Four studies of education growth: inequality by wealth, age effects, sub-national learning differentials, and projections

This paper comprises four background studies for the Global Monitoring Report 2009. The studies analyze: changes in inequalities in enrolment by wealth of pupils; the effects of underage and overage pupils on school efficiency as measured by promotion, repetition and dropout; sub-national differentials of learning and the correlations with other measures of school quality and quantity; projections of primary TNER, secondary NER, and gender parity. The wealth study uses 206 household surveys from 61 countries from 1990-2006. The study confirms that in all countries, and all surveys, in this time period there has been an inequality of enrolment by pupil wealth; almost universally, the poorer the pupils, the lower the enrolment rates. The study also finds that these differentials have been declining over time, in part an artifact of overall enrolment increases, but in part also independent of enrolment and possibly the result of pro-poor school programs. The age study uses household survey data from 35 countries to calculate promotion, repetition, and dropout by age. The study finds that overage pupils tend to have higher promotion rates in early primary school, but under-perform in later years of primary and in secondary. Underage pupils have very high repetition rates in first grade suggesting an unmet need for kindergarten and pre-school services. The learning study uses assessments and exams from 25 countries and develops a method to assess subnational inequality across countries even when using different tests. In 6 of the 25 countries, there are exceptionally high sub-national differences of learning scores. In 9 of the 25 countries, learning is rather equal across the country. The extent and values of learning differentials are correlated to school entry, attendance, retention and pupil teacher ratios in some countries, but by no means is there a consistent relationship.