Tazeen Fasih

Decentralized Decision-making in Schools: The Theory and Evidence on School-based Management

The school-based management (SBM) has become a very popular movement over the last decade. The World Banks work on school-based management emerged from a need to better define the concept, review the evidence, support impact assessments in various countries, and provide feedback to project teams. The authors took detailed stock of the existing literature on school-based management and then identified several cases that the Bank was supporting in various countries. The authors present as well general guidance on how to evaluate school-based management programs. The Bank continues to support and oversee a number of impact evaluations of school-based management programs in an array of countries. Despite the clear commitment of governments and international agencies to the education sector, efficient, and equitable access remains elusive for many populations - especially for girls, indigenous peoples, and other poor and marginalized groups. Many international initiatives focus on these access issues with great commitment, but even where the vast majority of children do have access to education facilities, the quality of that education often is very poor. This fact increasingly is apparent in the scores from international learning assessments on which most students from developing countries do not excel. Evidence has shown that merely increasing resource allocation without also introducing institutional reforms in the education sector will not increase equity or improve the quality of education. One way to decentralize decision-making power in education is known popularly as SBM. There are other names for this concept, but they all refer to the decentralization of authority from the central government to the school level. SBM emphasizes the individual school (represented by any combination of principals, teachers, parents, students, and other members of the school community) as the main decision-making authority, and holds that this shift in the formulating of decisions will lead to improvement in the delivery of education.

Linking Education Policy to Labor Market Outcomes

Education plays a central role in preparing individuals to enter the labor force, as well as equipping them with the skills to engage in lifelong learning experiences. The objective of this study is to review what is known about the role of education in improving labor market outcomes, with a particular focus on policy considerations for developing countries. The report presents findings from current literature on the topic, which offers new ways of looking at the returns to education, together with evidence from four original data analysis and background studies of education and labor issues in Ghana and Pakistan. Country studies on Ghana and Pakistan are used to substantiate findings of the literature and illustrate the heterogeneity of education labor market linkages across regions. These countries were chosen because they are representative of two of the poorest regions of the world and because their inclusion in the analysis complements ongoing World Bank work on education and labor market issues in those countries. This report offers two types of findings: those relevant to the content of educational policies and those relevant to the framework for educational policy making.

Analyzing the impact of legislation on child labor in Pakistan

This paper exploits a natural experiment approach to identify the impact of legislation (Employment of Children Act 1991) in Pakistan on participation of children in the labor markets. The law prohibits employment of children less than 14 years of age in sectors other than agriculture or household enterprises. With micro-data, making use of regression discontinuity data design, the study finds some evidence that the Employment of Children Act 1991 helped in reducing the employment of children immediately after its implementation.