| Hey, readers, How good are schools at educating kids? This is one of the most important questions in global development and in US public policy. But though it's been researched extensively, I always come away from my reviews of the literature feeling a little dissatisfied. One problem is that many different interventions show really promising results — but those results almost never transfer from the site where the intervention was first tried to other sites. It's also really difficult to compare results between studies. Some measure how many years kids stay in school. Others measure how proficient they become in key school skills like literacy — but they often rely on local tests and report relative test scores compared to other students in the area, which makes it hard to tell how big the gains are in absolute terms. How do we compare an intervention that helps kids stay in school three years longer but barely addresses literacy rates to one that doesn't change years of schooling but makes that schooling higher quality? How do we compare boosting test scores by a standard deviation in Kenya to boosting scores by a standard deviation in the Philippines? That's why I was excited to see a new working paper from the World Bank Group that attempts to address this problem by defining a metric — learning-adjusted years of schooling — and then revisiting the evidence base for 150 education interventions to figure out which ones are most cost-effective at moving that metric. The result? Some educational interventions really stand out in their analysis. "Some of the most cost-effective interventions can deliver the equivalent of three years of high-quality education (i.e., three years of education in a high-performing country such as Singapore) for as little as $100 per child," the paper finds. Others achieve effectively nothing, with no measurable gains in learning-adjusted years of schooling. This doesn't solve all the problems with education intervention research — not even close. Education research will likely continue to be plagued by difficulty in getting similar results from interventions in different contexts. But if widely adopted, a metric like learning-adjusted years of schooling solves one of the major barriers to researchers learning from each others' results, and it identifies some particularly promising areas where education interventions should get a closer look. The most promising education interventions, the paper says, are "targeted information campaigns on benefits, costs and quality; interventions to target teaching instruction by learning level rather than grade (such as 'Teaching at the Right Level' interventions and tracking interventions); and improved pedagogy in the form of structured lesson plans with linked student materials, teacher professional development, and monitoring." To unpack all that a bit more: If students are in a class where they are being taught material that is too easy or too hard, they will not learn. Encouraging schools to place students based on what skills they have, then, is a highly cost-effective way to improve performance. If teachers do not know how to teach, students won't learn. So lesson plans, training for teachers, and monitoring to determine which teachers are doing a good job is highly cost-effective. Finally, explaining to parents and communities why education is important shows promise as a highly cost-effective way to increase the benefits of education (at least sometimes). Notably, some of the high-profile educational interventions the general public knows the most about don't make the list. Providing textbooks, for example, generally hasn't been beneficial in studies unless you provide effective lesson plans for teachers. Building schools is not a very cost-effective way to improve education, and scholarships for students to attend aren't either. Efforts to reduce class sizes, provide school uniforms, or give schools technology (without additional reforms) have no effect at all. Of course, the ineffectiveness of those other interventions is contingent on the conditions they're happening in. Keeping kids in school for more years may do a great deal for them if they have good instruction but might be worthless if quality instruction is not available. In low-income countries, many students attend school for years while still not mastering basic concepts. By the age of 10, the review points out, "90 percent of children in low-income countries still cannot read with comprehension." Keeping kids in school for longer will likely be much more effective once those schools are effective at teaching, so implementing the most promising reforms identified might open the door for other reforms, making them cost-effective when they aren't right now. At the same time, we should keep in mind that many education interventions, even ones that seem like a good idea and have preliminary evidence in favor, likely won't work out. In the US, philanthropists have tried again and again to reform education — and they've often made things worse. Education is complicated, requiring buy-in from teachers, parents, students, and local communities. Lots of interventions that seem promising won't work, and that's okay. The important thing is that we measure results and report them consistently, so researchers can learn from findings elsewhere and we can focus our efforts where they'll matter most for kids. —Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc | 
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