Education reform and quality of education

• In Event: Reformism: the rise and effects of national education reform, 1970-2016

Proposal

Education reform guides a country’s intended path for progress, articulates its priorities, and signals to the international community of its commitment for change. Beyond its intended goals, we have little understanding of how these education reforms have impacted the overall quality of education. In order to address this gap in the literature, we explore the association between education reforms and key education outcomes such as access to education and learning outcomes. To do so, we compile an original dataset that includes the following: 1) a cross-national, longitudinal panel dataset of national education reforms (1970-2015); and 2) the largest, more comprehensive standardized and pyschometrically-robust cross-national panel database of international and regional international assessments. We include other covariates such as enrollment rates, gender parity, polity scores, and GDP per capita to control for between-country differences. I hypothesize that countries with consistent, area-specific education reforms show gains in test scores. I will present preliminary results examining the association between education reforms and educational outcomes.

Author

• Rie Kijima, Stanford University