A great teacher can inspire students, build confidence, and shape their future. But what happens when students rarely see teachers or principals who look like them? These gaps not only shape students’ academic experiences but also influence their aspirations, learning outcomes, and long-term opportunities.
“It’s always better as a team.” This phrase, shared by a participant in the Committed Parenting for Early Childhood (PPC, for its Spanish initials: Programa Parentalidades Comprometidas con la Primera Infancia) program in Uruguay, sums up a fundamental principle of parenting: when childcare responsibilities are shared fairly, everyone benefits.
This study delves into the growing trend of hiring temporary teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), driven by the need for education systems to find more cost-effective and flexible solutions in the face of budget constraints and increasing educational demand. However, it warns that this practice may negatively affect the quality and equity of education, as temporary teachers often have lower qualifications, face precarious working conditions, and experience high turnover rates.
Getting the right education policies into place is hard enough. But more often than not, implementation is where they fall apart. Let us share two striking findings. First, an analysis of more than 400 education policies across more than 40 education systems found that fewer than half of these policies showed evidence of progress or impact over the past decade.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has become a powerful and effective tool to deal with violence in many at-risk areas in the world. However, its use for gender-based violence (GBV) and dating violence, although promising, has been limited and used as a response service for survivors, rather than for prevention. To understand to what extent such interventions can help provide tools and skills to young people in their impressionable years to produce behavioral changes that prevent GBV, we carried out such an intervention among high school students in the municipality of Ecatepec in Mexico.
We adapted a violence-prevention, parenting program (the Irie Homes Toolbox, or IHT) for integration into Jamaican preschool services. The adapted IHT was evaluated in a mixed-method feasibility trial in Kingston, Jamaica. Twenty-four preschools were randomly assigned to intervention (n12) or wait-list control (n12). Ten caregivers per school were recruited (n240, n120/group). The program consisted of eleven 1-hour parenting sessions delivered by a preschool teacher with groups of ten caregivers of children aged 2-6 years.
This paper explores how female political leaders impact environmental outcomes and climate change policy actions using data from mixed-gender mayoral races in Brazil. We rely on a Regression Discontinuity design that compares municipalities where women narrowly won the election with those where men narrowly won. This strategy allows us to identify the causal effect of a woman winning the mayoral election. We find that, compared to male mayors, female mayors significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation in the municipalities with Amazon biome.
This paper reports socio-economic and health outcomes for intersex people in Mexico using data collected between 2021 and 2022. This is the first study relying on a large nationally representative survey including information on sex variations to document substantial negative outcomes for intersex individuals. Around 1.6% of individuals aged 15-64 are intersex.
Although many web-based non-probabilistic surveys are the only source of data on gender and sexual diversity in many countries, there is little evidence of their accuracy in characterizing LGBTI people. This paper studies how precisely the experiences of LGBTI people are captured by web-based non-probabilistic surveys.
I provide estimates of intergenerational mobility (IGM) in education at a disaggregated geographic level for Chile, a country with high school-level stratification by socioeconomic status and a decentralized administration of public schools. I document wide variation across communes. Relative mobility is correlated to the number of doctors, the number of students per teacher, and earnings inequality. Using a LASSO, I find that the share of students enrolled in public schools, the number of students per teacher, population density, and municipal budget are the strongest predictors of IGM.