Global Education Policy Dashboard
This repository is for the Global Education Policy Dashboard team. Please contact our team at [email protected] with any questions.
- Master_Code: will contain a generic version of the code used to do sampling, data quality checks, cleaning, and analysis. The plan is update this code frequently, and then when new countries are added some template code is already available to get started.
- Country Specific Code: Each country will also have a code directory containing the code that has been tailored for that country. For example, Peru will have a directory containing the sampling code and any future cleaning code.
The github repo is readable by the World Bank Github group members, but writable only for users in the World Bank EduAnalytics team.
Country specific and generic code used to do sampling, clean data, do quality checks, and analysis are available in this repo.
Folders are organized by Country -> Year -> Code
Data is currently housed on our Dashboard team sharepoint folder, but will be migrated to a network drive when that is set up.
All Stata datasets or csv files are set to .gitignore, meaning they will not be uploaded onto github when things are pushed, so that no data is accidentally pushed .
Additionally, users may set up a password.R file to store passwords for the Survey Solutions API. The password.R file should be stored in the parent directory of your clone (i.e. something like C:\Users\wb{upi}\Documents\Github\GEPD). Files starting with password are included in the .gitignore file. If you aren't sure how to set one up, please contact Brian Stacy [email protected]. If a password.R file is not setup, it is no problem, but you will be prompted each time to enter a username and password when running an api.R file.
Policymakers in low- and middle-income countries who are working to improve student learning often find themselves flying blind. They see the budget that goes into education and (sometimes) the learning that students come out with, but they lack information on the crucial factors in between— the practices, policies, and politics—that drive those learning outcomes. The new Global Education Policy Dashboard initiative will fill that gap.
Many countries, despite having significantly increased access to education for their children and youth, now realize that they are facing a learning crisis. For instance, when grade 3 students in Nicaragua were tested in 2011, only half correctly solved 5 + 6. And in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, when grade 3 students were asked recently to read a sentence such as “The name of the dog is Puppy,” three-quarters could not answer what the dog’s name was. Examples like these from around the world underline that schooling is not the same as learning—even though education policy often assumes that it is.
The World Development Report 2018 argued that the learning crisis has both micro- and system-level causes: poor service delivery in schools and communities, driven by unhealthy politics and low bureaucratic capacity, mediated through policies that are not aligned toward learning for all. To tackle the crisis and improve student learning at scale, countries need to know where they stand on all three of these dimensions—practices (or service delivery), policies, and politics.
But providing such a systemwide overview requires better measurement. Many of these drivers of learning are not captured by existing administrative systems. And although new measurement tools capture some of those aspects well, no single instrument pulls together data on all these areas. This gap leaves policymakers in the dark about what is working and what isn’t.
To fill this gap, the World Bank, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development, is designing a Global Education Policy Dashboard, which will measure the drivers of learning outcomes in basic education around the world. In doing so, it will highlight gaps between current practice and what the evidence suggests would be most effective in promoting learning, and it will give governments a way to set priorities and track progress as they work to close those gaps. This collaboration will advance the goals of the Human Capital Project, a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.
The dashboard will start by focusing attention on education outcomes—learning and participation in primary school. The next set of indicators will measure the quality of service delivery, focusing on four key school-level ingredients of student learning: teaching, school management, technology for learning, and learner preparation.
In addition, the dashboard will measure deeper systemic drivers: the policies and politics that determine the quality of service delivery. The end goal is to have a set of indicators that is comprehensive but also focused so stakeholders can pay attention to what is really most important.
The dashboard will be implemented in 13 countries in 2019, with a goal of rapidly expanding coverage after lessons from the field have been incorporated.
Develop tools to collect data at all levels of the system on a regular basis. Because of the shortcomings of existing data on the drivers of learning, in its early stage the dashboard will rely primarily on data collected under this initiative, rather than just presenting existing data in a new framework. In each participating country, the initiative will deploy various new data-collection instruments, including a School Survey, an Expert Survey, and a Survey of Public Officials. This multilevel approach is necessary to gather data on all the drivers of learning, from the level of the learner to the level of the system. The aim is to develop lean and cost-effective instruments so the dashboard can be inexpensive enough to be applied repeatedly and to be scaled up after initial phasing.
Embed innovative measurement approaches in a coherent, system-wide framework. The dashboard approach combines the conceptual framework of the World Development Report 2018 with indicators derived from streamlined versions of the most current measurement tools. These tools include the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) initiative, Systems Approach for Better Results (SABER), Global Early Child Development Database (GECDD), World Management Survey, Bureaucracy Lab surveys, and others.
Present a user-friendly dashboard interface. After gathering data, the dashboard initiative will display the indicators in an easy-to-use interface, focusing attention on key constraints. The primary audience will be policymakers, placing a premium on a visual representation that illuminates key relationships and constraints on learning.
Make resources available for implementation in all developing countries. Along with developing the dashboard and implementing it in an initial set of 13 countries, the World Bank and partners will create tools and resources to make it easy for countries to use it to strengthen their own administrative systems. Ultimately, this will allow global scale-up to all developing countries that find it useful.