Trnsfrm Ed for Dev Implem Chng

1.5 Credits · Level: Graduate

The goals of this course are to prepare students with the skills to analyze education performance, advise education policymakers, and deploy the evaluation techniques needed to generate new evidence on program innovations and policy reforms. The course will leave students with mastery of existing data and research evidence and a deeper capacity to present policymakers with succinct presentations of relevant evidence-based recommendations for transforming teaching and learning in their context. Policy advice would include a full understanding of implementation and political challenges. The course includes opportunities to talk directly to leading researchers (such as Eric Hanushek) and education reformers about their experience. The core premise of the course is that virtually all programs or policies aimed at raising student learning are mediated by the interaction of teachers and students in the classroom. We explore key policy issues developing countries face in improving student learning and other competencies (socioemotional and other 21st century skills) and ensuring the equity of schooling outcomes. We analyze how these outcomes can be measured and how policies and programs designed to improve them can be evaluated, with attention to differential impacts on students of different genders, ethnicity and geographic location. We review the latest global research on education system performance and recent country experience with systemic education reforms. We analyze in depth the global evidence that teachers are the most important in-school determinant of student learning, and the key policy levers education systems have for increasing the supply of effective teachers and motivating high performance. Given the political stakes around systemic education reform and the especially complex politics of teacher reforms, the course gives attention to the political dynamics of reform and includes an opportunity to interview reform leaders.