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Abstract
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. Some studies report changes in years of schooling; others report changes in learning. Standard deviations, the metric typically used to report learning gains, measure gains relative to a local distribution of test scores. This metric makes it hard to judge if the gain is worth the cost in absolute terms. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) -- which combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard -- as a new metric for reporting gains from education interventions. The paper applies LAYS to compare the effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness, where cost is available) of interventions from 150 impact evaluations across 46 countries. The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.
Highlights
The average child in a low-income country is expected to attend 5.6 fewer years of school than a child in a high-income country (World Bank 2020).2 By the age of 10, 90 percent of children in low-income countries still cannot read with comprehension, compared with only 9 percent in high-income countries (Azevedo et al 2019)
We summarize results by category of education intervention, such as Early Childhood Development (ECD) or instruction targeted to the child’s level of learning rather than grade level
4.2.2 Calibrating gains from specific interventions and policies to system-level gaps What could the macro, systemwide effects of these highly effective interventions be? To answer this, we explore first how many LAYS a given intervention could contribute toward closing the gap to achieve a full and globally benchmarked quality education at scale in a given country—assuming, as mentioned before, that the nationally scaled-up version of the program were as effective as the evaluated version
Summary
The average child in a low-income country is expected to attend 5.6 fewer years of school than a child in a high-income country (World Bank 2020). By the age of 10, 90 percent of children in low-income countries still cannot read with comprehension, compared with only 9 percent in high-income countries (Azevedo et al 2019). Policymakers must make tough choices about what to invest in to improve education outcomes—from constructing schools to coaching teachers, from improving school management to deploying new educational software Making these investment decisions requires comparable data on both the benefits and costs—i.e., the cost-effectiveness—of alternative approaches. There is evidence that some of the benefits of education, including economic growth, are more closely associated with learning (Hanushek and Woessmann 2012), whereas others are associated with years of schooling (Baird, McIntosh and Ozler 2011; De Neve et al 2015; Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer 2017). These two dimensions of education cannot be considered entirely separately. Improving the quality of education has more impact if more children go to school for longer, and programs that increase years of schooling lead to more learning if the underlying education system is of a higher quality
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