Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools,
educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these
expenditures are at increasing students' years of completed schooling and, more
importantly, the skills that they learn while in school. This paper examines studies published
between 1990 and 2010, in both the education literature and the economics literature, to
investigate which specific school and teacher characteristics, if any, appear to have strong …