Impact Evaluations of EDUCO: A Critical Review

Abstract

Despite the excitement around the Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program during the early 1990s as it was being scaled up, the Ministry of Education and the representatives of the World Bank knew that they would need solid evidence which demonstrated that the program produced beneficial outcomes in order (a) to continue to promote the program as a central policy for education reform in El Salvador and (b) to be able to credibly promote the program internationally as a best practice. It was in this context of excitement and determination that the World Bank began to carry out evaluations of EDUCO. With this in mind, this chapter critically reviews six key studies that were carried out between 1994 and 2005 by the World Bank on the EDUCO program. These six studies are included here for critical review because they represent each of the studies that were produced as impact evaluations, all of which were generated by the World Bank. They represent the entire body of “legitimate” and “policy-relevant” knowledge that was created in order to evaluate whether the program worked by identifying the effects of the EDUCO intervention.