Education System Reform and Aid Effectiveness
Case Studies in Long-Term Education Reform
The Power of Persistence: Education Reform and Aid Effectiveness reports the findings of a two-year study of reform efforts supported by international donors in five specific national systems in the period between 1990 and 2009. Most of the existing literature on education reform is has been concerned with specific interventions and policy reforms necessary to improve education. This report considers that research and turns focus on the process challenges of introducing, implementing, and sustaining reforms, in order to better understand the nature of education system change, the indicators and measures of forward progress, the key points of leverage and support to facilitate change, and the productive roles that donor agencies play.
The single most important lesson from these case studies of the political, institutional, and technical dimensions of reform efforts over two decades is that for effective and durable reform, all specific interventions, policy reforms and project activities — decentralization, service delivery, dialogue, information and analysis, teacher training, workshops, textbooks and testing — must be understood and strategized in the context of longer-term goals and trends.