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School Resources and Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: A Review of the Literature from 1990 to 2010

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  • Paul W. Glewwe
  • Eric A. Hanushek
  • Sarah D. Humpage
  • Renato Ravina

Abstract

Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students’ years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn while in school. This paper examines studies published between 1990 and 2010, in both the education literature and the economics literature, to investigate which specific school and teacher characteristics, if any, appear to have strong positive impacts on learning and time in school. Starting with over 9,000 studies, 79 are selected as being of sufficient quality. Then an even higher bar is set in terms of econometric methods used, leaving 43 “high quality” studies. Finally, results are also shown separately for 13 randomized trials. The estimated impacts on time in school and learning of most school and teacher characteristics are statistically insignificant, especially when the evidence is limited to the “high quality” studies. The few variables that do have significant effects – e.g. availability of desks, teacher knowledge of the subjects they teach, and teacher absence – are not particularly surprising and thus provide little guidance for future policies and programs.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 17554.

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Date of creation: Oct 2011
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17554

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  1. Jesse Rothstein, 2008. "Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement," NBER Working Papers 14442, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Harriet Nannyonjo, 2007. "Education Inputs In Uganda : An Analysis of Factors Influencing Learning Achievement in Grade Six," World Bank Publications, The World Bank, number 6758.
  3. Imbens, Guido & Wooldridge, Jeffrey M., 2009. "Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation," Scholarly Articles 3043416, Harvard University Department of Economics.
  4. Paul Glewwe & Michael Kremer & Sylvie Moulin & Eric Zitzewitz, 2000. "Retrospective vs. Prospective Analyses of School Inputs: The Case of Flip Charts in Kenya," NBER Working Papers 8018, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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  1. Revisitando Una Laptop por Niño
    by Pablo Ibarrarán in Hacia el desarrollo efectivo on 2012-06-18 20:31:27
  2. Development that Works: One Laptop per Child revisited
    by Pablo Ibarrarán in Eval Central on 2012-06-18 10:59:46
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Cited by:
  1. Baranov, Igor N., 2012. "Quality of Secondary Education in Russia: Between Soviet Legacy and Challenges of Global Competitiveness," Working Papers 538, Graduate School of Management, St. Petersburg State University.

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