CIES 2018 presentation, given by Luis Crouch on behalf of Hank Healey. The EGR Sustainability Framework emanates from a) a general understanding of evidence-based EGR programs, b) the notion of a “learning coherent” education system (Pritchett, 2015), c) the notion of a “bare bones” or “core functions” system (Crouch and Destefano, 2015); and effective curriculum implementation. To this end, our proposed EGR sustainability framework maintains that one must a) map the existing education system’s institutional, systemic, cultural, and attitudinal capacity to function as an effective learning coherent core functions curriculum implementation system, b) identify the various gaps and barriers that prevent the system from working in this manner, c) develop a plan to address those gaps and barriers, and d) help the MOE to implement that plan.

The British Department for International Development (DFID) has partnered with the Ugandan Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) to conduct empirical research on inefficiencies in the Ugandan education system. This research will help the Ministry better understand the severity, causes, and consequences of an enrolment bulge in early primary classes in Uganda. Specifically, this study is investigating the magnitude of repetition in primary 1. It encompasses a nationally representative sample of pupils, and uses information from interviews with pupils, parents/guardians, and teachers.

In response to the growing need to improve learning outcomes, USAID's 2011 Education Strategy focused on improving the teaching and learning of reading in early grades. Its goal of 100 million children showing improved reading skills testified to USAID’s commitment to investing in and measuring improvements in learning outcomes. As a result, USAID education programs with a focus on early grade reading have become the norm, with such programs implemented in approximately 20 countries during the five years since the adoption of the education strategy. In the last couple of years, the lessons of successful pilots are being applied on increasing scale in numerous countries. Taking successful pilot projects to scale and helping education systems implement their national reading strategies at scale have therefore become the primary challenges faced by USAID and other supporters of educational improvement in the developing world. The challenges of realizing large-scale impact, and of seeing that impact sustained, are not new to development. However, they are being approached with renewed interest and attention in the education sector. This paper examines seven countries where interventions to improve early grade reading are being taken to scale - some with project support, some through government initiative. Management Systems International's framework for taking projects to scale, and the framework defined in the Brookings Institute's Millions Learning report are used to examine how scale has been and is occurring in these selected countries.

Egypt, currently in the throes of major political change, will likely undergo reforms of various sorts in the next few years. Some of these reforms are likely to give local entities, including schools, greater control over education finances. In 2007, the Government of Egypt began to decentralize some non-personnel recurrent finances from the center—the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance (MOF)—to lower-level jurisdictions, including schools, using a number of simple and transparent enrollment- and poverty-based funding formulas. By 2010, a sizable amount of capital expenditure was also being transferred to lower levels of the system via similar equity- based funding formulas. Prior to these formula-based decentralization efforts, a large amount of education-related non-personnel recurrent finances had already been moving from the MOF to the muderiyat, education offices at the governorate level of the system. Analysis of these latter allocations reveals that they are highly inequitable on an inter-governorate per-student basis, ranging from EGP 966 per student in New Valley to EGP 25 per student in 6th of October. This paper examines the nature and potential causes of this inequity and espouses a way in which these funds could be transferred using an equity-based funding formula that holds harmless those muderiyat that would lose absolute amounts of money under such a more equitable distribution scheme.

This study examines why some districts performed better than others in implementing their Teacher Deployment Plans. The TDP engaged selected districts to analyze data to quantify and qualify their teacher deployment issue, to identify the means by which they could address their teacher deployment issue—merging schools, creating multi-grade schools, transferring teachers, recruiting teachers, and/or reassigning teachers—and to help them develop a detailed TDP plan that, when implemented, would address the teacher deployment issue. This study examines why some districts performed better than others in implementing their TDP plans.