Projects
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EsadeEcPol
2024
Together with Xavier Bonal and Angel Martinez, we conducted the most exhaustive and detailed report to date in Spain on the cost of access to private-subsidized (charter) schools and the fees paid by families.
For the first time, we presented a complete, in-depth and reliable analysis of the phenomenon of fees in private schools. To do so, we use two databases prepared by the National Institute of Statistics (INE): the first looks at the phenomenon from the side of fee payment (families) and the second from the side of school financial accounting.
The most important result is that, contrary to what the public debate to date suggests, we depict a sector that is more diverse than monolithic, both from a territorial point of view (each autonomous community shows a different model of charter school) and from the point of view of fee collection and the most likely reasons why those schools that charge them decide to do so. The report had more than 100 media impacts and reached the frontline of key newspapers.
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EsadeEcPol
2023
In 2023, Spain will have the same real per capita income as in 2005, while other countries around us are much richer than they were then. This means that in the last eighteen years we have not improved, on average, our standard of living.
We are therefore on the path towards two lost decades. There are many reasons that explain how we have arrived here, but one underlying structural challenge stands out, the most important: Spain is lagging behind in the knowledge race.
In Un país posible, a group of prestigious political scientists, economists and sociologists offer a path of concrete, limited, realistic, evidence-based and politically viable reforms, to change this trajectory and contribute to Spain becoming a leading country in the new economy with a fair and balanced model. I coordinated the book together with Toni Roldán, Jorge Galindo and Teresa Raigada.
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EsadeEcPol
2023
Less than a week after the publication of the PISA 2022 results and data, together with Lucía Cobreros and in collaboration with Save the Children Spain, we launched a refined diagnosis of the state of educational equity in Spain and its 17 autonomous communities.
This report diagnoses the state of equity and equality of opportunity in education in Spain and its autonomous communities based on an original, unique and detailed analysis of the PISA 2022 microdata, comparing it with that of 2018. Describing and understanding educational equity in depth is highly relevant for the social and economic future of a country, the real opportunities of young people, as well as present and future human capital and social cohesion. And it is especially so in Spain, with a historically high and still persistent school failure rate. The project reach +100 media impacts.
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EsadeEcPol
2023
Since 2022 we have worked, collaborating with the Ministry of Universities in Spain, with the SIIU data base (the data base with all university students in Spain since 2013, with one million and thousands of students). In this project, we analyze, with Lucia Cobreros and Juanma Moreno, the evolution of the Selectividad grades in the last years and the impact that the different policies have had in the grades. We see that the grade increase is explained by inflationary reasons but also more competitiveness of students. We also observe that the 2017 reforms (which will reduce the optionality of the exam) and the 2020 reform (which will expand it again) are having an inflationary effect on the grades. Finally, we observe important differences in Secondary education grades by student characteristics. We propose 5 measures for the Selectivitat to become a fairer exam and to avoid the phenomena of grade inflation.
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EsadeEcPol
2023
Together with Alvaro Ferrer we elaborated an report abalyzing the use of administrative educational data is becoming more prevalant thanks to the better available administrative data and also to methodological advances in economics and social sciences. We see that Spain is losing the race in spite the efforts from the Ministry of Education and some regions in the last 15 days. We are propose 8 measures to pass from “islands” of innovation to the institutionalization of educational research, policies and educational practice based on the data provided by administrations. More than 40 of the best quantitative researchers (economists, sociologists, psychologists) in education in Spain gave support to the report initiative and its proposals.
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EsadeEcPol
2021–2022
This project was initially designed at the heat of the news coming at the end of the pandemic. With Angel Martinez and Marta Ferrero.
We analyze the increase in the school morning shift. From one side, using the Household Survey (ECV), we estimate the impact that the morning or continuous school day has on the labor supply of households, their earning and the impact by gender. The results will be very illustrative of how harmful this school model is for gender equality and household income. We also carried out a massive survey to all public educational schools in primary grades. We will obtained 2000 responses from teachers explaining the situation of the schools after the pandemic and the changes in the school day that were taking place. In May 2022, we published the report with EsadeEcPol, with a massive impact on public and social debate. It is the most relevant report of the Think Tank since its creation. It had 400 media coverage. The report opened newspaper editorials and television debates.
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EsadeEcPol
2021–2022
At the end of 2020, the first research on the negative impact of school closures on learning started to become public. Together with Claudia Hupkau and Toni Roldán we developed, with the NGO Empieza por Educar, what we called "Mentores": an intervention project to give support to students during the 2020-21 academic year. We proposed a program of individualized online tutoring in groups of 2 students for 8 weeks, with 3 sessions of 50 minutes per week, during the months of April and May 2021, for 378 students from 1st and 2nd grades of lower secondary in 18 schools of the most complex environments of Madrid and Catalonia. To do so, we designed the program with a randomized controlled trial (or RCT), which will consisted of randomly selecting an “intervention” group and another “control” group. The results were extraordinary. Mathematics results will significantly improve, and the probability of repeating a course was dramatically reduced. The project also increased the satisfaction, effort at school and aspirations of the students.
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World Bank
2018–Current
Since 2018, the World Bank has been providing intensive support to the Ministry of Education of the Kingdom of Morocco in its reform program. In 2019, a loan of 500 million dollars was signed to provide support to the expansion of early childhood education, teacher policies and the governance of the educational system. In 2023, the loan was extended for 3 more years. In this, I lead the part related to teacher policies. We have developed an instrument for the assessment of social and emotional competencies with high predictive validity, which is being incorporated in teaching recruitment system. We have also provided support to the creation of a system of teacher professional development for teachers in service and conducting measures of the quality of teaching through classroom observations. We are also developing a system of teacher coaching at schools.
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World Bank
2019–Current
Croatia is the EU country with the lowest instructional time in primary education. The reason is that the system continues to operate fundamentally by shifts and hence time at school is scarce: either there is school in the morning or in the afternoon. The decline in births of the recent decades, together with the modernization of the educational system and the curricular reforms, have facilitated the most important educational change of the last decades: the rise of the school by shifts and the introduction of a whole-day school system. The World Bank funded 2021 a loan to the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education to finance a pilot program for schools to be completed at 60 schools. The project includes changes in infrastructure, pedagogical design, support in the design of the model, the planning of the school network and an information system and real-time evaluation of the results. In this project, I participated at various levels in designing possible models for optimizing the school system with geolocalization models, developing the new whole-day school model from the pedagogical and infrastructure point of view and leading the evaluation of the project.
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EsadeEcPol
In 2021 we got in touch with Spanish regions that had carried out external educational evaluations after the school closures caused by COVID-19. The objective was to study and estimate the learning loss in Spain, as many other studies have been done for other countries. Finally, the Basque Country Government showed interest and provided us with the micro-data to conduct the study. We partnered with the COTEC Foundation to broaden the focus of the study and study the policies that the countries were developing to alleviate the learning loss after school closed. We generated a huge impact on public debate. In the academic study, signed with Andreu Arenas, we found a greater learning loss in mathematics which was mostly concentrated in public school. We also identified a strong relationship between learning loss and socioemotional deterioration. The study was cited by the jorunal Nature in the international meta-analysis that compiled data from all countries.
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EsadeEcPol
2021–2022
School segregation is a growing phenomenon in many countries around the world, also in Spain, especially in some of its regions and cities. In 2021 we published, together with Save the Children (and their education specialist Alvaro Ferrer a report analyzing the situation of school segregation in Spain (with the first analysis that was conducted for Primary grades, based on data from TIMSS) and made 8 proposals to reduce school segregation considerying the principle of freedom of choice of schools the families. It had great media attention and generated a deep transversal debate in sectors that normally do not have concerns about the issue. After this, we were be invited to present our work at the congresses of the main charter school associations and the Basque Country regional Parliament.
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Others
2020–2021
I participated in a group of educational experts for the preparation of the Education Chapter of the Spain 2050 report, led by the National Office of Foresight and Strategy of the Government of Spain. In the education chapter, we analyzed the state of education in Spain, identified key strengths and weaknesses and elaborated a comprehensive long-term strategy of educational policies and indicators to monitor progress. The report was presented by the Prime Minister of Spain and had a great media coverage and subsequent public and social debate.
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World Bank
2021–2022
This report, which I co-authored, analyze in-depth the status of public finances of the Lebanese educational sector after the policrisis created by the 2019 crisis and inflation, the pandemic, the explosion in the port of Beirut and the fiscal crisis of 2021. Lebanon has a complex educational architecture, with multiple sources of public finance that are very fragmented and a high level of family spending. The result is a system far from universal coverage, non-free access and profound inefficiencies and inequalities.
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Others
2020
In the months of the hardest confinement in the spring of 2020, I worked together with the COTEC Foundation and her Director of Education, Ainara Zubillaga, in a project to understand the consequences of school closures on children, we drawed possible scenarios of action by public administrations after schools would reopened. This report was the first to anticipate what would happen next and had a great influence on the policy response of the Ministry of Education and the regions as well as on the public debate.
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World Bank
2018–2021
In 2017, the World Bank created TEACH, a classroom observation instrument to reliably and accurately measure classroom interactions between primary school teachers and students in developing countries. In 2019 I received the TEACH training to accredit myself as a classroom observer and organizer of observation experiences in developing countries. That allowed me to put and set the deployment of the instrument in Morocco.
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Others
2018–2020
After the failure of the Educational Pact at the Congress of Deputies, together with the Atlantida Project and the COTEC Foundation we created REDE, the Network for Educational Dialogue, a ample network of educational organizations and associations that worked with hundreds of teachers, directors, inspectors , academics and specialists discuss and explore a hypothesis: if from the educational sector, an agreement between different visions (that had turned impossible from politics) could occur in Spain. So we created 6 work groups that will worked on agreed diagnostic documents and proposals. These discussions were the start of 6 monographs of the journal Cuadernos de Pedagogía and 6 books edited by the ANELE publishing house. In addition to leading the coordination of the group together with Florencio Luengo and Ainara Zubillaga I coordinated two working groups: the educational evaluation group (joint with Javi Cortés and education financing group: in these two groups, I coordinated and edit the monographs of Cuadernos de Pedagogía and the two books of ANELE.
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Others
2017–2018
Between 2017 and 2018, as a collaborator with the Atlantida Project, I participated in the elaboration and dissemination of a proposal for a possible educational pact within the framework of the Subcommission for a Social and Political Pact for Education of the Spanish Congress of Deputies. We prepared extensive documentation, held meetings with political parties, organized events, and participated as speakers in various sessions of the Congress Subcommittee. The pact failed, but the learnings were large.
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World Bank
2017
In this project, I developed a model for measuring the value-added of primary schools in Bulgaria. We did this using administrative datasets with millions of observations of students, schools and families. The model was piloted by the Ministry of Education with the educational inspection and a group of Primary schools.
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World Bank
2016-2017
I participated in the preparation of Growing United, the World Bank's flagship report for the European Union published in 2017. The report argued that aging and technological change were impling a large challenge with EU's convergence model, as well as its model for growth and inequality reduction that had been so successful before the 2008 crisis. In this report, the educational and training sector, the labor market, and the status of companies were analyzed from a European perspective. The report was be coordinated by Christian Bodewig and Cristobal Ridao. In this project, I worked on the education chapter and the labor market chapter with my colleagues Margo Hoftijzer, Katia Herrera and Miguel Ruiz.
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Others
2016–2018
Together with Octavio Medina, I led the Education Series of the Politikon Blog, where academics, policy-makers and educational specialists participated. The cycle had important coverage and attention from traditional media and political parties.
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World Bank
2018
This report will analyze in depth the status of public finances for the educational sector in Moldova. Moldova was at the beginning of this century one of the most disadvantaged countries in education in Europe, due to its development, it will undergo important reforms to reduce the shortage and protect expanding subsectors such as early childhood education. I will participate in various sections of the report.
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World Bank
2016
As part of a consultancy project assessing the Ministry of Education of Romania, we participated in the design of a model for analyzing investment needs in infrastructure, taking into account demographic trends, educational policies, social objectives and labor. The model assembled different parts of the educational information system of the Ministry of Education and included all the individualized information of students, families, teachers and schools.
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World Bank
2015–2016
I participated in a program to support the Ministry of Education of West Bank in Ramallah to develop the implementation of its new curriculum applied to reading in the Arabic language in the first years of Primary. With the support of various experts in the field at an international level, we carried out discussion workshops with national and local specialists at the curricular level, sharing experiences and learning from good national and international practices.
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World Bank
2014–2015
I led the design of a PISA micro-data analysis model to diagnose the status of education in various countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hongria).
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World Bank
2014–2015
I participated as a health economist in a design project to identify and diagnose the status of the national health system from a systemic perspective. This project was based on a massive data collection excercise and modeling based on the micro-data available to the Ministry of Health of Latvia and Estonia.
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Others
2017–2019
In this project, I worked with Sara de la Rica, Fernando Monge and Ainhoa Vega-Bayo, by designing and leading an analysis of the situation of the Basque educational system, based on a large part of the micro-data administrative records of the Department of Education of the Basque Government. It was part of a collaboration agreement between the Department of Education of the Basque Government and the University of the Basque Country. On the one hand, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the state of the public spending in education, at the level of schools, analyzing the adequacy, the efficiency and the equity of the welfare. Furthermore, we prepared a detailed analysis to understand the evolution of the results of Primary and lower secondary students in the Diagnostic Assessments carried out by the Government between 2011 and 2017.
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Others
2017
In this project, led by Atlantida Project and with the support of the COTEC Foundation, I analyzed the calibration of the Capacitat Professional Docent (CPD) instrument, a self-assessment tool of the functioning of schools evaluated by teachers. Together with Eva Flavia Martinez and Javier Cortés, we analyzed the results, and studied the validity, reliability and predictive capacity of the instrument, based on the responses of 2,000 teachers from 100 public schools in the Autonomous Community of Extremadura.
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Others
2015–2018
During this period, I worked to study the impact of technological change and the polarization and evolution of employment in the recent decades in developed countries. From here came part of my doctoral dissertation, a study on the future of the work in the EU by the World Bank and a report by FEDEA Foundation.
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World Bank
2013–2015
In this project, I participated in the design of the World Bank loan for educational reforms of the Ministry of Education of Kosovo related to governance, school management, evaluation and educational information systems. I was also be co-author of the review of public financing in education, together with Flora Kelmendi.
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World Bank
2012–2014
In this project, I participated in the design of the World Bank loan for educational reforms of the Ministry of Education of Moldovia, that had a very large impact on the school system. The loan supported the restructuring of the school system due to demographic decline, the reform of secondary school final exams and the introduction of information systems.
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Others
2016
Working with the consulting firm KSNET, we prepared a report on the status of child inequality in Spain for the NGO Save the Children. We analyze 5 dimensions of child inequality (education, health, social protection, employment and housing), from a quantitative perspective and also from a public policy perspective. The report served as framework of various strategies (among others, social protection and school segregation) of Save the Children's impact on children's issues in the following years.