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Education for Development: What Policies?c21





                   efficiency.

                       Charter Schools in the United States are publicly funded but privately
                   managed. Charter schools are given autonomy while held accountable through
                   a contract to produce specific results. Evaluations of charter schools found that

                   the largest benefits accrue to less privileged students (Gleason et al., 2010). A
                   general finding from this literature is that the benefits from charter attendance
                   are larger in math than in reading test scores (e.g. Hoxby et al., 2009; Angrist et

                   al., 2010; Flaker, 2014).
                       Institutional changes such as the introduction of monitoring and evaluation
                   systems, central examinations, teacher incentives and accountability are more
                   likely to improve school quality, although difficult to cost (Hanushek and

                   Woessmann, 2011).


                                       Toward Better Policies



                       Given the state of our knowledge, let us summarize what policies we are
                   confident would be conducive to education contributing to socioeconomic

                   development.

                   Fix institutions


                       First of all, fix the environment. No education policy will succeed unless

                   the institutional environment is right. Before attempting to enact any education
                   policy, one should look outside the education system. Are the country’s
                   institutions conducing to or hampering the success of any education policy?

                   Specific areas to look at are the structure of incentives, regulations and public
                   finance.
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