Schools are available. In most countries, they are free, at least at the primary level. Most children enrolled. And yet in the various surveys that we have conducted around the world, child absentee rates vary between 14 and 50%. Building schools and hiring teachers is useless if there is no strong underlying demand for education; conversely, if there is real demand for skill, a demand for education will naturally emerge, and supply will follow.
Education is a subject of intense policy debate. As in the case of aid, the debate is not about whether education per se is good or bad (everyone probably agrees it is better to be educated than not). It centers instead on whether governments ought to, or know how to, intervene.
The quality of education is low because parents do not care enough about it, and they don’t because they know that the actual benefits (what economists call the “returns”) are low. When the benefits of education become high enough, enrollment will go up, without the state having to push it. People will send their children to private schools that will be set up for them, or if that is too expensive, they will demand the local governments set up schools. Since parents are able to respond to changes in the need for an educated labor force, the best education policy, for the demand is not education policy. Make it attractive to invest in business requiring educated labor and these will be a need for an educated force, and therefore a pressure to supply it. And then, since parents will start to really care about education they will also put pressure on teachers to deliver what they need. If public schools cannot provide quality education a private-school market will emerge. Competition in this market, will ensure that parents get the quality of schooling that they need for their children.
People ivest in education, as they invest in anything else, to make more money- in the form of increased earnings in the future. The problem with thinking of education as an investment is that parents do the investing and children get the benefits, sometimes much later. And though many children do, in effect, “repay” parents for the investment by taking care of them in old age, many others do so only reluctantly, or simply “default” abandoning their parents along the way.
Most parents are in a position of power relative to their children- they decide who goes to school, who stays home or goes out to work, and how their earnings are spent. Building schools and hiring teachers is a necessary first step to lower the cost of sending a child to school, but it may not be enough. In first world countries parents must take their kids to school until they can prove they can educate them by themselves. This is the idea behind the new tool of choice in education policy: the conditional cash transfer. PROGRESA (Mexico) offers money to poor parents but only if their children regularly attended school and the family sought preventive health care. It is a nudge, regardless of what the parents think of education.
Children in private schools learn more than children in public ones. The peculiar way in which expectations about what education is supposed to deliver distort what parents demand, what both public and private schools deliver, and what children achieve- and the colossal waste that ensues.
Poor families see education as a lottery ticket not a safe investment. Parents also tend to believe that the first years of education pay much less than the next ones. In reality, available estimates show that each year of education increases earnings more or less proportionally. And even for people who do not get a formal sector job, education seems to help: for example, educated farmers earned more during the Green Revolution than uneducated ones.
Kids grow up with low expectations of what the they can accomplish. Parents use words like “stupid” “smarter” making the children believe their categories. Not only parents but teachers also discriminate children based on they ethnics.
Parents who give up too soon, teachers who never tried to teach them, the students´ own diffidence. Some of theses people surely had the potential to be professors of economics or captains of industry. A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills and identifying talent.
First factor: focus on basic skills and commitment to the idea that every child can master them as long as she, and her teacher, expends enough effort on it. Second, it takes relatively little training to be an effective remedial teacher, at least in the lower grads. Third, there are large potential gains to be ha by reorganizing the curriculum and the classrooms to allow children to learn at their pace, and in particular to make sure the children who are lagging behind can focus on the basics. Finally, given that good teachers are hard to find and information technology is getting better and cheaper by the day, it seems rational to use it more. With this each child is able to set his or her own pace through the program.