2,922,972 research outputs found

    Teacher shortages, teacher contracts and their impact on education in Africa

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    Primary school enrolment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, many countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed-term) contracts typically implying considerably lower salaries and a sharply reduced duration of professional training. While this policy has led to a boost of primary enrolment, there is a concern about a loss in the quality of education. In this paper we analyse the impact on educational quality, by estimating nonparametrically the quantile treatment effects for Niger, Togo and Mali, based on very informative data, comparable across these countries. We find that contract teachers do relatively better for low ability children in low grades than for high ability children in higher grades. When positive treatment effects were found, they tended to be more positive at the low to medium quantiles; when negative effects were found they tended to be more pronounced at the high ability quantiles. Hence, overall it seems that contract teachers do a relatively better job for teaching students with learning difficulties than for teaching the more advanced children. This implies that contract teachers tend to reduce inequalities in student outcomes. --

    Estimating Structural Models of Equilibrium and Cognitive Hierarchy Thinking in the Field: The Case of Withheld Movie Critic Reviews

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    Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. Because the unreviewed movies tend to be below average in quality, this practice provides a useful setting in which to test models of limited strategic thinking: Do moviegoers seem to realize that no review is a sign of low quality? A companion paper showed that in a set of all widely released movies in 2000–2009, cold opening produces a significant 20%–30% increase in domestic box office revenue, which is consistent with moviegoers overestimating quality of unreviewed movies (perhaps due to limited strategic thinking). This paper reviews those findings and provides two models to analyze this data: an equilibrium model and a behavioral cognitive hierarchy model that allows for differing levels of strategic thinking between moviegoers and movie studios. The behavioral model fits the data better, because moviegoer parameters are relatively close to those observed in experimental subjects. These results suggests that limited strategic thinking rather than equilibrium reasoning may be a better explanation for naïve moviegoer behavior

    Maternal and perinatal outcomes by planned place of birth among women with low-risk pregnancies in high-income countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis

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    © 2018 The Author(s) Background: The comparative safety of different birth settings is widely debated. Comparing research across high-income countries is complex, given differences in maternity service provision, data discrepancies, and varying research techniques and quality. Studies of births planned at home or in birth centres have reported both better and poorer outcomes than planned hospital births. Previous systematic reviews have focused on outcomes from either birth centres or home births, with inconsistent attention to quality appraisal. Few have attempted to synthesise findings. Objective: To compare maternal and perinatal outcomes from different places of birth via a systematic review of high-quality research, and meta-analysis of appropriate data (Prospero registration CRD42016042291). Design: Reviewers searched CINAHL, Embase, Maternity and Infant Care, Medline and PsycINFO databases to identify studies comparing selected outcomes by place of birth among women with low-risk pregnancies in high-income countries. They critically appraised identified studies using an instrument specific to birth place research and then combined outcome data via meta-analysis, using RevMan software. Findings: Twenty-eight articles met inclusion criteria, yielding comparative data on perinatal mortality, mode of birth, maternal morbidity and/or NICU admissions. Meta-analysis indicated that women planning hospital births had statistically significantly lower odds of normal vaginal birth than in other planned settings. Women experienced severe perineal trauma or haemorrhage at a lower rate in planned home births than in obstetric units. There were no statistically significant differences in infant mortality by planned place of birth, although most studies had limited statistical power to detect differences for rare outcomes. Differences in location, context, quality and design of identified studies render results subject to variation. Conclusions and implications for practice: High-quality evidence about low-risk pregnancies indicates that place of birth had no statistically significant impact on infant mortality. The lower odds of maternal morbidity and obstetric intervention support the expansion of birth centre and home birth options for women with low-risk pregnancies

    An Exploratory Study Comparing a Low Income Black Dominant Urban School to a Low Income White Dominant Urban School in Terms of School Quality

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    Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Urban Schools are often judge on the perceived shortcomings of students’ academic skills and family social economic status. This image is judged more negatively when students are mainly Black students from low-income homes. One of the main sources of that judgement is the overall letter grade each school receives as part of state accountability systems. When urban schools have a preponderance of low income white students (LIW) with higher letter grades than urban schools with a preponderance of Black students from low income homes (LIB), the typical conclusion is that the LIW schools are “better” than the LIB schools. To see if this is validated in other areas of schooling, I selected four areas that it would be possible to use to “compare” in an exploratory fashion these two types of urban schools. Those four are: 1) teacher quality, 2) AP enrollment and completion data, 3) technology usage, and 4) graduation rates, for all of which data is available and/or can be collected. Thus, I will be exploring whether the school’s letter grade does distort the understanding or perception of quality for these two types of schools. The findings of the study indicated that the LIB urban high school was not equal or better than LIW urban high school. Even though there was growth in the four focus areas and in the state accountability grade for LIB urban high school, the LIW urban high school outperformed the LIB urban high school in all areas. This study also confirmed that the LIB urban high schools continue to have the less effective teachers in the classrooms, which leads to little to no change in educational quality

    Can ‘New Welfare’ Address Poverty through More and Better Jobs?

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    New welfare has been prominent in recent European social policy debates. It involves mobilising more people into paid work, improving human capital and ensuring fairer access to opportunities. This programme is attractive to business (more workers, better human capital and reduced social conflict to enhance productivity and profitability) and to citizens (more widely accessible job-opportunities with better rewards): a relatively low-cost approach to the difficulties governments face in maintaining support and meeting social goals as inequalities widen. The general move towards ‘new welfare’ gathered momentum during the past two decades, given extra impetus by the 2007-9 recession and subsequent stagnation. While employment rates rose during the prosperous years before the crisis, there was no commensurate reduction in poverty. Over the same period the share of economic growth returned to labour fell, labour markets were increasingly de-regulated and inequality increased. This raises the question of whether new welfare’s economic (higher employment, improved human capital) and social (better job quality and incomes) goals may come into conflict. This paper examines data for 17 European countries over the period 2001 to 2007. It shows that new welfare is much more successful at achieving higher employment than at reducing poverty, even during prosperity, and that the approach pays insufficient attention to structural factors, such as the falling wage share, and to institutional issues, such as labour market deregulation

    Teacher Shortages, Teacher Contracts and their Impacton Education in Africa

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    Primary school enrolment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, manycountries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed-term) contracts typically implying considerably lower salaries and a sharply reduced duration of professional training. While this policy has led to a boost of primary enrolment, there is a concern about a loss in the quality of education. In this paper we analyse the impact on educational quality, by estimating nonparametrically the quantile treatment effects for Niger, Togo and Mali, based on very informative data, comparable across these countries. We find that contract teachers do relatively better for low ability children in low grades than for high ability children in higher grades. When positive treatment effects were found, they tended to be more positive at the low to medium quantiles; when negative effects were found they tended to be more pronounced at the high ability quantiles. Hence, overall it seems that contract teachers do a relatively better job for teaching students with learning difficulties than for teaching the ‘more advanced' children. This implies that contract teachers tend to reduce inequalities in student outcomes. At the same time, we also observe clear differences between the countries. We find that, overall, effects are positive in Mali, somewhat mixed in Togo (with positive effects in 2nd and negative effects in 5th grade) and negative in Niger. This ordering is consistent with theoretical expectations derived from a closer examination of the different ways of implementation of the contract teacher programme in the three countries. In Mali and, to some extent, in Togo, the contract teacher system works more through the local communities. This may have led to closer monitoring and more effective hiring of contract teachers. In Niger, the system was changed in a centralized way with all contract teachers being public employees, so that there is no reason to expect much impact on local monitoring. In addition, the extremely fast hiring of huge numbers of contract teachers may also have contributed to relatively poor performance in Niger. These results are expected to be relevant for other sub-Saharan African countries, too, as well as for the design of new contract teacher programmes in the future.Subsaharan Africa ; Primary school ; Enrolment ; Teachers ; Recruitment programme ; Civil servants ; Teacher training ; Quality of education ; Mali ; Togo ; Niger

    Virtuoso: Massive Multilingual Speech-Text Joint Semi-Supervised Learning for Text-To-Speech

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    This paper proposes Virtuoso, a massively multilingual speech-text joint semi-supervised learning framework for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) models. Existing multilingual TTS typically supports tens of languages, which are a small fraction of the thousands of languages in the world. One difficulty to scale multilingual TTS to hundreds of languages is collecting high-quality speech-text paired data in low-resource languages. This study extends Maestro, a speech-text joint pretraining framework for automatic speech recognition (ASR), to speech generation tasks. To train a TTS model from various types of speech and text data, different training schemes are designed to handle supervised (paired TTS and ASR data) and unsupervised (untranscribed speech and unspoken text) datasets. Experimental evaluation shows that 1) multilingual TTS models trained on Virtuoso can achieve significantly better naturalness and intelligibility than baseline ones in seen languages, and 2) they can synthesize reasonably intelligible and naturally sounding speech for unseen languages where no high-quality paired TTS data is available.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

    A Reduced-Reference Metric Based on the Interest Points in Color Images

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    28th Picture Coding Symposium (PCS 2010)In the last decade, an important research effort has been dedicated to quality assessment from the subjective and the objective points of view. The focus was mainly on Full Reference (FR) metrics because of the ability to compare to an original. Only few works were oriented to Reduced Reference (RR) or No Reference (NR) metrics, very useful for applications where the original image is not available such as transmission or monitoring. In this work, we propose an RR metric based on two concepts, the interest points of the image and the objects saliency on color images. This metric needs a very low amount of data (lower than 8 bytes) to be able to compute the quality scores. The results show a high correlation between the metric scores and the human judgement and a better quality range than well-known metrics like PSNR or SSIM. Finally, interest points have shown that they can predict the quality of color images
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