Last updated on May 24, 2015
If you have been paying any attention to development economics over the last 10 years, you know that education — to generalize quite a bit, how to increase school enrollment, and how to make sure children actually learn useful stuff — is one of the areas where development economists have learned the most, thanks to improved standards of causal identification.
In that spirit, two books were released just before Christmas on the topic of education in developing countries, both written by top scholars in that area. I have only browsed both books and have not yet read them carefully, but they are definitely in my to-read pile for the first half of 2014.
The first is my colleague Paul Glewwe’s (pronounced “gle-vee,” in case you’re wondering) Education Policy in Developing Countries, published by the University of Chicago Press in December. In this book, Paul reviews and summarizes the evidence as to what works best in terms of education policy for developing countries.
The second is Lant Pritchett’s The Rebirth of Education, published by the Center for Global Development in October. With a subtitle like “Schooling Ain’t Learning,” this book promises to be the more polemic of the two.