Since the first charter school law passed in 1991, U.S. charter schools have enjoyed steady and relatively rapid growth, now serving more than three million students nationally. In more than 58 cities, charter schools represent more than 20 percent of all public school enrollment. In seven cities, charter schools enroll more than 40 percent of…

Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this…

This report was produced for the 2012 Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers meeting in Mauritius. Its main purpose is to track the historical progress and likelihood of attainment of Education For All and education-specific Millennium Development Goals while also critically reviewing the methods used to track this progress. The analyses…

This paper documents the importance of continued investment in basic education and argues that investments need to be carefully targeted to address the constraints that limit the coverage and quality of education if they are to provide expected benefits. Part I begins with a discussion of the returns to investment in education. Part II then…

Madagascar is a poor, primarily rural country in which three-quarters of the population has subsisted below the poverty line for at least two decades. In view of the important role of education in the government's poverty reduction agenda, this report documents the current status of educational development in Madagascar and the key constraints on…