed to lead to work so clearly that's a very important now we do have some some work in the past the work, the evaluation of vocational and training programs has been produced dismal, dismal results they tend to be these programs tend to be the sort of ghetto of education systems etc that's not the case for some countries of course but there's a revival of this because of this because of the globalization concern about being more for our countries to be more competitive but our own staff are it's a very difficult topic to look at because for one thing vocational is not homogeneous they are you can have four year vocational and technical programs you can have two years you can have one year you have and when the government asks about vocational and technical education they tend to talk about a very large set of different kinds of delivery so this is an area where I think we need to do some more work following from that work done I think it was in the 80s when there was a lot of work on vocational and technical education higher education we've just completed some study on world-class universities because countries are very interested actually in building good universities centers of excellence so I think this is if you're interested in that certainly that's something that I can send to you now the world bank when we began working on education we began working on higher education the first loans of the world bank was to the higher education institutions so this is something that we're just beginning after supporting basic education from the late 80s up to today even now as you know with the education for all and the millennium development goals for 2015 we're still focused on because we want poor countries to catch up we're focusing on real and basic education but we know that even for poor countries there's a lot of interest for secondary education and higher education and it's only natural as you increase enrollment rates at the primary level kids will eventually get to the higher education level so this is something that we certainly have to do languages and inequality I think very important and since I'm not an educator directly I sort of won't say a whole lot about that except to say that my educator colleagues would say it's best to instruct in your mother tongue up to grade two or three because then it's more a child is better able to learn the concepts that in a language the child is more familiar with I've been doing some work on ethnolinguistic groups so inequalities by ethnolinguistic groups and one thing that I'm finding is that first in many cases if a minority group in terms of the ethnolinguistic group is very disadvantaged the supply of teachers for that group is also very limited that's one of the challenges and then if you have a country like Laos where there are at least 50 language groups and that's an understatement what think about the cost implications of producing school textbooks in the mother tongue and where some of those languages do not even have written script that is still recognized today in some of those ethnolinguistic groups the UNESCO a certain part of UNESCO is actually helping develop script for those ethnic groups so it's yes, I think it's important to think that language is helps learning how far to take it to offer instruction in two languages three languages, four languages or in the case of Laos how many languages would you offer so I think it's an important challenge to governments but you can see where the how large the challenge is of that and I was in a discussion as part of a discussion with the Philippines where the Philippines has 80 language groups also when they were trying to decide how many there were many people who were experts on language of instruction and they were also saying look we have to teach in the native tongue and then the question was so how many and so there was a huge long discussion about how many is it going to be four so not even 80, not even close to 80 so even the four and what does that mean in terms of teacher training teacher recruitment production of materials curriculum development the World Bank does not really have if there is a project that is involved in curriculum development it's likely the teams are likely to involve one local expert on that one because to tell the truth to be honest we don't have a lot of curriculum experts anymore so if there is going to be curriculum development the those experts aren't going to come from the World Bank and I would imagine that they would be coming from Lebanon so this would be the way these development projects work is that the teams are formed you do have international experts but then there are also local experts especially in this case for curriculum development this is one area where countries are very sensitive about and we recognize that thank you for the questions enjoy them