Page 85 - Education for Development:George Psacharopoulos University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

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.