Primary

This policy note was prepared in parallel to the report Pakistan at hundred, Shaping the Future. The report Pakistan at the rate hundred discusses options to accelerate and sustain growth in Pakistan so that the country becomes an upper middle-income country when it turns hundred years old in 2047. This policy note discusses Pakistan’s greatest asset- its large population, requiring more and better investment to become a demographic dividend that supports growth for decades to come.

This paper looks at how countries have mobilized additional resources for education and assesses their impact on access and learning outcomes, using the World Bank's new Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling measure. The paper shows that global spending on education has risen significantly over the past two decades, although spending as a share of gross domestic product has remained relatively unchanged, at about 4.5 percent. However, global trends mask large differences across regions and country income groups.

Evidence on the impacts of many teacher policies remains insufficient and scattered, and the impact of many reforms depends on specific design features. In addition, teacher policies can have very different impacts, depending on the context and other education policies already in place. Systems approach for better education results (SABER) - teachers is a tool that aims to help fill the gap by collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and disseminating comprehensive information on teacher policies in primary and secondary education systems around the world.

This study documents the results of a pilot study designed to measure the quality of teacher practices using the classroom observation tool TEACH in a selection of 45 public primary schools (73 percent rural and 27 percent urban) in Mindanao, a province of the Philippines. Teachers in Mindanao are relatively skilled at creating a supportive learning environment and maximizing opportunities to learn, though they are less effective at setting positive behavioral expectations.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that measured the effectiveness of both financial and non-financial incentives at the student, classroom, and school levels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A new classroom routine was designed to encourage all grades 5 and 6 students to take home a classroom textbook and use it to study for a weekly quiz.

In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of schooling" and another in the net present value of potential increased lifetime earnings.

Schooling is not learning. Although access to schooling has improved significantly in the last decade, Afghan students are not learning. After spending 4 years in primary school, around 65% of Afghan students have only fully mastered Grade 1 Language curriculum and less than half of them mastered Grade 1 Mathematics curriculum. Data collected from the SABER SD survey show that Afghan students could correctly answer only 30% of the questions on the Language test, on average.