The best buy? Prospective evidence on successful remediation in Morocco's public primary schools

Abstract:

To address the learning crisis, targeted remediation and structured pedagogy are often considered ``great buys'' for education policymakers, but related programs are difficult to scale, and impacts in government schools are often muted. We collaborated with Morocco's Ministry of National Education Preschool and Sports to conduct a prospective evaluation of a large-scale reform effort that combines multiple ``great buys''. Our results rest on a pre-registered difference-in-differences analysis of primary data collected from 276 public primary schools. After one year, the program improved student learning by 0.90 standard deviations (s.d.) on average (0.52 s.d. impacts in Arabic, 1.30 s.d. impacts in French, and 0.93 s.d. impacts in math). Its average effect exceeds the 99th percentile of treatment effects of other education interventions in low- and middle-income countries. These findings suggest that an integrated intervention can achieve transformative impacts on student learning, at scale.