It’s tricky to evaluate government education policies. Using the examples of three rigorous studies of three different education policies, this note aims to shed some light from the perspective of someone on the policy side on how, why, and when to evaluate government-led reforms.

Many countries’ systems of basic education are in “stall” condition. A recent paper of Beatty et al. (2018) uses information from the Indonesia Family Life Survey, a representative household survey that has been carried out in several waves with the same individuals since 2000 and...

This set includes data and Stata files to replicate the results in CGD Working Paper 279, “The High Return to Private Schooling in a Low-Income Country”

Using data from Kenya—a poor country with weak public institutions—the authors find a large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation.

This set includes the household survey data, standardized test score data, and the Stata files to replicate the results in CGD Working Paper 271, "Why Did Abolishing Fees Not Increase Public School Enrollment in Kenya?"

Previous studies suggest that abolishing user fees would increase enrollment in public schools, but the results of this research show that the opposite is true in Kenya.

Desmond Bermingham recaps the consensus from a CGD discussion about what to do about a hidden crisis in global education. He offers his top-12 tasks for delivery on global commitment to give all children a good education.