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Improving the quality of primary education in latin America and the Caribbean — Toward the 21st Century
442
Economics of Education Review
to generalize the findings. The schools in Clotfelter’s study are three prominent research universities (Harvard, Duke, and the University of Chicago) and one excellent liberal arts college (Carleton). The schools involved provided detailed budgetary data at the institutional level, as well as more detailed data for selected departments. These departmental data included not only spending and revenue information, but also data on class sizes and teaching assignments. Following a thoughtful review of developments in American higher education that have made college costs such a focus of attention, the bulk of Clotfelter’s narrative is devoted to a patient and meticulous analysis of these data for years in the early 1980’s and 1990’s - the exact years depending on data availability at the individual institutions. Clotfelter finds for the most part that the sources of increases in real costs at the elite colleges and universities are rather diffuse. At root, universities are driven by a search for excellence that encourages greater spending whenever revenues are available to support it. This ever-present tendency will produce rapid run-ups in college costs whenever circumstances allow--and in the 1980’s, with rising returns to higher education and strong growth in the incomes of the wealthy families who are the full-tuition payers at elite the circumstances certainly colleges and universities, allowed. About a fifth of the increase in real college costs can be attributed to higher prices for faculty and other inputs; the rest is spread among various forms of program expansion, personnel upgrades, and administrative expansion. The closest thing to a smoking gun Clotfelter turns up in investigating the causes of cost increases is the considerable decline in teaching loads for full time faculty in recent decades. His analysis across representative departments in his four institutions from 1976-77 to 1991-92 finds a decline in average numbers of courses taught in virtually every case. At the research universities he studies, the typical natural scientist teaches on average less than 1.5 undergraduate courses per year. There are, to be sure, significant variations across institutions, with Harvard having generally the lowest teaching loads. Not surprisingly, Carleton faculty teach substantially more courses per year than those at research universities, with the liberal arts faculty often teaching two or three more courses than their research university counterparts. Even at Carleton, nonetheless, teaching loads have fallen significantly since the mid-1970’s. The decline in teaching loads has not, it turns out, led to an increase in average class size. Rather, colleges and universities have added to the ranks of teachers (sometimes through hiring graduate students or part-timers) as full-time teaching loads have declined. Here, then, is a significant source of real cost increases: with lower teaching loads, a college has to pay more faculty to mount the same number of courses. Clotfelter rightly resists the temptation to find here clear evidence of waste or growing inefficiency in “elite” higher education. Clotfelter emphasizes the point that lower teaching loads have accompanied greater research efforts. (He gives less attention to the possibility that lower teaching loads might also lead to greater teaching effort and hence learning per course.) And here we come up against the difficulty that, as I noted at the outset, Clotfelter is unable to overcome. How are we to judge whether the greater output of research (or of teaching quality) that accompanies lower teaching loads is “worth it”: how do we, in other words, evaluate the output of the university? This is plainly an important, and deep, question. Unfortunately, nothing in the data Clotfelter can deploy provides evidence to answer it. Along with the rich data and analysis Clotfelter provides on sources of change in higher education costs comes some fascinating comparative analysis of different ways of providing high quality undergraduate education. A liberal arts college like Carleton produces an undergraduate education
very differently from a Duke or a Harvard, even though their “products” sell to quite similar customers at quite similar prices. Clotfelter shows this in a particularly striking way through his calculation of “average class size.” Rather than taking a simple average of the size of different classes, he calculates class size by examining the size of the class taken by an average student. A simple example will illustrate. Consider a uniersity with 2,750 students, each taking four courses. Half the classes enroll 100 students each; the other half enroll IO students each. On conventional accounting the average class size is 55. But of the 10,000 course enrollments, only 1,000 are in small classes. Over ninety percent of the time the course experienced by a student is a course of 100 students, and thus the average class size, weighted by student, is 90.9. Calculated in this unusual, but perfectly sensible, way, the differences in class sizes across these schools are quite stunning. In the social sciences, for example, the average class size at Carleton was 24, compared with 80 at Duke, 242 at Harvard, and 38 at Chicago. Differences like these raise another puzzling question. In a world where it is hard for technologies as similar as Betamax and VHS, or Windows and Macintosh, to coexist, how is it possible for undergraduate educations that sell for essentially the same price to be produced in such sharply different ways? Clotfelter does not pretend to answer this or the many other deep questions his work poses. But his careful, thoughtful, detailed, and balanced analysis allows such questions to be framed with much greater precision than before. In this and other respects, his book makes an important contribution to our understanding. MICHAEL
S. MCPHERSON Macalesrer College
PII:SO272-7757(98)00010-7 Improving the Quality of Primary Education in Latin America and the Caribbean Toward the 21st Century. LAURENCE, WOLFF, ERNEST0 SCHIEFELBEIN and JORGE VALENZUELA. (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Discussion Paper No. 257, 1994). iv + 155 pp. Price: U.S.$10.95 WORLD BANK books
and discussion papers are not known for their theoretical rigor, methodological precision, or elegance of presentation; they are expected to focus on relevant issues, be thematically profound, and provide reasonable recommendations which are derived logically from the inquiry and have a measurable impact. This work is no exception. Its scope is broad, as it is based on information from nineteen Latin American and Caribbean nations. Obvious differences in language, population size, physical infrastructure, pedagogical philosophies, and statistical reporting, just to name a few, hamper the probe. Yet the authors succeed in developing comparable standards, reporting on specific countries without losing regional perspective, and transcending their somehow boring data management to establish a sound, systematic analytical pattern--justification for topic, assessment of current situation, and recommendation of strategies for reform. An alarming empirical observation serves as the study’s point of departure: Primary education in Latin America and the Caribbean continues to show inadequate achievement in spite of significant increases in public expenditures on the subsector. Such inadequacy is evinced by poor learning outcomes and low levels of school completion which inevitably
443
Book Reviews result from an extremely high (29 percent) grade repetition rate, especially affecting undernourished children. The study determines that excessive repetition is brought about by low quality of inputs into the system--school and classroom features, educational materials, teacher characteristics, didactic practices, management, student experiences, and health status. Of these, three are identified as fundamental for the improvement of primary education, and a considerable amount of effort is devoted to their analysis. They are early childhood development, textbooks and teaching materials, and teachers and their classroom behavior. The members of the World Bank team point out that the first few years of life are critical in the formation of intelligence, personality, and social behavior. Investments in early childhood development programs, they argue, yield high rates of return--cost savings to society through reductions in dropout and repetition rates later on in grades l-6; fewer inequalities, including less unemployment and delinquency; and increased productivity of care-givers by means of allowing more female labor force participation. Recommendations here include targeting programs to lower-income and at-risk children; encouraging partnerships of govemments, NGOs, and communities; and integrating nutrition and health contents of programs with education. The authors charge that, while educational materials are highly cost-effective, the provision of textbooks in Latin America and the Caribbean generally suffers from poor management, improper evaluation and selection, inappropriate physical specifications, poor content quality, and inconsistency with the curriculum. More often than not, current textbooks fail to incorporate modem pedagogical practices and provide adequate guidance to teachers. They recommend not only improving the content quality of textbooks, but also combining them with workbooks, library resources, and materials created by teachers for specific instances using photocopiers, word processors, etc. Wolff and his colleagues blame teachers and their classroom behavior for many of the structural problems of primary education, pointing out that morale is low in many countries because of insufficient salaries, excessive bureaucracy, and political appointments to administrative jobs. Classroom discipline is a problem, and teaching time is constrained by routine procedures, a very short school day, frequent strikes, and teacher absences. In the relatively brief teacher-student interaction time available, expository material is often presented out of sequence or without regard to students’ particular concerns or responses. Alternative methods such as cooperative learning, individual instruction, and free writing are rarely used. The authors stress the need to develop new teaching strategies which allow students to integrate broad patterns of learning and encourage them to participate overtly and repeatedly through activities that involve problem solving, decision making, research reports, and construction of some product. The heterogeneous composition of many rural classrooms, plus frequent student absenteeism on account of harvest time, family crises, and informal work opportunities, make small-group instruction both appropriate and effective. After suggesting that Latin America is under-investing in its primary education, the rest of the work is devoted to discussing financing strategies. An argument is made for focusing on children’s priorities and improving the learning environment rather than dwelling on bureaucratic matters or intermediary clients. Challenging, albeit feasible, recommendations for governments include making parents defray a portion of the costs of didactic materials; increasing slightly the average number of pupils per teacher as a costsaving measure; ensuring that real teachers’ salaries do not deteriorate further; targeting improvements on children in rural areas, indigenous groups, and urban slums; and allocating a significant budget portion to research, information systems, and pilot programs. Other, less realistic recommendations are geared toward firing redundant staff and
inoperative teachers. Whatever the courses of action eventually implemented, the authors recognize the necessity of building a consensus for change. It is essential that political and educational leaders convince their constituents of the merits of long-term investment rather than setting only short-term goals. MANUEL J. CARVAJAL Florida International University
PII:SO272-7757(98)00009-0 Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality. By DALE
BALLOU and MICHAEL PODGURSKY. Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1997. 184~~. Price: US$15 (paper), $25 (cloth) USING VARIOUSmeasures of teacher quality, and various statistical tests, Ballou and Podgursky conclude that substantial increases in the real wages paid by public schools during the 1980s did little to improve teacher quality. The authors then model the teacher labor market to explain the relatively disappointing results. Finally, they recommend private-sector practices as a way to achieve better results. In chapters 2 and 3, Ballou and Podgursky report the results of a natural experiment, when during the 1980s public-school salaries increased rapidly relative to reference groups. The authors seek evidence that the quality of teacher recruits was improved by these pay increases, seeking improvements relative to older teachers along several dimensions. The authors also stratify the sample into high-, medium-, and low-increase states for evidence of differential pay impacts on quality. The results of increased pay seem modest and mixed. For example, the proportion of new teachers graduated from “above average” colleges is greater than of older teachers by the end of the 1980s. but the proportion of recruits from the most “selective” colleges is not greater. One positive sign was that far more recruits at decade-end held math or science degrees than did older teachers (I 1.7 percent vs. 7.9 percent); but it is difficult to conclude that higher relative pay was the cause. States with only moderate pay increases employed more math and science majors than the states with the largest pay improvements. In sum, improvements are small and hard to attribute to pay improvements. Ballou and Podgursky are careful within the limits of their data to check for factors that could have biased their conclusions. However, even the best natural experiment is not a controlled experiment. One must wonder, for example, whether the potential impact of pay improvement was diminished by the polemic against public education waged by the Reagan administration. Or, did increased non-teaching opportunities for women and minorities during the 1980s hurt teacher recruitment in ways that could not be fully captured by a relative pay variable? Finally, was the pay improvement of the 1980s a statistical artifact? Figure 4.1 in the book reveals that relative pay indeed increased between 1981 and 1991, but that I98 I was an abnormally low year; indeed, the same figure shows 1991 and 1976 pay to be about the same. In short, results from natural experiments are rarely conclusive. In the middle chapters, the authors model the publicschool labor market to explain their results. The essential elements of the model are 1) that the highest-quality teacher recruits are sensitive to both relative pay and the probability of obtaining a job, and 2) that higher relative pay reduces job openings by reducing the turnover of the existing teacher force. The result is that a reduction in job openings negates
Economics of Education Review
to generalize the findings. The schools in Clotfelter’s study are three prominent research universities (Harvard, Duke, and the University of Chicago) and one excellent liberal arts college (Carleton). The schools involved provided detailed budgetary data at the institutional level, as well as more detailed data for selected departments. These departmental data included not only spending and revenue information, but also data on class sizes and teaching assignments. Following a thoughtful review of developments in American higher education that have made college costs such a focus of attention, the bulk of Clotfelter’s narrative is devoted to a patient and meticulous analysis of these data for years in the early 1980’s and 1990’s - the exact years depending on data availability at the individual institutions. Clotfelter finds for the most part that the sources of increases in real costs at the elite colleges and universities are rather diffuse. At root, universities are driven by a search for excellence that encourages greater spending whenever revenues are available to support it. This ever-present tendency will produce rapid run-ups in college costs whenever circumstances allow--and in the 1980’s, with rising returns to higher education and strong growth in the incomes of the wealthy families who are the full-tuition payers at elite the circumstances certainly colleges and universities, allowed. About a fifth of the increase in real college costs can be attributed to higher prices for faculty and other inputs; the rest is spread among various forms of program expansion, personnel upgrades, and administrative expansion. The closest thing to a smoking gun Clotfelter turns up in investigating the causes of cost increases is the considerable decline in teaching loads for full time faculty in recent decades. His analysis across representative departments in his four institutions from 1976-77 to 1991-92 finds a decline in average numbers of courses taught in virtually every case. At the research universities he studies, the typical natural scientist teaches on average less than 1.5 undergraduate courses per year. There are, to be sure, significant variations across institutions, with Harvard having generally the lowest teaching loads. Not surprisingly, Carleton faculty teach substantially more courses per year than those at research universities, with the liberal arts faculty often teaching two or three more courses than their research university counterparts. Even at Carleton, nonetheless, teaching loads have fallen significantly since the mid-1970’s. The decline in teaching loads has not, it turns out, led to an increase in average class size. Rather, colleges and universities have added to the ranks of teachers (sometimes through hiring graduate students or part-timers) as full-time teaching loads have declined. Here, then, is a significant source of real cost increases: with lower teaching loads, a college has to pay more faculty to mount the same number of courses. Clotfelter rightly resists the temptation to find here clear evidence of waste or growing inefficiency in “elite” higher education. Clotfelter emphasizes the point that lower teaching loads have accompanied greater research efforts. (He gives less attention to the possibility that lower teaching loads might also lead to greater teaching effort and hence learning per course.) And here we come up against the difficulty that, as I noted at the outset, Clotfelter is unable to overcome. How are we to judge whether the greater output of research (or of teaching quality) that accompanies lower teaching loads is “worth it”: how do we, in other words, evaluate the output of the university? This is plainly an important, and deep, question. Unfortunately, nothing in the data Clotfelter can deploy provides evidence to answer it. Along with the rich data and analysis Clotfelter provides on sources of change in higher education costs comes some fascinating comparative analysis of different ways of providing high quality undergraduate education. A liberal arts college like Carleton produces an undergraduate education
very differently from a Duke or a Harvard, even though their “products” sell to quite similar customers at quite similar prices. Clotfelter shows this in a particularly striking way through his calculation of “average class size.” Rather than taking a simple average of the size of different classes, he calculates class size by examining the size of the class taken by an average student. A simple example will illustrate. Consider a uniersity with 2,750 students, each taking four courses. Half the classes enroll 100 students each; the other half enroll IO students each. On conventional accounting the average class size is 55. But of the 10,000 course enrollments, only 1,000 are in small classes. Over ninety percent of the time the course experienced by a student is a course of 100 students, and thus the average class size, weighted by student, is 90.9. Calculated in this unusual, but perfectly sensible, way, the differences in class sizes across these schools are quite stunning. In the social sciences, for example, the average class size at Carleton was 24, compared with 80 at Duke, 242 at Harvard, and 38 at Chicago. Differences like these raise another puzzling question. In a world where it is hard for technologies as similar as Betamax and VHS, or Windows and Macintosh, to coexist, how is it possible for undergraduate educations that sell for essentially the same price to be produced in such sharply different ways? Clotfelter does not pretend to answer this or the many other deep questions his work poses. But his careful, thoughtful, detailed, and balanced analysis allows such questions to be framed with much greater precision than before. In this and other respects, his book makes an important contribution to our understanding. MICHAEL
S. MCPHERSON Macalesrer College
PII:SO272-7757(98)00010-7 Improving the Quality of Primary Education in Latin America and the Caribbean Toward the 21st Century. LAURENCE, WOLFF, ERNEST0 SCHIEFELBEIN and JORGE VALENZUELA. (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Discussion Paper No. 257, 1994). iv + 155 pp. Price: U.S.$10.95 WORLD BANK books
and discussion papers are not known for their theoretical rigor, methodological precision, or elegance of presentation; they are expected to focus on relevant issues, be thematically profound, and provide reasonable recommendations which are derived logically from the inquiry and have a measurable impact. This work is no exception. Its scope is broad, as it is based on information from nineteen Latin American and Caribbean nations. Obvious differences in language, population size, physical infrastructure, pedagogical philosophies, and statistical reporting, just to name a few, hamper the probe. Yet the authors succeed in developing comparable standards, reporting on specific countries without losing regional perspective, and transcending their somehow boring data management to establish a sound, systematic analytical pattern--justification for topic, assessment of current situation, and recommendation of strategies for reform. An alarming empirical observation serves as the study’s point of departure: Primary education in Latin America and the Caribbean continues to show inadequate achievement in spite of significant increases in public expenditures on the subsector. Such inadequacy is evinced by poor learning outcomes and low levels of school completion which inevitably
443
Book Reviews result from an extremely high (29 percent) grade repetition rate, especially affecting undernourished children. The study determines that excessive repetition is brought about by low quality of inputs into the system--school and classroom features, educational materials, teacher characteristics, didactic practices, management, student experiences, and health status. Of these, three are identified as fundamental for the improvement of primary education, and a considerable amount of effort is devoted to their analysis. They are early childhood development, textbooks and teaching materials, and teachers and their classroom behavior. The members of the World Bank team point out that the first few years of life are critical in the formation of intelligence, personality, and social behavior. Investments in early childhood development programs, they argue, yield high rates of return--cost savings to society through reductions in dropout and repetition rates later on in grades l-6; fewer inequalities, including less unemployment and delinquency; and increased productivity of care-givers by means of allowing more female labor force participation. Recommendations here include targeting programs to lower-income and at-risk children; encouraging partnerships of govemments, NGOs, and communities; and integrating nutrition and health contents of programs with education. The authors charge that, while educational materials are highly cost-effective, the provision of textbooks in Latin America and the Caribbean generally suffers from poor management, improper evaluation and selection, inappropriate physical specifications, poor content quality, and inconsistency with the curriculum. More often than not, current textbooks fail to incorporate modem pedagogical practices and provide adequate guidance to teachers. They recommend not only improving the content quality of textbooks, but also combining them with workbooks, library resources, and materials created by teachers for specific instances using photocopiers, word processors, etc. Wolff and his colleagues blame teachers and their classroom behavior for many of the structural problems of primary education, pointing out that morale is low in many countries because of insufficient salaries, excessive bureaucracy, and political appointments to administrative jobs. Classroom discipline is a problem, and teaching time is constrained by routine procedures, a very short school day, frequent strikes, and teacher absences. In the relatively brief teacher-student interaction time available, expository material is often presented out of sequence or without regard to students’ particular concerns or responses. Alternative methods such as cooperative learning, individual instruction, and free writing are rarely used. The authors stress the need to develop new teaching strategies which allow students to integrate broad patterns of learning and encourage them to participate overtly and repeatedly through activities that involve problem solving, decision making, research reports, and construction of some product. The heterogeneous composition of many rural classrooms, plus frequent student absenteeism on account of harvest time, family crises, and informal work opportunities, make small-group instruction both appropriate and effective. After suggesting that Latin America is under-investing in its primary education, the rest of the work is devoted to discussing financing strategies. An argument is made for focusing on children’s priorities and improving the learning environment rather than dwelling on bureaucratic matters or intermediary clients. Challenging, albeit feasible, recommendations for governments include making parents defray a portion of the costs of didactic materials; increasing slightly the average number of pupils per teacher as a costsaving measure; ensuring that real teachers’ salaries do not deteriorate further; targeting improvements on children in rural areas, indigenous groups, and urban slums; and allocating a significant budget portion to research, information systems, and pilot programs. Other, less realistic recommendations are geared toward firing redundant staff and
inoperative teachers. Whatever the courses of action eventually implemented, the authors recognize the necessity of building a consensus for change. It is essential that political and educational leaders convince their constituents of the merits of long-term investment rather than setting only short-term goals. MANUEL J. CARVAJAL Florida International University
PII:SO272-7757(98)00009-0 Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality. By DALE
BALLOU and MICHAEL PODGURSKY. Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1997. 184~~. Price: US$15 (paper), $25 (cloth) USING VARIOUSmeasures of teacher quality, and various statistical tests, Ballou and Podgursky conclude that substantial increases in the real wages paid by public schools during the 1980s did little to improve teacher quality. The authors then model the teacher labor market to explain the relatively disappointing results. Finally, they recommend private-sector practices as a way to achieve better results. In chapters 2 and 3, Ballou and Podgursky report the results of a natural experiment, when during the 1980s public-school salaries increased rapidly relative to reference groups. The authors seek evidence that the quality of teacher recruits was improved by these pay increases, seeking improvements relative to older teachers along several dimensions. The authors also stratify the sample into high-, medium-, and low-increase states for evidence of differential pay impacts on quality. The results of increased pay seem modest and mixed. For example, the proportion of new teachers graduated from “above average” colleges is greater than of older teachers by the end of the 1980s. but the proportion of recruits from the most “selective” colleges is not greater. One positive sign was that far more recruits at decade-end held math or science degrees than did older teachers (I 1.7 percent vs. 7.9 percent); but it is difficult to conclude that higher relative pay was the cause. States with only moderate pay increases employed more math and science majors than the states with the largest pay improvements. In sum, improvements are small and hard to attribute to pay improvements. Ballou and Podgursky are careful within the limits of their data to check for factors that could have biased their conclusions. However, even the best natural experiment is not a controlled experiment. One must wonder, for example, whether the potential impact of pay improvement was diminished by the polemic against public education waged by the Reagan administration. Or, did increased non-teaching opportunities for women and minorities during the 1980s hurt teacher recruitment in ways that could not be fully captured by a relative pay variable? Finally, was the pay improvement of the 1980s a statistical artifact? Figure 4.1 in the book reveals that relative pay indeed increased between 1981 and 1991, but that I98 I was an abnormally low year; indeed, the same figure shows 1991 and 1976 pay to be about the same. In short, results from natural experiments are rarely conclusive. In the middle chapters, the authors model the publicschool labor market to explain their results. The essential elements of the model are 1) that the highest-quality teacher recruits are sensitive to both relative pay and the probability of obtaining a job, and 2) that higher relative pay reduces job openings by reducing the turnover of the existing teacher force. The result is that a reduction in job openings negates