Dale Ballou, NCPI affiliate and associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, recently visited Brazil to participate in a seminar entitledEducation Policy: A Discussion of Brazil and the U.S., while other center affiliates were contributing authors on a forthcoming report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Ballou presented results from the center’s recently released POINT experiment at the Brazil seminar. The seminar, which is in its second year, featured faculty and researchers from the Leadership, Policy, and Organizations Department at Peabody and the Department of Economics at the University of Sao Paulo. Ballou was joined by fellow Peabody professors Will Doyle, Stella Flores, and Stephen Heyneman.

The featured presentations included:

• Dale Ballou – “Do Performance Incentives Improve Student Mathematics Achievement: Results from a Randomized Experiment in Middle Schools”
• Will Doyle – “Higher Education Finance in the American States: Privatization or Policy Drift?”
• Stella Flores – “Access and Residency: State Policy, Migration and Financial Aid”
• Stephen Heyneman – “International Competition for Higher Education Quality: The American Model or the Successful Model?”
• Fernando Botelho, Ricardo Madeira, and Marcos Rangel – “An Agenda for Research on Education in Brazil: Interacting with the U.S. Experience”

This comparative discussion of education policy in Brazil and the U.S. was facilitated by Professor Heyneman, professor of international education policy at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, and funded in part by the Vanderbilt International Office.

Additionally, NCPI affiliates were contributing authors on a forthcoming report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Entitled Establishing a Framework for Evaluation and Teacher Incentives: Considerations for Mexico, the forthcoming report is part of a broader OECD project with Mexico to provide recommendations on topics related to teacher effectiveness, school management, and leadership policy to improve the quality of Mexico’s schools. This forthcoming report follows a previous OECD report delivered to Mexico in October 2010 entitled Improving Schools: Strategies for Action in Mexico.