تلاش های کمک کننده در مقیاس وسیع برای بهبود وضعیت آموزشی توزیع درآمد خانوار و ضعیف: تجربه PEDC در ویتنام

In 2003, donors combined together in Vietnam to support the provision of quality primary schooling for 226 disadvantaged districts (about a third of the country). US$160 million was invested in infrastructure, materials and training across the 226 districts. The programme has been commended by donors and received good press inside Vietnam. Comparison of achievement surveys in 2001 and 2007 showed, however, that there had been a decline in performance in the targeted districts. This article explores various hypotheses as to how this could have happened; and in particular the increasing amounts spent by better-off households on their children's education.

Vietnam is a developing country, and many Vietnamese parents cannot afford for their children to attend schools. The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has been implementing the Primary Education for Disadvantaged Children project (PEDC) since late 2003 to improve this situation. The project, funded by a consortium of donors through the International Development Association (IDA) and the Government of Vietnam, was due to close in December 2009, although there has been a 1-year extension. The overall objective of the PEDC project is to improve access to primary school and the quality of education for disadvantaged boys and girls. The project was targeted at 226 districts (out of 615) spread across 40 provinces (out of 61). With a total budget of US$160 million, considerable effort has been made in terms of infrastructure, investment and training in each of those districts; and, after some initial delays, the programme has been commended by donors and received good press inside Vietnam. It is well-recognised that substantial investments of this volume should be properly monitored and evaluated. For PEDC, a full programme of final evaluation has been carried out of the details of each of the sub-components of the project; but that evaluation has been more focused on the implementation of PEDC interventions than on outcomes. This paper, based on a report for PEDC (Carr-Hill and Lang, 2009a), focuses on the impact of the PEDC intervention on the quality of student learning as measured by the changes in the scores in PEDC districts compared to non-PEDC districts in two achievement surveys carried out in 2001 (before the project started) and 2007 (during the project's fourth year).

The analyses have demonstrated the power of the synthetic estimation approach; any set of school surveys can be combined with a school census to generate values of any characteristics included in the school survey for any school in the country, just as any set of household expenditure survey can be combined with a national population census to generate values for all households in the country. That analysis also demonstrated the value of a detailed national school data base such as the DFA, enabling a powerful synthetic estimation – at least for 2007 – as above; it can be used as an important source of evidence for decision making.