The Economic Costs and Returns to Educational Television

Abstract

The use of classroom educational television (ETV) is spreading rapidly in low-income countries, primarily as a means to deliver high-quality education to a large proportion of school-age children without the necessity of training great numbers of skilled, well-prepared teachers. The purpose of ETV, then, is to transform quickly school systems which are traditional and limited in the number of children they reach into modern, universally available systems which provide the best teaching possible through television programming from a central studio. The concept of giving all children in a country or region the best teaching methods and techniques available, no matter how isolated the community nor how limited the knowledge and capability of the local teacher, doubtless has great appeal. In theory, ETV should increase greatly pupils' cognitive learning, especially that of those who got the worst teaching before ETV. Therefore, not only should the introduction of television into the classroom increase pupil performance generally, it should reduce the difference in school performance between the poorest and richest regions of the country. It is in this context that ETV has been adopted by many school systems. Yet, despite its theoretical advantages, very little is known about the actual effects of educational television on children's school performance, or whether ETV really does equalize educational opportunities. Besides, ETV requires large investments of time, energy, and resources (capital, highly skilled labor) which are scarce in low-income countries. The investment in this new method is therefore being made with hardly any information about either the educational effectiveness of ETV compared