Peter Anthony Holland

Increasing Access by Waiving Tuition: Evidence from Haiti

Despite impressive gains in increasing access to school over the last twenty years, an estimated 57 million children worldwide do not go to school. Abolishing school fees has increased enrollment rates in several countries where enrollments were low and school fees were high. However, such policies may be less effective, or even have negative consequences, when supply-side responses are weak. This paper evaluates the school-level impacts of a tuition waiver program in Haiti, which provided public financing to non-public schools conditional on these schools not charging tuition. The paper concludes that a schools participation in the program results in having more students enrolled, more staff, and slightly higher student-teacher ratios. The program also reduces grade repetition and the share of students who are over-age. While the increase in students at participating schools does not directly equate to a reduction in the number of children out of school, it does demonstrate strong demand from families for the program, and a correspondingly strong supply response from the non-public sector.

Understanding the trends in learning outcomes in Argentina, 2000 to 2012

This paper seeks to understand what drove the trends in learning outcomes in Argentina between 2000 and 2012, using data from four rounds of the Program for International Student Assessment. A year-specific education production function is estimated and its results used to decompose the changes in learning outcomes into changes in inputs, parameters, and residuals via microsimulations. Estimates of the production function show the importance of socioeconomic status, gender, school autonomy, and teacher qualifications to determine learning outcomes. Despite an important increase in the level of resources invested in public education, learning outcomes in public schools decreased vis-a-vis private schools. According to the results presented here, the increase in the number of teachers in the system, pushing the pupil-teacher ratio in Argentina to 11, had no effect on learning outcomes. The microsimulation further confirms that changes in the system’s ability to transform inputs into outcomes accounted for most of the changes in test scores. Overall, the study shows the ineffectiveness of input-based education policies to improve learning outcomes in Argentina.

Extending the school day in Latin America and the Caribbean

Countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean are reforming their education systems to add more hours to the school day. This paper examines the evidence on the relationship between instructional time and student learning, reviewing 19 studies that measure the effects of longer school days in the region. It characterizes the differences in the implementation of extended school day programs and provides one detailed case study and cost-effectiveness exercise, from Uruguay. While the evidence suggests some positive impacts across a range of outcome variables, including learning outcomes, adult labor force participation, and crime and teenage pregnancy reduction, there is considerable heterogeneity across studies. Even using the most optimistic impact estimates, a cost-effectiveness exercise suggests that there are likely many more cost-effective reforms to achieve similar learning effects. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for policymakers and practitioners considering an extension of the school day.