The latest EconTalk podcast is a fascinating long interview with Lant Pritchett (Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard). The first third of the programme discusses the widespread and systemic falsification of educational outcome statistics for government-run education in the developing world, as detailed in Pritchett’s new book The Rebirth of Education. I might also add that in some parts of the declining world, such as Russia, the educational and other statistics are also suspected to be diverging from reality. Nor is even the UK immune, as we now have rampant grade-inflation of degree classifications at the undergraduate level.
On the falsification of educational outcome statistics
08 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in My general observations, Spotted in the news
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An excellent follow-on podcast is this: http://bryancallen.com/2014/12/09/ep177-james-tooley/ which examines the flipside – private schools that are set up autonomously by the poor in the slums, because the government schools are so bad. Turns out that such slum schools consistently outperform government schools (even when government schools consistently inflate their results by fiddling the figures).