Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children

One of the best ways to avoid being poor as an adult is to obtain a good education. Individuals with higher academic achievement and more years of schooling earn more than those with lower levels of human capital. This is not surprising given that we believe that schooling makes people more productive, allowing them to command higher wages in the labor market. This paper offers a message of tempered optimism in contrast to a sense of pessimism about the ability of schools to lift poor children’s life chances. The past few decades have seen a dramatic improvement in the technology of education policy evaluation, which has enhanced our ability to uncover moderately-sized program impacts within the complex environment that determines schooling outcomes. The available evidence reveals a number of potentially promising ways to improve the learning outcomes of low-income children. This is not to say that everything works: many current and proposed education policies either enjoy no empirical support for their effectiveness, or in some cases have strong empirical evidence for their ineffectiveness. But a careful sifting of the empirical evidence identifies a selected set of interventions that seem to be promising. Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children