The new buzz words in the World Bank are Open Data. Here, in our blog, we have been championing the cause of Open Data (see New Open Data Initiative Emphasizes Importance of Education Stats) and what it does for knowledge sharing and looking at development solutions for Education systems.
You may know that the President Bob Zoellick (also known as RBZ) recently delivered a pretty inspiring speech at Georgetown University at the end of September. He was advocating for a new perspective for the Bank: “Beyond the Ivory Tower to a New Research Model: Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions.”
Zoellick Explained What The Open Data Drive Is:
Last Spring, we launched an Open Data initiative, making available to the public ---- free of charge -- more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic, and human development indicators for more than 200 economies, some going back decades.
"Boom Doctor" - AKA Justin Yifu Lin, The Bank's Chief Economist Dreamt His Vision Aloud
Justin Yifu Lin, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the Bank, started a new blog called Let’s Talk Development. (Incidentally for weekend reading,
also check out the piece in the New Yorker on him, "Boom Doctor." ) In his blog posting, where he talked about the first World Statistics Day at the Bank,
he rang out:
My dream is to create an environment where researchers and analysts have access to a wide range of reliable data: long time-series, household and firm surveys, and special studies; where they can share their own data; and where they can work together as a community to solve development problems. This is the goal of Open Development.
"The Flow Of Knowledge Is No Longer North To South, West To East, Rich To Poor" - RBZ
In our Unit, we are leading a work program called, Benchmarking Education Systems for Results (BESR) as a multi-year initiative that is also a key component of the Bank’s Education Sector Strategy 2020. This major undertaking is envisaged as a global public good that would help countries better understand what good performance means for an Education system, how to get there, and how countries compare with one another on the dimensions that matter. The BESR program is also intended to help identify priority actions by benchmarking individual components of sub-systems, such as teacher salaries, teacher attendance, performance-related pay for quality teaching.
Teacher Policies Around The World - Sharing Policy Ideas In The Middle East
Emiliana Vegas leads the work on benchmarking teacher policies, aptly called Teacher Policies Around The World. Last month, along with the Education team from the Middle East and North Africa region, we presented in Doha, Qatar - the first set of findings from our data collection during the Ministerial Colloquium on Quality Education in the Arab World. Seven countries took part in the first round of data collection from May – July 2010. These are: Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen. In each country, data were collected using a set of instruments we designed, which focus on the teacher policy framework, as represented in laws and regulations. The Ministers expressed a strong desire to continue to share and learn from each other in designing their teacher policies, especially through the Arab Observatory. At the end of the Colloquium, the Arab Ministers endorsed the Doha Declaration.
In The Doha Declaration, The Arab Ministers Committed To:
Establishing quality national standards for all dimensions of the education system, particularly for teachers and other education professionals.
As For Our Work OnTeacher Policies......
This week, Emiliana is soliciting feedback from Latin American country clients at the PREAL and the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala event -- Effectiveness of Teacher Performance. She will be sharing our first set of findings from the data collected in Mexico and Chile. I will be eager to learn from Emiliana how it goes..........
Photo credit: The image of West Bay in Doha, Qatar comes from Wikipedia Commons.
