Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

• The Impact of the 1999 Education Reform in Poland

  Patrinos, Harry Anthony; Jakubowski, Maciej; Wisniewski, Jerzy; Porta, Emilio Ernesto (2012-03-19)

  Increasing the share of vocational
 secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development
 policy for decades, perhaps nowhere more so than in formerly
 socialist countries. The transition, however, led to
 significant restructuring of school systems, including a
 declining share of vocational students. Exposing more
 students to a general curriculum could improve academic
 abilities. This paper analyzes Poland s significant
 improvement in international achievement tests and the
 restructuring of the education system that expanded general
 schooling to test the hypothesis that delayed vocational
 streaming improves outcomes. Using propensity score matching
 and differences-in-differences estimates, the authors show
 that delayed vocationalization had a positive and
 significant impact on student performance on the order of
 one standard deviation.
• Republic of Korea : Workforce Development

  World Bank (Washington, DC, 2013)

  The Republic of Korea vaulted in less
 than three generations from being one of the poorest
 countries in the world to becoming a member of the
 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
 (OECD). This economic transformation has attracted
 considerable admiration and inquiry. One of the key factors
 for Korea's success was the provision of skills to
 support industrialization and economic diversification. This
 report takes advantage of a new World Bank diagnostic tool
 to examine the development of the Korean system for
 Workforce Development (WfD) from 1970 to 2010. The findings
 are intended to document good practices, lapses and key
 breakthroughs and generate insights that can be used to
 enrich dialogue on WfD policy in the World Bank's
 partner countries. The tool is based on an analytical
 framework that identifies three functional dimensions of WfD
 policies and institutions: strategic framework, which refers
 to the praxis of advocacy, partnership, and coordination in
 relation to the objective of aligning WfD in critical areas
 to priorities for national development; system oversight,
 which refers to the arrangements governing funding, quality
 assurance and learning pathways that shape the incentives
 and information signals affecting the choices of
 individuals, employers, training providers and other
 stakeholders; and service delivery, which refers to the
 diversity, organization and management of training
 provision, both state and non-state, that deliver results on
 the ground by enabling individuals to acquire market-and
 job-relevant skills. These three dimensions constitute a
 closed policy-making loop and, when taken together, allow
 for analysis of the functioning of a WfD system as a whole.
 This report focuses specifically on policies in the area of WfD.
• The Impact of Vocational Schooling on Human Capital Development in Developing Countries

  Zhang, Linxiu; Shi, Yaojiang; Huang, Xiaoting; Yi, Hongmei; Chu, James; Loyalka, Prashant; Song, Yingquan; Wei, Jianguo (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)

  A number of developing countries are
 currently promoting vocational education and training (VET)
 as a way to build human capital and strengthen economic
 growth. The primary aim of this study is to understand
 whether VET at the high school level contributes to human
 capital development in one of those countries—China. To
 fulfill this aim, a longitudinal data on more than 10,000
 students in vocational high school (in the most popular
 major, computing) and academic high school from two
 provinces of China are used. First, estimates from
 instrumental variables and matching analyses show that
 attending vocational high school (relative to academic high
 school) substantially reduces math skills and does not
 improve computing skills. Second, heterogeneous effect
 estimates also show that attending vocational high school
 increases dropout, especially among disadvantaged
 (low-income or low-ability) students. Third, vertically
 scaled (equated) baseline and follow-up test scores are used
 to measure gains in math and computing skills among the
 students. The results show that students who attend
 vocational high school experience absolute reductions in
 math skills. Taken together, the findings suggest that the
 rapid expansion of vocational schooling as a substitute for
 academic schooling can have detrimental consequences for
 building human capital in developing countries such as China.