Aid and Universal Primary Education

Universal Primary Education (UPE) is one of the main objectives of development aid. However, very little empirical evidence of its effectiveness actually exists. Until very recently, the quality of available data was not sufficient to obtain robust results regarding the relationship between international aid and educational achievements. In this article, the latest, more disaggregated and more reliable data is used to study the relationship between aid to education and educational achievements. The focus here not only on educational variables in term of coverage, but also in term of equity and process. The year of Fast Track Initiative (FTI) endorsement is used as an original instrument to tackle the endogeneity problem of aid. Our results are very robust and indicate that aid to primary education has a strong effect on primary school enrollment and gender parity. A negative impact on repetitions rate is also indicated while no effect on the pupil teacher ratio can be observed. Diminishing return in the effectiveness of aid to primary education may also be highlighted. Finally, the governance variables do not appear to have an impact on this relationship.aid effectiveness;education;Sector-specific aid

Aid effectiveness in education sector of Pakistan

The main objective of this study is to examine the effectiveness of sector-specific foreign aid given to education sector and aggregate foreign aid on the national educational outcomes of Pakistan, respectively. --

Financing Higher Standards in Public Education: The Importance of Accounting for Educational Costs

Performance standards have been at the center of recent debates on educational reform. Many states have implemented new performance standards, often based on student test scores, and a district's state aid is sometimes linked to its success in meeting the standards. This focus on performance is designed primarily to promote better student achievement by holding schools accountable. However, a school's performance is influence not only by the actions of its administrators and teachers but also by factors outside its control, such as the nature of its student body. Thus, a focus on performance is inevitably unfair, especially to cities, unless it accounts for the impact on performance of factors outside the control of school officials. To be fair, school report cards and performance-based state aid systems must distinguish between poor performance based on external factors and on school inefficiency. Many state aid systems have taken one step in this direction by compensating districts with low wealth, a factor over which they have no control. However, school district performance is also influenced by the cost of education, which varies widely from district to district based on local wage rates, student characteristics, and other external factors. Existing state aid formulas either ignore these factors altogether or else use ad hoc corrections, such as "weighted pupil" counts, that account for them partially at best. In this policy brief, we explain why a performance focus and educational cost indexes must go hand in hand, discuss alternative methods for estimating educational cost indexes, and show how these cost indexes can be incorporated into a performance-based state aid program. We show, using data from New York State, that controlling for costs in the design of school aid formulas is crucial to enable central cities to reach educational adequacy standards.

New York State Competitive Grants: Creating a System of Education Winners and Losers

This study highlights the significant downside of the introduction of competitive grants into the New York school finance system. It makes a strong case that these grants have actually been substituted for aid programs, such as the Foundation Formula, which distribute school aid based on student need and district wealth. Key FindingsCompetitive grants create a system of educational winners and losers among students, instead the state should be guaranteeing all students access to high quality programs. Competitive grants are inequitable. Only 19 out of 202 high needs school districts even applied for funding through the competitive grants, whereas 100% of them would receive funding had this money been put through the foundation aid formula. While the competitive grants do prioritize high quality educational programs including academically excellent middle schools, college level courses in high school, career and technical education, and increasing the number of students graduating with Regents Diplomas with Advanced Designation, these exact types of programs have been cut from schools statewide as a result of state budget cuts. Test scores are the single largest factor in awarding competitive grants meaning that when students take tests they are competing with each other for access to high quality educational opportunities. Making schools compete for funding based upon test scores will result in more teaching to the test

Promoting Economic Mobility by Increasing Postsecondary Education

Explores policy options for expanding educational opportunities for low-income students to enhance upward economic mobility. Examines the effectiveness of student aid in promoting college completion and proposes a plan for better guidance and preparation

Education: The Key to Africa’s Future

Africa, a continent full of abundance and potential, is ironically hindered in desolation, deprivation, and chaos. The growth, future, and potential success of Africa is solely dependent on the education of its children. After identifying a number of educational barriers, defining the need for educational improvement, and documenting the efficiency of Western aid, this paper concludes that the West needs to recognize that it is the Africans who must ultimately save their own countries. However, Western programs and aid can help restore Africa when used thoughtfully and effectively. National programs and foreign funding must promote education that places value on the African “way of life,” assists the ‘people’ of Africa, and gives African children a sense of worth, hope, and acceptance in Christ

Local Government Budgeting: The Econometric Comparison of Political and Bureaucratic Models

The current paper presents a method of deciding the question of whether any given stage in the budget process is an example of the "political" or the "bureaucratic" model. We then use it to study local government spending on education. The basis for our method is the important difference between the effect of intergovernmental aid that is implied by the political budget model and by the bureaucratic budget model. According to the bureaucratic model, the effect of inter-governmental aid on each category of educational input (e.g., teachers' salaries, books, etc.) depends only on the change in total educational spending induced by the aid and not on the type of aid that causes the change in spending. In contrast, the political budget model implies that the overall expenditure increase is the result of separate decisions on each of the expenditure categories and that the changes in these expenditure categories will depend on the form of the intergovernmental aid. Our method of exploiting this difference is presented in detail below.

A New Test of Borrowing Constraints for Education

We discuss a simple model in which parents and children make investments in the children’s education, investments for other purposes, and parents can transfer cash to their children. We show that for an identifiable set of parent-child pairs, parents will rationally under-invest in their child’s education. For these parent-child pairs, additional financial aid will increase educational attainment. The model highlights an important feature of higher education finance, the "expected family contribution" (EFC) that is based on income, assets, and other factors. The EFC is neither legally guaranteed nor universally offered: Our model identifies the set of families that are disproportionately likely to not provide their full EFC. Using a common proxy for financial aid, we show, in data from the Health and Retirement Study, that financial aid increases the educational attainment of children whose families are disproportionately likely to under-invest in education. Financial aid has no effect on the educational attainment of children in other families. The theory and empirical evidence identifies a set of children who face quantitatively important borrowing constraints for higher education.

Moving Towards Educational Equity?: How is New York State's School Funding Reform Impacting Educational Equity on Long Island?

This report identifies the 11 Long Island districts with the most student poverty and compares them with the 11 districts with middle student poverty, and the 11 districts with the least student poverty. In addition to poverty, this report looks at the demographic composition of these districts, and percentage of English language learners. Historically on Long Island, as elsewhere, there has been a large funding gap between school districts with high poverty and those with little poverty. The funding gap, as examined by The Education Trust and others, documents the difference in educational opportunity between school districts. In order to make this calculation it is necessary to both examine expenditures per pupil and student need (as measured by the proportion of student poverty). Policy makers and researchers across the spectrum agree that it generally costs more to provide equivalent educational opportunity to students from poor households as those from middle class or wealthier households. This report factors student poverty into the measurement of the funding gap. The report examines the effectiveness since 2007 of different state school aid categories at closing the funding gap--specifically looking at foundation aid, high tax aid and all state operating aid as a whole. In addition, this report looks at student outcomes according to 8th grade English Language Arts and Math exams, graduation rates, Regents diploma rates, and college enrollment rates in order to evaluate whether there has been progress at closing the achievement gaps since funding reforms were instituted

Educational policy, policy appropriation and Grameen Bank higher education financial aid policy process

The paper talks about higher educational polices and their process of policy appropriations, policy as practices, policy as symbolic, policy as rituals, policy as myths, policy backward- mapping and policy-forward mapping, multi-stage policy implementation process, street-bureaucrats planners, and policy reform process. It critically looks at pros-and-corns of different educational policy theories and their applications in education, and the higher education student financial aid different policies, strategies and products and their impact on the college students. The paper also narrates the higher educational policies and methods of need-based, merit-based, means-test-based grants allocation and loan disbursement and their impact on student academic achievements. Moreover, it discusses the policy process model that has both agendas and multiple streams that consider looking at policy designing problems, solutions of the problems and their usefulness to SES students. Additionally, the paper narrates the Grameen Bank higher education student loan policy making process, although there is no higher education student financial aid services are not exist in Bangladesh. Literature reviews, conversations with higher education students, contextual analysis, and the author personal working experience incorporate here. The study finds for policy improvement, policy analysis is vital because policy analysis can explores usefulness of the policy for public well being and for effectiveness of the policy appropriation.Center for Social Economy Learning and Workplace, University of Toronto. -- York Center for Asia Research, York University. -- Indiana University Bloomington