Limited educational opportunities and dismal learning outcomes constrain productivity growth and social mobility in much of the developing world. Limited infrastructure, poorly-trained teachers, centralized curricula that leave struggling students behind, schools of highly heterogeneous quality, high opportunity costs of schooling and widespread information distortions are among the causes. Our education researchers rely on evidence-based policy-research partnerships with local governments and NGOs to design, implement, and evaluate using rigorous methodologies and novel data sources, innovations that help overcome these pervasive barriers to increase schooling and learning.
Our projects include:
This ongoing project, funded by JPAL and the government of Colombia, aims to develop, implement and test a virtual assistant college counselor that uses big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to empower Colombia’s students to make informed choices concerning tertiary education choices and financial aid opportunities. Methods include: Focus Groups, Qualitative Analyses, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Randomized Controlled Trials Implemented at Scale in Colombia. The baseline findings show that students have very limited knowledge of various aspects concerning tertiary education, including returns, graduation rates and financial aid opportunities; pilot studies to date suggest the virtual assistant substantially reduces search costs.
Funded by the World Bank, this project documented the long-term impacts on beneficiaries and taxpayers of Colombia’s PACES program, a private school voucher program for socio-economically disadvantaged students implemented at scale in the 1990s. Using a randomized controlled trial using administrative data for up to 20 years after voucher lottery and cost-benefit analysis, we found that PACES vouchers greatly increased intergenerational mobility through increased tertiary education access and completion, and greater formal sector earnings and consumption typically associated with the middle class (e.g. cars). The PACES program was able to simultaneously expand secondary school access and improve intergenerational mobility at a low or possibly negative cost to taxpayers. Finally, voucher impacts on outcomes associated with intergeneration mobility are entirely driven by vocational school applicants, which we argue is consistent with horizontal market product differentiation, and not competition or cream-skimming, as the likely mechanism at play.
Funded by USC and Georgetown University, researches examined long-term labor market, formal education impacts on trainees and their relatives, and rates of return of a vocational training program for disadvantaged youth implemented at scale in Colombia. By using a randomized controlled trial implemented at scale and administrative data for up to 11 years of follow-up, we discovered that trainees were more likely to enroll in formal tertiary education, and their relatives more likely to complete secondary school. For females, training helped relax credit constraints associated with direct tertiary education costs. For males, training appears to have improved field-specific knowledge and/or information about field-specific returns on tertiary education. Accounting for the formal education impacts of training on both participants and their relatives, in addition to the direct impact of training on earnings, increases the program’s estimated internal rate of return from 22.2% to 24.1% for females and from 10.2% to 25.5% for males.
Using a randomized controlled trial in 48 low-income public elementary schools in Metropolitan Lima, Peru, this project documented whether inquiry-based instruction is an effective pedagogical approach to improve science skills among low-achieving, early-grade students. Assignment to treatment increased endline science achievement by 3 percentiles (0.12 SD) with greater gains for students who attended at least one remedial session, and a concentration of gains among boys. We cannot reject the null hypothesis of no indirect science achievement gains among nonparticipants. This project was sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank.
By using an RCT to develop a low-cost, scalable strategy to improve formal savings among youth, we found that low-income youth (12 years old on average) who open new accounts are randomly assigned immediately after opening the account to control or to receive one of three twelve-month text-messaging campaigns: i) monthly savings reminders, ii) semimonthly reminders, iii) monthly action-oriented financial education messages. Relative to control, monthly and semimonthly reminders groups increase account balances during the campaign as a result of reduced withdrawals, potentially through savings shifts from home to bank accounts. After the campaign youth in both reminders groups continue to use the accounts but do not deplete balances. The financial education campaign had a smaller, not statistically significant, effect on account balances, but some short-term effect on reducing withdrawals, possibly through shifts from home savings. Funders for this work were Save the Children and MasterCard Foundation.
Using contextual analysis and regression discontinuity design in national administrative data, researchers documented the process by which Colombia screens, selects, places and rewards public sector teachers early in their careers. Applicants who marginally pass the teacher screening test have greater annual earnings during the first three years of tenure than applicants below the passing cutoff. The total earnings effect is a combination of higher daily wages and greater labor supply, part of which is in outside, predominantly non-teaching jobs for a substantial fraction of public teachers. For infra-marginal high-scoring applicants, being a public teacher in Colombia is as attractive, if not more, as for those at the margin. On the whole, rather than a penalty, public teachers in Colombia across all ability levels earn a substantial labor market premium early in their careers.This word was funded by the Inter-American Development Bank.
We documented the academic impacts on children and costs of access to a private subsidized school in Mexico City using an RCT with primary data collection for the World Bank.
Publication link: to come.
We were funded by Fundacion Compartir to develop a national review, detailed evidence-based policy proposal centered on teacher policy reform to improve education quality in Colombia. For each of the policy areas we present a detailed 10-year reform plan including expected fiscal costs and alternative revenue sources. To achieve teacher excellence in Colombia, we detail a fiscally responsible, multi-pronged approach that simultaneously enhances the social value of teaching, aims to attract top graduates to the profession, improves the quality of teacher training pre-service and on-service programs, improves teacher evaluation metrics and makes pecuniary rewards more attractive.