Why Attract Good Teachers  The most widespread losses and abuses in education systems occur on the front lines—teachers who are absent from their posts or who demand illegal pay…[more]

Skilled workforce and strong R&D keys to Thailand 4.0 success  Several of the government’s recent economic initiatives have the potential to kick-start Thailand’s economy. To achieve the economic transformation it has been aspiring for, having a skilled workforce and much more strategic investments in research and development (R&D) will be important…

Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%  While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots. It’s been long discussed that robots and computers will start taking our jobs “in the near future” — well that near future is upon us and we’re not really prepared to deal with it. Of course, some jobs are more at risk than others, are few are as threatened as factory jobs…

The power of human capital via @YouTube…Cambodia Higher Education Project

World Bank helps fund Vietnam education reform  The World Bank approved Friday two credits totalling US$150 million to help Viet Nam support and sustain the implementation of its Higher Education Reforms Agenda and improve pre-school preparation for 5-year old children. “The World Bank is pleased to support the strengthening of Viet Nam’s education sector to help raise the country’s economic competitiveness,” said Victoria Kwakwa, the World Bank Country Director for Viet Nam. “Improving education outcomes for the population is an important part of Viet Nam’s economic and social development agenda and has been defined as one of the three breakthrough areas in its Socio-Economic Development Strategy for 2011-20,” she stressed. Accordingly, $50 million will be used to support the implementation of policies designed to strengthen governance, financing and quality of higher education, while enhancing the fiscal transparency, sustainability and effectiveness of the higher education sector. Meanwhile, the Viet Nam School Readiness Promotion Project aims to improve school preparation for children entering primary education. It particularly focuses on those most vulnerable to not succeeding in a school environment, through supporting selected elements of Viet Nam’s national programme on “Universal Early Childhood Education for 5 year old Children 2010-15.” The project supports efforts to expand full day pre-school enrolments, improve capacity for pre-school quality assurance and strengthen the professional expertise of teachers and principals. The credits come from the International Development Association, the World Bank Group’s concessional lending window for low income countries…

Quality education for all: measuring progress in Francophone Africa  Quality education is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing poverty and inequality; yet it remains elusive in many parts of the world. The Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC), which is designed to assess student abilities in mathematics and reading in French, has for the first time delivered an internationally comparable measure around which policy dialogue and international cooperation can aspire to improve. The PASEC 2014 international student assessment was administered in 10 countries in Francophone West Africa (Cameroon, Burundi, Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Chad, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger)…

The economic returns to proficiency in English in China  We examine economic returns to proficiency in English in China using two waves of the China Labor-Force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). We find positive earnings returns to proficiency in English. We find considerable heterogeneity in the economic returns to proficiency in English across age groups, coastal and inland provinces, levels of education and occupation. We find that the returns to proficiency in English are higher in the coastal region, higher for women and evidence of education-language and skill-language complementarity. We also see differences in the economic returns to English between urban and rural residents and between rural-urban migrants and urban locals. Our findings help to explain why the demand for learning English is so high in China, as well as having implications for the Chinese government at a time when it is re-evaluating the importance attached to learning English in the curriculum.

Leadership and teacher learning in urban and rural schools in China: Meeting the dual challenges of equity and effectiveness  Despite a rapid rise in national income levels, the distribution of wealth remains unevenly distributed between residents of rural and urban areas both in mainland China and other developing nations. These inequities carry over to the education system where researchers have documented differences not only in resource allocation but also in the academic performance of students in urban and rural schools. Most research into the causes of China’s urban-rural achievement gap has focused on fiscal resources. In contrast, the current study examined differences in school organization processes associated with learning-centered leadership and teacher learning. These foci were selected due to their documented importance in supporting sustainable school improvement. We employed multi-group confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to analyze survey data collected from 492 urban teachers and 423 rural teachers in 31 Chinese schools located in three different provinces. The results affirmed a similar model of leadership and teacher learning in urban and rural schools. Specifically, school leadership exerted significant direct and indirect effects on teacher learning. It was, however, notable that the strength of all variable measures were significantly higher in the urban schools. The findings imply a potential benefit to be gained from providing training focused on ‘learning-centered leadership for principals and middle level leaders in rural schools, as well as expanding access to quality professional development opportunities for rural teachers…

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and World Bank Partner to Boost Global Knowledge for Development  Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and the World Bank have launched a search for two candidates to join a new research program for interns…

The robot being developed to help teach autistic children  Last year I wrote about a new robot that was designed to care for children. The machine, called NAO, is capable of reading the mood of the child, recognizing their family and even understanding your preferences for food, music and so on…

The Effect of Fe y Alegria on School Achievement: Exploiting a School Lottery Selection as a Natural Experiment  Fe y Alegria is an organization working in many developing countries as a public-private partnership. This study estimates the effect of one Fe y Alegria school in Peru on mathematics and reading comprehension among second grade primary pupils, between 2007 and 2012. The identification strategy is based on the fact that for this school Fe y Alegría conducted a lottery to determine which students would be accepted onto first grade…The results show that this Fe y Alegria school generated substantial score gains for lottery winners, equivalent to 0.4 standard deviations…

World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law   What makes policies work to produce life-improving outcomes? The answer put forward in the World Development Report 2017 is better governance—that is, the ways in which governments, citizens, and communities engage to design and apply policies…

世界上哪个地区的孩子最聪明？经合组织数据显示，该地区为东亚地区  经合组织上月发布的国际学生评估项目（PISA）最新调查结果表明，全世界学习成绩最好的学生中，很多都来自东亚地区。
正如在最近发布的《国际数学于科学趋势研究报告》（TIMSS ）的结果表明，新加坡学生在国际学生评估项目每一学科的成绩均在世界上名列前茅，以较大优势领先于其他经济体和国家。新加坡学生在科学、数学和阅读三门学科上的成绩水平，要比同地区和经合组织国家的学生成绩水平高出两个学年。另外，几乎所有的新加坡学生都达到了基本熟练水平或更高水平。同时，他们的成绩越来越好，成绩低于基本熟练水平的学生人数因此而显著减少。 本学生在科学、数学和阅读学科上的成绩，也明显高于大多数参与该项目的经济体。不过，与上一轮评估相比，日本学生在阅读方面的分数有所下降。尽管如此，与新加坡一样，日本90%的学生已经达到了基本熟练水平或更高水平。 Read more »