Outsourcing Education: Experimental Evidence from Liberia

Romero, Mauricio; Sandefur, Justin; Sandholtz, Wayne Aaron

doi:10.1257/aer.20181478

Cited by 58 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…For example, trials in Kenya and Liberia have shown in headtohead comparisons that the same programmes are less effective when put in the hands of government compared with private providers. 153,154 A metaanalysis of trials evaluating a wide range of health, education and social assistance interventions finds that those implemented by government are on average less effective than nonstate providers. 155 These studies typically focus on notforprofit organisations and less evidence exists for the value of contracting forprofit providers, whose involvement remains controversial.…”

Section: Government As a Project Of Shared Responsibility To Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

A future for the world's children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission

Clark¹,

Coll-Seck

Banerjee³

et al. 2020

The Lancet

730

597

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Despite dramatic improvements in survival, nutrition, and education over recent decades, today's children face an uncertain future. Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country. In 2015, the world's countries agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet nearly 5 years later, few countries have recorded much progress towards achieving them. This Commission presents the case for placing children, aged 0-18 years, at the centre of the SDGs: at the heart of the concept of sustainability and our shared human endeavour. Governments must harness coalitions across sectors to overcome ecological and commercial pressures to ensure children receive their rights and entitlements now and a liveable planet in the years to come.

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Section: Government As a Project Of Shared Responsibility To Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

A future for the world's children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission

Clark¹,

Coll-Seck

Banerjee³

et al. 2020

The Lancet

730

597

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An average of school-based testing (for students in school) and home-based tracking (for students out of school), combined with classroom observations, as part of a randomised controlled trial in Liberia, cost US$150 per child. 36 37 …”

Section: Practical Lessons For Phone-based Assessmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical lessons for phone-based assessments of learning

et al. 2020

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School closures affecting more than 1.5 billion children are designed to prevent the spread of current public health risks from the COVID-19 pandemic, but they simultaneously introduce new short-term and long-term health risks through lost education. Measuring these effects in real time is critical to inform effective public health responses, and remote phone-based approaches are one of the only viable options with extreme social distancing in place. However, both the health and education literature are sparse on guidance for phone-based assessments. In this article, we draw on our pilot testing of phone-based assessments in Botswana, along with the existing literature on oral testing of reading and mathematics, to propose a series of preliminary practical lessons to guide researchers and service providers as they try phone-based learning assessments. We provide preliminary evidence that phone-based assessments can accurately capture basic numeracy skills. We provide guidance to help teams (1) ensure that children are not put at risk, (2) test the reliability and validity of phone-based measures, (3) use simple instructions and practice items to ensure the assessment is focused on the target skill, not general language and test-taking skills, (4) adapt the items from oral assessments that will be most effective in phone-based assessments, (5) keep assessments brief while still gathering meaningful learning data, (6) use effective strategies to encourage respondents to pick up the phone, (7) build rapport with adult caregivers and youth respondents, (8) choose the most cost-effective medium and (9) account for potential bias in samples.

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“…This focus informed the design of all teaching and learning materials, from textbooks to teacher handbooks and lesson plans. These materials also incorporated scripted lessons, which have been shown to work in numerous settings (Piper et al 2018;Romero, Sandefur, and Sandholtz 2020;Eble et al 2021) and are alleged to be particularly helpful for teachers with less training and suboptimal supervision, potentially raising the level of the "floor" of teaching quality in challenging contexts. The absence of heterogeneity in the treatment effect shows the intervention worked similarly for all children.…”

Section: Features Uniqueness and Scalability Of The Interventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large Learning Gains in Pockets of Extreme Poverty: Experimental Evidence from Guinea Bissau

Fazzio¹,

Eble²,

Lumsdaine³

et al. 2020

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Fazzio and Eble share "co-first author" status, as they contributed equally to the work (order of co-first author names was randomized according to Ray and Robson 2018).We are grateful to our administrative, research, and implementation teams in Bissau for their tireless work. Ana Forjaz oversaw the fieldwork at endline. Mark Fisher designed and maintained the database. Gilda Piaggio conducted the power calculation and randomization at the beginning of the study. Yixun Zeng provided research assistance in the preliminary stages of the data analysis. Clive Belfield and Sharon Wolf gave helpful comments on the manuscript. We are grateful to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) for funding the exploratory research on learning levels in Guinea Bissau that motivated this study. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for generous input which greatly improved the work. This study was funded by Effective Intervention, a UK registered charity. The study passed ethical/ institutional review by the Ministry of Education of Guinea Bissau on 30 August, 2012, and the NBER ethics committee on 1 July, 2014 (ref: IRB Ref#14_06). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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Outsourcing Education: Experimental Evidence from Liberia

Cited by 58 publications

References 38 publications

A future for the world's children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission

A future for the world's children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission

Practical lessons for phone-based assessments of learning

Large Learning Gains in Pockets of Extreme Poverty: Experimental Evidence from Guinea Bissau

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