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...

We know from data across countries that far too many children around the world experience violence at school. For example, evidence from 20 African countries shows high rates of both physical and sexual violence. But qualitative studies with smaller samples or more targeted quantitative studies can ...

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...

Everyone agrees that Ghana's school feeding programme is an important and useful social programme…but insufficient and poor quality food is compromising its impacts; government financing remains a challenge; and it lacks lacks broader support and accountability mechanisms. The programme has huge pot...

As Lao Tsu put it a couple of thousand years ago, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” One of those single steps in the journey towards a quality education—the goal of the fourth Sustainable Development Goal—is children simply attending school. While attending school regularly ...

There’s a lot out there on how to improve educational outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. On the one hand, one may be tempted to lean into Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg’s critique: “There are so many ‘facts’ now available about how to fix education, that anyone…can easily gravita...

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...