Test after test shows that kids in developing countries hardly learn anything (useful) even after spending years in school. Then does it make sense to force them into school using conditional cash transfer? Asks Prof. Lant Pritchett in this very interesting blog.
Some excerpts:
Data from the 2005 India Human Development Survey (Desai, Dubey, Vanneman, and Banerji 2008) show that 29 percent of parents report their child was “beaten or pinched” in government schools in the previous month. Worse, a child from the poorest group of households is almost twice as likely to be beaten or pinched in a government school than a child from the richest group of households. This is in contrast to private schools which show no income favoritism in beating.
…if somehow UP in 2009 had been able to replace its regular teachers making around 11,000 rupees a month with contract teachers working for 3000 rupees a month that UP could have saved more than a billion dollars… This replacement of regular with contract teachers would appear to double child learning per year as the estimated “contract teacher” impact on learning… is roughly the same as an additional year with a regular teacher.
Prof. Lant Pritchett is one of the most interesting economists of our time, and somewhat controversial too. He wrote the toxic World Bank memo commonly attributed to Larry Summers. Summers just signed it as the Chief Economist of the Bank.
Prof. Pritchett has a cock-eyed view on most development issues. For example, he is not that excited about universal schooling. Check out his forthcoming book, The Rebirth of Education: From Universal Schooling to Universal Learning, for his views on this issue.
Nor does he share his fellow economists’s enthusiasm for conditional cash transfer (CCT).
“Adding conditionality to cash transfer is good politics..”.
It many not be good economics though.
The genius of the CCTs in Mexico and in Brazil was not about how to get kids in school…Many of these transfers were conditioned on the enrollment of children in age groups with near-universal enrollment. (In Brazil in 2001, for example, enrollment at ages 9–12 exceeded 95%.).
