Developing countries strongly emphasize enhancing foundational reading skills, with the expectation that such improvements will catalyze the development of new cognitive abilities and lead to improved life outcomes. However, the relationship between early educational gains and later-life achievement...

The first SDG4 target is to both expand access to universal secondary school and to ensure that all children achieve minimum learning outcomes in primary school. To the extent that action must be prioritized, this article argues that achieving universal secondary education is both more feasible at s...

Exposure to school violence has been proven to be detrimental to human capital formation, but there is limited rigorous evidence about how to tackle this pervasive issue. This paper examines the impacts of a large-scale government intervention that aimed to improve school leaders’ skills to manage s...

Over two decades and dozens of countries, the United States Agency for International Development has refined a package of support for early-grade reading, often referred to as “structured pedagogy”, which includes textbooks, teacher training, coaching, and lesson plans.

School violence—physical, sexual, and psychological—is prevalent in many schools around the world. Because media coverage of current events can play an important role in shaping tolerance for school violence and policy responses, we examine 208 recent news items about school-related violence in the ...

Haiti is once more experiencing a crisis of instability and political unrest. The devastating 2010 earthquake was seen as a chance to break with the past and steer the nation in a new direction, but although some progress was made, it was short-lived, insufficient to establish a path for growth, une...

There is a non-trivial chance that ODA for non-humanitarian and climate finance will fall in absolute terms over the coming years and that aid will become increasingly focused on richer countries. The most promising strategy for bilateral ODA flows may be to increase the generosity of traditional do...