Teachers, Students, and the Low-Performance Trap: Lessons from Africa and Latin America

Martin Carnoy will discuss a recent study he conducted examining school systems on either side of the border area of two neighboring Southern African countries, Botswana and South Africa and identifying the gains made by learners in the sample with specific teachers and specific classroom conditions. The study examined students in a border region who, like students in many border regions of the world, are very alike linguistically and culturally, yet attend schools that have been subject to different political and policy histories.

Carnoy will discuss study outcomes, which measured learner achievement gains, as well as learner characteristics, the quality of teaching, learning opportunities, and other classroom conditions that might have influenced how much students improved their achievement during their Grade 6 year.
 
Martin Carnoy is Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. He has written more than 30 books on economic issues, racial inequality, and education policy. His research focuses on the changing economic value of education and on the financing and resource allocation aspects of educational production. His research on educational policy includes some of the earliest empirical work measuring the impact of vouchers and state accountability systems on student academic performance. More recently, he and his students have done extensive analysis on the TIMSS and PISA data, as well as on other international tests specific to Latin America and Africa.

This talk is part of SCOPE's brown bag seminar series, which brings notable experts to the Stanford
community to address issues of educational opportunity, access, equity,
and diversity in the United States and internationally.