Wouldn’t COD Aid encourage countries to push children through the schooling system at the expense of school quality?
It could, but a number of mechanisms can mitigate such problems. One approach would be to condition payments on whether or not a minimum share of students takes standardized competency tests whose results must be made public. This would allow donors and the country’s own citizens to judge whether quality is being neglected and to pressure the government to pursue a different strategy. An alternative approach would be to link all or part of the payments to student performance on standardized competency tests. The challenges for this approach would be to design accurate and relevant tests and to perform robust audits. Effort would be needed to avoid distorting the educational process by encouraging teachers to only “teach to the test.” In either case, donors would have an interest in financing the direct costs of introducing and applying tests, both to improve assessment of schooling quality and to improve the possibility of effective management of the education system with better inform
