Around half of children in low-income countries have elevated blood lead levels. What role does lead play in explaining low educational outcomes in these settings?

Improving school quality in low- and middle-income countries is a global priority. One way to improve quality may be to improve the management skills of school leaders. In this systematic review, we analyze the impact of interventions targeting school leaders' management practices on student learnin...

The overarching theme of these episodes is the luck and privilege I’ve enjoyed—and my country has enjoyed—and the implications for my and my country’s responsibilities to the rest of the world. I was lucky to be born in America White and well-off; was lucky again as a baby boomer to enjoy the reprod...

In the fall of 1968, when I was 22 and starting the second year of a two-year master’s program at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington, DC, the man who would become my first husband told me about a college friend in New York needing $200 to help pay for an illegal but reas...

Can governments contract out school management at scale? In 2016 the Government of Punjab transferred management of over 4,000 failing primary schools to private operators. Schools remained free to students. Private operators received a government subsidy per enrolled student of less than half per-s...

Before I get to the origin of CGD I want to say something about the concept of “mission.” I attended Catholic schools straight through college, and though before I left college I had left behind being a Catholic, I had apparently internalized the idea of having a mission in life—as in the missionari...

The story opens in the summer of 1990, when I became the head of a small technical division on environment in the Latin America region of the World Bank. The vice-president of the region told me (in so many words) he wanted an economist to take charge of what he saw as a “too-green” group. I resiste...