Using unique household data sets for six Latin American countries, the essays collected in this volume put together a compelling picture of the effects of privatization. Prices usually increase significantly in the wake of privatization, which can prove particularly difficult for low-income groups. On the other hand, privatized services often lead to expanded coverage, greatly benefiting even poorer groups. Symbolic issues as well as material outcomes are relevant, as access to public services generates a sense of inclusion and provision of basic rights to historically excluded populations.

The expansion of service that has accompanied privatizations in Latin America not only provides the less well-off with the opportunity to use those services, but also offers the possibly more important benefit of a sense of inclusion in society. Increased access to services further allows Latin Americans to enjoy a higher quality of life and provides the opportunity to generate more stable sources of income.

An increasing number of developing countries are introducing school-based management (SBM) reforms that are aimed at empowering principals and teachers or at strengthening their professional motivation, thereby enhancing their sense of school ownership. Many of these reforms have also strengthened parental involvement in the schools. SBM programs take many different forms in terms of who has the decision-making power and the degree of decision making that devolves to the school level. While some programs transfer authority only to school principals or teachers, others encourage or mandate parental and community participation, often through school committees. SBM has the potential to become a low-cost way of making public education spending more efficient by increasing the accountability of those involved and by empowering those individuals to improve learning outcomes. 'Decentralized Decision-Making in Schools' reviews more than 20 country experiences with SBM in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America. For each country, the authors provide a brief description of the SBM reform along with any evidence regarding its impact on a variety of indicators, from student test scores and dropout and retention rates, to parent and teacher perceptions of the reform's benefits. Overall, the authors found that SBM has had a positive impact on some variables--mainly in reducing repetition and failure rates, and in improving attendance rates--but has had mixed results on others such as test scores, possibly due to the timing of the reform. 'Decentralized Decision-Making in Schools' will be useful to teams preparing education projects with an emphasis on decentralized authority, to education officials interested in school reform, and to governments worldwide looking to improve education for all students.

While public-private partnerships in education in the United States have received a lot of attention, research on such partnerships elsewhere has been limited-even though such partnerships have been steadily gaining prominence, particularly in developing countries. Aiming to fill this gap, this book presents fresh, technically sound empirical evidence on the effectiveness and cost of various public-private education partnerships from around the world, including voucher programs and faith-based schools. The evidence on the impact in terms of school performance, targeting, and cost of public-private partnerships is mixed. Some evidence suggests that voucher schools outperform public schools, but the difference between both types of schools is not as large as one might think, and is often smaller than simple statistics suggest. Evidence on faith-based schools tends to show slightly better performance than public schools, but this is not the case in all countries. While in some countries faith-based schools reach the poor better than public schools, in other countries the reverse is observed. As for the private costs of education, evidence shows that costs depend on the systems in place in each country, but that when school choice is limited, parents can still influence the performance of their children through private expenditure for tutoring. More rigorous studies on such partnerships, particularly in developing countries, are necessary.