A Harvard - World Bank Conference, October 5-6, 2005
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
 Papers & Presentations This conference focused on the public-private partnerships in education in the context of both developing and developed countries and the efficacy of such initiatives. The event attracted many of the foremost economists, political scientists, policymakers and practitioners with an interest in education policy. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education policy play an important role in enhancing the supply as well as the quality of human capital. In recent years, there has been a burgeoning of PPPs in different parts of the world. These initiatives are widespread—they encompass the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. However, they differ in their forms and structures, in the extent of public and private participation, and in the forms of their participation. The keynote speech was given by Cecilia María Vélez White , the Minister of Education from Colombia, and formerly head of education for the city of Bogota. She spoke about Colombia's experiences with public-private partnerships in education. She presented the results of the concession school model in Bogota, which she instituted, and highlighted the benefits of working with the private sector to further public sector goals. While PPPs in the United States have received considerable attention, credible research on such initiatives in other parts of the world has been very limited. Ludger Woessmann’s study provides important and valuable insights into the efficacy of different forms of PPPs using cross-country analysis based on PISA. Thomas Nechyba discussed the theoretical underpinnings of such initiatives and the role the design of such initiatives play. Norman LaRocque presented a world tour of PPPs. Papers presented at the conference analyzed vouchers in Colombia and Chile. Eric Bettinger investigated the effect of private school vouchers in Colombia on student outcomes. Vouchers in Colombia were allocated randomly among applicants whenever demand for vouchers exceeded supply. Taking advantage of this design, he finds that voucher lottery winners scored higher on standardized exams, were more likely to have attended private school, were less likely to have repeated a grade, and in the longer run were more likely to have taken college entrance exams and score higher in this exam. In a careful examination of the private-public school controversy in Chile, Cristian Bellei finds that different studies yield very different conclusions due to methodological differences, data limitations and their differences in abilities to control for various biases such as selection, inability to include appropriate controls, interaction effects and so on. When he corrects for such biases he finds no evidence that private voucher schools are more effective than public schools in Chile, 20 some years after the introduction of the voucher system. Charter schools in the United States were discussed by Chester Finn and Gregg Vanourek . They described the dynamism of the charter movement and show that is an example of how an essential government function that has been recycled with few fundamental changes for well over a century can be reconceived to accommodate entrepreneurial initiative, private-sector investment, competitive forces, the profit motive, performance contracting, franchising, and more—all within the context of public funding, standards and oversight. Public and private school initiatives in England were an interesting topic. Stephen Machin presented some very early empirical evidence on a high profile public private partnership—the City Academies Program. Matching the academy schools to an appropriate control group of schools, taking into account pre-policy time trends and using school scores, the paper finds that there is no short-run positive impact effect from Academy status. A number of providers were on hand, including CfBT’s Neil McIntosh , who discussed the barriers to breaking down the state monopoly in the provision of schooling in England. He concluded that although there have been consistent attempts to pluralize provision, there are significant barriers inhibiting the success of those efforts. Those barriers include: declining enrollments, the national curriculum, the complexity of school administration in England and the non-scalable nature of initiatives thus far, the opposition of national trade unions to interventions which might undermine their national pay bargaining. Michael Latham, also of CfBT, discussed the limitations of the British Public Finance Initiative (PFI) model – whereby the state allows the private sector to build schools, through a competitive contracting process, which it then operates – for enhancing educational outcomes. Concession schools in Colombia were discussed by Felipe Barrera . Concession schools are publicly funded but privately managed schools, first implemented in Bogota, Colombia. Using propensity score matching, the study finds that dropout rates were lower in concession schools and competition from concession schools led to a decline in dropout rates in nearby public schools. Other topics included education contracting and teacher absenteeism in public and private schools in developing countries. Michael Kremer and Karthik Muralidharanhis provide evidence that teacher absenteeism is a serious problem in India with absence rates averaging 25 percent. However, absence rates are much lower in private schools. Geeta Kingdon compared the achievement and cost effectiveness of different types of schools in India—public, private and aided. Private schools are considerably better than public schools on both counts. However, the passage of several acts in the early 1970s led to a decrease in accountability from aided schools so that they became virtually indistinguishable from public schools. José-Ginés Mora looked at PPPs in education in four Latin American countries: Colombia, Venezuela, Chile and Brazil. Among the interesting findings is the fact that in Venezuela, overall, private schools account for 17 percent of primary education and 30 percent of secondary education. Private schools are divided into non-subsidized schools, which receive all their funding from the contributions made by the users, and subsidized schools, which are partially or totally funded by the state. Most of the latter are Catholic schools which belong to the Venezuelan Association of Catholic Education (AVEC). A panel of key providers was also organized. Jorge Cela presented the experience of Fe y Alegría – a non-governmental organization controlled by the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church that operates formal pre-school, primary, secondary and technical education programs in the poorest communities in Latin America, beginning in Venezuela in 1955 and since spreading to 14 other countries including Spain, serving over 1 million students. Pablo Jaramillo presented the case of PPPs run by Colombia’s Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (coffee growers of Colombia) – the largest NGO in the coffee world. The coffee growers operate primary, basic and adult education programs, and support the well known Colombian innovation, Escuela Nueva. Carl Bistany presented the case of Sabis, an international education company, which has roots going back 120 years, to 1886 with a small school in a village in Lebanon, the first private school in Sabis’ network. Today Sabis operates a network of 31 K-12 schools in 11 countries with a total enrolment of 28,000 students from over 120 nations. Seven of the thirty-one are charter schools in the United States. Christopher Cerf presented the case of Edison Schools and argued for the need for growth in the private school sector. The funding of public schools in general and of charter schools in particular makes it unlikely that any individual school will have the resources to develop all of the expertise and build all of systems necessary to maximize its success for students. The optimal scale of a school district or a system of schools is not known by policy experts or education experts. Participants also discussed the role of the World Bank, IFC and other development partners in fostering a public-private partnership in education and the theoretical arguments behind mobilizing the private sector. In a panel chaired by Guy Ellena, IFC’s Director for Education and Health, Ronald Perkinson and Robert Taylor outlined the IFC’s instruments for involving the private sector in the provision of education services in developing economies. Isabel Guerrero, Country Director for the World Bank for Mexico and Colombia, highlighted the extensive participation of the Bank with private sector providers in a number of countries, but argued that more should be done in collaboration with the IFC and others. Frank Lysy of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency – the World Bank Group’s political risk insurance arm – discussed his agency’s recent entry into the education sector. The discussants – George Psacharopoulos, formerly of the World Bank, and Paul Peterson , of Harvard University – called for more active collaboration as well. In addition, the event explored the creation of a research program on public-private partnerships in education, with an emphasis on contracting models. In the paper on Education Contracting: Scope of Future Research, Harry Patrinos reviewed the evidence on the impact of educational contracting in both developing and developed countries, including vouchers, charter schools and their variants in different countries, and private finance of school infrastructure arrangements. The paper shows that research on these initiatives in developing countries is still very limited and calls for rigorous impact evaluations of such initiatives in these countries. Conference papers are available at:
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/conferences/MPSPEpapers.htm . Papers or presentations not available online are here: This conference was supported by CfBT, the John M. Olin Foundation, the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank Institute. Related Links
More information on PPPs in education can be found at:
http://www1.worldbank.org/education/economicsed/finance/demand/case/case_index.htm
http://www.ifc.org/edinvest/index.htm World Bank Economics of Education website. |
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