Publicizing public goods in education: New evidence and tools to improve the sector

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Recent efforts to improve the quality of education in the sector have been moving on two parallel tracks. The first, more widely publicized track, is the growing number of large-scale initiatives to improve learning outcomes in low and middle-income countries. The second track, and the focus of this panel, is the expanding number of public goods contributions to the international education sector. Public goods are things of value available to all as individuals and their design make it impossible for other to not able to access or use (Anomaly, 2018). In the education sector, these public goods have traditionally been tools, research materials, documents or frameworks that are meaningfully useful to help key leaders to make decisions or design and implement better interventions. These public goods contributions are simultaneously under-publicized and potentially significantly useful for decision-makers, donors and researchers to improve their practice. This panel focuses on four research streams, products and reports that can be considered public goods. The presentations are designed both to increase the awareness of the CIES participants about the availability of the public goods but also to inform methods to make them more widely available, more responsive to demand from the sector, and increase their utilization for the purposes they were designed.

First, the World Bank has developed the Learning Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS) measure. Given the interest in estimating levels of human capital, measuring the impact of interventions, and comparing the availability of education in countries, the sector had been missing a common metric that could overcome some of the criticisms of years of schooling and effect sizes have suffered from. LAYS is an improvement over other popular measures by combining the quantity and quality of education into one measure that can be compared across contexts. LAYS is increasingly utilized at an international level, serving as the key metric for the World Bank’s Human Capital Index and USAID’s work on country capacity. Researchers are becoming more likely to utilize LAYS as a meaningful measure of program impact as well. While LAYS utilization has certainly grown, this presentation will provide background on the development and utilization of LAYS and encourage policymakers, implementers and researchers to incorporate LAYS in their work.

Second, the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel has worked to develop a Smart Buys document for use by policymakers. The panel includes prominent researchers and professors of education with knowledge of the cost-effectiveness literature on various intervention areas. This panel was supported by technical experts from the World Bank and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) to undertake an ambitious effort to consolidate the rigorous research evidence on this topic. The Smart Buys document classifies different types of interventions by the size of their impact, the strength of the evidence and the costs. Potential interventions are classified as “great buys” or “good buys” if they are cost-effective and have strong evidence, while “promising but low-evidence” interventions typically have smaller studies in favor of them. Finally, “bad buys” are interventions that have consistent evidence that the programs don’t work or are not cost-effective. This document will be widely distributed in late 2020 and will begin to be used by policymakers for decision-making in early 2021. The presentation will share the document itself as well as how it has been used by policymakers since its publication.

Third, the Center for Global Development has been contributing rapid and broad-based evidence and policy relevant information for policymakers and researchers in the education sector. Their work since the beginning of 2020 has been prolific, providing public goods in three categories. First, the CGD research team is synthesizing research on key questions. For example, CGD’s researchers have provided evidence about the role that examinations play in exacerbating inequality (Rossiter et al, 2020) while also providing evidence about what works to improve education in Africa (Evans and Mendez Acosta, 2020). Second, CGD has provided the sector with some of the best rapid tools and evidence about COVID-19’s impact on education, including a database of how different countries’ education systems were responding to the disease. Third, CGD’s public good contributions include examinations of important topics that others have ignored, including on public private partnerships (Sandefur and Romero, 2019). This combination of work has made the CGD website a key location for the sector to turn to when wanting to decide what issues are most salient and how to implement higher quality education.

Fourth, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with RTI International to develop resources to support adapting complicated research on the Science of Teaching into usable guidance for policymakers, donors and researchers. For example, RTI has developed how-to guides on how to implement structured pedagogy programs to improve foundational literacy and numeracy at large scale. These how-to guides are written for audiences who are non-academics and with limited time to read complex documents without specific suggestions for action. Averaging five pages, using clear language and including graphics and figures, these guides address eight of the key areas necessary to implement structured pedagogy programs effectively. Upcoming guides will focus on practical language of instruction guidance in complex language environments and additional topics of broad interest to those focused on implementing effective foundational literacy and numeracy programs at scale. These Science of Teaching documents will be supplemented by additional research efforts to answering questions of interest to the sector, and this presentation will elicit feedback from the sector on which research efforts would be most viable and valuable for the sector to know.

This panel will provide an opportunity for the sector to more broadly interact with these public goods. The panelists will also receive feedback from the sector on how to more effectively disseminate these materials, with the ultimate goal of having higher quality public goods from these providers as well as the broader sector.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Benjamin Piper, RTI International

Individual Presentations

• Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling: Macro and micro applications of a new standardized metric of quality education - Halsey Rogers, World Bank

• Cost-effective approaches to improve global learning: What are the “Smart Buys” for improving learning in low- and middle-income countries? - Anna Rudge, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; Benjamin Piper, RTI International

• Simplifying the Science of Teaching: Developing how-to guides for effective foundational literacy and numeracy programs - Jessica Mejia, RTI International; Benjamin Piper, RTI International; Asyia Kazmi, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Wendi Ralaingita, RTI International; Julianne Norman, RTI International