Projects
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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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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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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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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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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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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.