The Parable of the Visiting Impact Evaluation Expert

From globaldevelopment Mon Sep 16 2013, 17:00:12

Visitans Perito works at the World Bank as an education specialist, and has just set off on a two week mission to the country of Peripheria, a poor, land-locked former Soviet Republic in Central Asia, about which he knows very little, except that everyone seems to agree it has a totally dysfunctional public school system.

Perito's assignment is to help the Peripherian Ministry of Education design its new Five Year Plan to Achieve High Quality Universal Primary Education, 2014-2018. The key moment of his trip is a face-to-face meeting with the Minister, who pitches him on a new vision for the Five Year Plan that she would like the World Bank to help fund.

After several minutes of pleasantries and formalities, the Minister makes her pitch.

"The government of Peripheria has decided to hire 50,000 new civil service teachers," she says, "to fulfill our president's promise to raise our test scores to the level of Western Europe by 2018. We have listened to your sermons about evidence-based policy and hired an expert local consultant who did a regression analysis of our most recent Annual Primary Examination scores." She flips through a copy of the report on her desk and reads aloud: "After controlling for socio-economic characteristics, our findings imply that Peripherian public schools with class sizes 10 pupils below the national average of 63 pupils per teacher will score 0.7 standard deviations higher on the APE.' I think you will agree, this sounds like a promising investment for the World Bank, no, Mr. Perito?"

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