Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"One thing is relatively clear: For the most part, poor people, even adolescent girls, make conscious choices about their own fertility and sexuality and find ways—though perhaps not pleasant ways—to control it. If young women get pregnant even though it is extremely costly for them, it must reflect someone’s active decision."

"If getting pregnant at the wrong time is not in her interest, why does it happen? More generally, how do families make fertility decisions, and how much control do women have over these decisions?"

"That family size does not adversely affect children seems counter intuitive, however: If the same resources have to be shared among more people, some of them at least should end up with less. If children do not suffer, who does? One possible answer is the mother."

"The problem is that it is impossible to develop a reasonable population policy without understanding why some people have so many children: Are they unable to control their own fertility (due to lack of access to contraception, for example), or is it a choice? And what are the reasons for those choices?"

"—we seem to be suggesting a two-tier education system—one for the children of the rich,who will no doubt get taught to the highest standards in expensive private schools&one for the rest.This objection is not entirely unwarranted but unfortunately,the division exists already,with the difference that the current system delivers essentially nothing to a very large fraction of children."

"This message of scaling down expectations, focusing on the core competencies, and using technology to complement, or if necessary substitute for, teachers, does not sit well with some education experts. "

"A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent."

"A child who expects to find school difficult will probably blame herself and not her teachers when she can’t understand what is being taught, and may end up deciding she’s not cut out for school—“stupid,” like most of her ilk—and give up on the education altogether, day dreaming in class or, like shantarama's children, just refuse to go."

"Women do better on math tests when they are explicitly told that the stereotype that women are worse in math does not apply to this particular test; African Americans do worse on tests if they have to start by indicating their race on the cover sheet."

"The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace."

"Misperception can be critical. In reality, there should not be an education-based poverty trap: Education is valuable at every level. But the fact that parents believe that the benefits of education are S—shaped leads them to behave as if there were a poverty trap, and thereby inadvertently to create one."

"This belief in the S—shape means that unless parents are unwilling to treat their children differently from one another, it makes sense for them to put all their educational eggs in the basket of the child they perceive to be the most promising, making sure that she gets enough education, rather than spreading the investment evenly across all their children."

"In reality, available estimates show that each year of education increases earnings more or less proportionally.26 And even for people who do not get a formal-sector jobeducation seems to help: For example, educated farmers earned more during the Green Revolution than uneducated ones. Moreover, there are also all the other, nonfinancial benefits. In other words, parents see an S—shape where there really isn’t one."

"Parents also tend to believe that the first few years of education pay much less than the next ones. For example, in Madagascar, parents believed that each year of primary education would increase a child’s income by 6 percent, each year of junior high education by 12 percent, and each year of senior secondary education by 20 percent."

"But one key issue is unique to education: The peculiar way in which expectations about what education is supposed to deliver distort what parents demand, what both public and private schools deliver, and what children achieve—and the colossal waste that ensues."

"So children in private school learn more than children in public schools. This does not mean, however, that private schools are as efficient as they could be. We see that they are not when we compare the effect of being in private school to the effect of simple interventions."

"Supply and demand strategies have no reason to be mutually exclusive. Supply by itself does some good, but demand is important, too. There are indeed people who somehow find ways to get educated without any top-down help when the right jobs come to town, but for many others, the impetus from schools being built in their area can be critical."

"So leaving it purely to the market will not allow every child, wherever she comes from, to be educated according to her ability. Unless we can fully erase differences in income, public supply-side intervention that makes education cheaper would be necessary to get close to the socially efficient outcome: making sure that every child gets a chance."

"This is important, because if parental income plays such a vital role in determining educational investment, rich children will get more education even if they are not particularly talented, and talented poor children may be deprived of an education."

"income per se matters for education decisions: Jamal will get less education than John because his parents are poorer, even if the income gains from education are the same for both."

"This is the idea behind the new tool of choice in education policy: the conditional cash transfer."

"This rationale explains why most rich countries simply give parents no choice: Children have to be sent to school until a certain age, unless parents can prove they are educating them at home. But this clearly does not work where state capacity is more limited and compulsory education cannot be enforced. In such cases, the government must make it financially worthwhile for parents to send their children to school."

"A civilized society cannot allow a child’s right to a normal childhood and a decent education to be held hostage to a parent’s whims or greed.” Building schools and hiring teachers is a necessary first step to lower the cost of sending a child to school, but it may not be enough."

"People will send their children to private schools that will be set up for them, or if that is too expensive, they will demand that local governments set up schools."

"In their view, the quality of education is low because parents do not care enough about it, and they don’t because they know that the actual benefits (what economists call the “returns” to education) are low. When the benefits of education become high enough, enrollment will go up, without the state having to push it."

"For the “demand wallahs,” a set of critics (including William Easterly) who believe that there is no point in supplying education unless there is a clear demand for it, these results encapsulate everything that has been wrong with education policy in the last few decades."

"Getting children into school is a very important first step: This is where learning starts. But it isn’t very useful if they learn little or nothing once they’re there."

"A large majority of policy makers, at least in international policy circles, have traditionally taken the view that the problem is essentially simple: We have to find a way to get the children into a classroom, ideally taught by a well-trained teacher, and the rest will take care of itself."

"So if the failure of schools in developing countries to attract children can’t be explained by problems of access, or lack of demand for educated labor, or parental resistance to educating their children, then where is the snag?"

"This does not absolve us of the responsibility of educating people about public health. We do owe everyone, the poor included, as clear an explanation as possible of why immunization is important and why they have to complete their course of antibiotics. But we should recognize—indeed assume—that information alone will not do the trick. This is just how things are, for the poor, as for us."