Fixing the Foundation

Fixing the Foundation | (News and Research 356)

Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific | Every year in 22 middle-income East Asia and Pacific countries, around 172 million children are enrolled in primary school. Early investments in education were key to East Asia’s remarkable development. Yet, despite significant advances in school enrollment, children in some countries and parts of some countries are not acquiring basic educational skills, according to a World Bank report. In all countries covered in the report, the quality of education is much weaker in rural and poorer areas than in urban and richer areas.

IFC announces $70 million dollar investment in Banco Diners Club del Ecuador to support higher education | ​ The International Finance Corporation (IFC) announced a US$70 million investment in Banco Diners Club del Ecuador to support higher education students in need of financial support. IFC´s financing to Banco Diners Club del Ecuador helps address this constraint by providing loans that give students and their families the flexibility to defer tuition payments and related educational expenses, helping them to weather shocks in their personal finances so that students can remain in university.

Dire Straits-Education Reforms: Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence | Gomendio, Wert | Responding to an ‘educational emergency’ generated largely by the difficulties of implementing education reforms, this book compares education policies around the world to understand what works where.

Learning to read in a language children understand | Weaver, Grimsland, Diabagate | Learning to read is deeply influenced by language abilities which begin developing at birth. To be able to read, children need to ‘sound out’ words (decode) and understand what those words mean (language comprehension). Reading comprehension is a product of these two tasks and a deficit in either skill will severely limit a child’s ability to read.

Returns to Education Turns 50 | Submit a Manuscript to the Journal Education Economics for a Special Issue on the 50th Anniversary of the Returns to Education: An International Comparison | Manuscript deadline: 31 October 2023 | Special Issue Editor: Harry Patrinos, World Bank | Submit An Article | This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book, Returns to Education: An International Comparison, by George Psacharopoulos (assisted by Keith Hinchliffe). Education Economics is publishing a special issue to mark this occasion and the contributions of Professor Psacharopoulos. The focus of this special issue is research on the returns to education. Research on international comparisons and /or returns to education in less developed economies are especially welcome.

Call for Papers: LESE (Lisbon Economics and Statistics of Education) Conference. Lisbon, Portugal, 18-19 January 2024. This 7th edition will continue a very successful tradition of getting together researchers, students, and education analysts, providing a forum to present methodological and applied research and to discuss quantitative results on education analysis. Submit extended abstracts or full papers until the 15th of October 2023 through the conference website: https://lese-conference.org/. The conference will include keynote speakers, roundtables, contributed parallel sessions, organized sessions, and a short course on the machine learning methods in education. The keynote talks will be given by: Simon Burgess (University of Bristol, UK) and Susan Dynarski (Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA. There will be two roundtables: What PIRLS 2021 and PISA 2022 Tell Us About Pandemic Learning Losses with Harry Anthony Patrinos (moderator, World Bank), Kristoff De Witte (KU Leuven), Maciej Jakubowski (University of Warsaw and Evidence Institute), and João Marôco (ISPA); After the Pandemic: What It Will Take to Improve National Education Systems with Nuno Crato (moderator, ISEG), Tommaso Agasisti (Polytechnic University of Milan), Noam Angrist (University of Oxford), and Carla Hearlemans (Maastricht University). Additionally, there is a short course on 17 January on Machine Learning in Education taught by Tommaso Agasisti (Polytechnic University of Milan).