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Blog Post
November 01, 2023
In recent decades, concerted efforts to promote access, equity, and inclusivity in education have improved school enrollment for girls and marginalized and disadvantaged populations. Kenya is no exception: it has reached gender parity at the primary school level, and the Kenyan government has implem...
Blog Post
October 17, 2023
There’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit in global development. On the issues that matter most, from preventing the next pandemic to expanding migration opportunities, and financing climate adaptation, even minor progress tends to require big financial commitments and often faces deep political resist...
Blog Post
September 22, 2023
We’ve updated our 2022 working paper with Laura Moscoviz on long run trends in education quality with several new surveys from around the world. Notably, a new survey round for India (NFHS-5) casts doubt on earlier data (NFHS-3). Dropping the suspect data, India’s current learning levels are unchang...
Blog Post
August 30, 2023
There’s a representation problem in the fields of economics and research that has been well documented. As my colleagues have written about previously here and here, studies have shown that only 5 percent of papers in top journals study low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), and research output is...
Blog Post
July 30, 2023
In a new paper, we examine the connection between exposure to lead—a dangerous but prevalent neurotoxicant—and children’s learning outcomes. We find that lead poisoning alone could account for more than 20 percent of the learning gap between rich and poor countries. Given the comparative ease of, sa...
Blog Post
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...