Interpreting Recent Research on Schooling in Developing Countries

Policymakers in developing countries have long been troubled by the unde-sirable, but apparently unavoidable, choice between providing broad access to education and developing high-quality schools. Recent evidence, how-ever, suggests that this is a bad way to think about human capital develop-ment. Grade repetition and high dropout rates lead to a significant waste of resources in many school systems. Students in quality schools, however, re-spond in ways that reduce such inefficiencies, perhaps even sufficiently to recoup immediately investments in quality. Promoting high-quality schools, however, is more difficult than many have thought, in part because research demonstrates that the traditional approach to providing quality-simply providing more inputs-is frequently ineffec-tive. Existing inefficiencies are likely to be alleviated only by the introduc-tion of substantially stronger performance incentives in schools and by more extensive experimentation and evaluation of educational programs and school organizations. Incentives, decentralized decisionmaking, and evaluation are alien terms to education, in both industrial and developing countries, but they hold the key to improvement that has eluded policymakers pursuing traditional practices. R ecent research into schooling has begun to point consistently toward education policies that differ sharply from much of what we have seen in the past. In particular, it points more toward performance incentives and less toward regulatory and input-based policies, and it underscores the im-portance of developing high-quality schools, even if this goal appears to impinge on access to schools. Three fundamental findings flow from the new research. First, education around the globe is a very inefficient exercise; strong evidence indicates that too much is being paid for the performance obtained from schools. Second, educa-tion has proved to be a very complicated subject, and available research has