TY - RPRT TI - What Do Teachers Know and Do? Does It Matter? Evidence from Primary Schools in Africa AU - Bold, Tessa AU - Filmer, Deon AU - Martin, Gayle AU - Molina, Ezequiel AU - Rockmore, Christophe AU - Stacy, Brian AU - Svensson, Jakob AU - Wane, Waly T2 - Policy Research Working Paper AB - School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills—the so-called "learning crisis." This paper uses data from nationally representative surveys from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, representing close to 40 percent of the region's total population, to investigate possible answers to this policy failure by quantifying teacher effort, knowledge, and skills. Averaging across countries, the paper finds that students receive two hours and fifty minutes of teaching per day—or just over half the scheduled time. In addition, large shares of teachers do not master the curricula of the students they are teaching; basic pedagogical knowledge is low; and the use of good teaching practices is rare. Exploiting within-student, within-teacher variation, the analysis finds significant and large positive effects of teacher content and pedagogical knowledge on student achievement. These findings point to an urgent need for improvements in education service delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa. They also provide a lens through which the growing experimental and quasi-experimental literature on education in low-income countries can be interpreted and understood, and point to important gaps in knowledge, with implications for future research and policy design. CY - Washington, DC DA - 2017/01/26/ PY - 2017 DP - DOI.org (Crossref) LA - en M3 - Working Paper PB - World Bank SN - 7956 ST - What Do Teachers Know and Do? UR - http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-7956 Y2 - 2020/05/25/12:48:11 KW - Education KW - Education Policy KW - Learning Crisis KW - Public Service Delivery KW - Teacher Absenteeism KW - Teacher Effectiveness KW - Teacher Performance ER - TY - JOUR TI - Experimental evidence on scaling up education reforms in Kenya AU - Bold, Tessa AU - Kimenyi, Mwangi AU - Mwabu, Germano AU - Ng’ang’a, Alice AU - Sandefur, Justin T2 - Journal of Public Economics AB - What constraints arise when translating successful NGO programs to improve public services in developing countries into government policy? We report on a randomized trial embedded within a nationwide reform of teacher hiring in Kenyan government primary schools. New teachers offered a fixed-term contract by an international NGO significantly raised student test scores, while teachers offered identical contracts by the Kenyan government produced zero impact. Observable differences in teacher characteristics explain little of this gap. Instead, data suggests that bureaucratic and political opposition to the contract reform led to implementation delays and a differential interpretation of identical contract terms. Additionally, contract features that produced larger learning gains in both the NGO and government treatment arms were not adopted by the government outside of the experimental sample. DA - 2018/12/01/ PY - 2018 DO - 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.08.007 DP - ScienceDirect VL - 168 SP - 1 EP - 20 J2 - Journal of Public Economics LA - en SN - 0047-2727 UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272718301518 Y2 - 2022/04/07/17:38:22 KW - Contract teachers KW - Education KW - External validity KW - Kenya KW - Randomized evaluation KW - State capacity ER - TY - ELEC TI - About us AU - TESSA DA - 2020/// PY - 2020 UR - http://www.tessafrica.net/about-us Y2 - 2020/06/26/12:46:35 ER -