CID Faculty Spotlight: Emiliana Vegas on What It Takes to Change Education

Enrollment is rising all over the world, yet learning levels remain stagnant. The 2023 UN Sustainable Development Goals Report predicts that 300 million students globally will lack basic reading and math skills by 2030 – unless something changes.

In the early 1980s, Venezuela was at the tail-end of a golden age: it was a stable, center-left democracy, and one of only four Latin American countries considered upper-middle-income by the World Bank. Throughout the previous three decades, like many of its neighbors, it had rapidly expanded access to education, opening new schools and hiring new teachers. By the mid 80s and 90s, a series of economic and political shocks reversed the country’s upward trajectory.

Emiliana Vegas, professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and CID faculty affiliate, came of age in Caracas as her country veered from growth toward decline, bearing witness to the power of education, and its link to uneven development. Determined to help Latin America and other developing regions thrive, she has tackled some of the most intractable problems in education, starting with the question of why, despite the political will and investment to make schooling accessible for all, much of Latin America failed to see significant improvement in educational outcomes.

The middle child of a stay-at-home-mom and a businessman who, as head of a volunteer organization, oversaw school construction in rural areas of Venezuela, Vegas often joined her father on site visits, where she saw firsthand the change a school (often a village’s first) could bring to a community. Although neither of her parents had finished college, they prioritized “getting [their kids] the best possible education,” and that included learning English, she recalls.

Vegas attended a bilingual primary school, and at 13, enrolled at an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut, where she received a rigorous secondary education. When she returned to Caracas and entered one of the country’s most selective university programs, she found herself at an advantage.

“I was studying with the best and brightest,” she says. “But the [curriculum] was not up to par. I didn’t have to study as hard as my peers who were equally smart. That’s when I realized, maybe this is why my country is underdeveloped – we need better schools.”

To test her insight, she pursued a master’s in public policy at Duke, then a PhD at Harvard, where the Graduate School of Education had recently hired its first economist, Richard Murnane. Vegas’ dissertation examined Latin American education systems from a labor market perspective, and showed that, in order to improve learning, you must first incentivize good teaching. She started her career at the World Bank, working at the intersection of development economics, education, and policy.

The work corroborated her conviction that “the only way to improve people’s life chances and a country’s development chances [is] a good education for everyone.” To effect change, she told the Harvard EdCast, “educators need to understand the world of incentives and how the flow of resources affects what people do and how they do it.”

Over a 20-year career in think tanks and development banks, Vegas has mobilized immense resources to improve education systems in developing countries with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. As a lead economist at the World Bank, chief of the education division of the Inter-American Development Bank, and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, Vegas has overseen multi-billion dollar budgets, shepherded numerous loans and grants, including financing for SUMMA, the first laboratory for education research and innovation in Latin America, and led research on wide-ranging projects, including teacher effectiveness, school finance, and early childhood development, and the impact of Covid on learning outcomes worldwide.

She has visited some of the most remote and under-resourced regions in the world to address disparities in education. In isolated areas of Amazonas state in Brazil, for example, children travel by boat for hours, in some cases days, to reach the nearest schoolhouse. Once there, there is often only one teacher for several grades, and none trained to teach the specialized math, science, and social studies curricula mandated by the federal government. Brazil’s distance learning solution (broadcast lessons recorded in Manaus, the state’s capital, to classrooms in remote areas) required massive funding and rigorous evaluation. Vegas’ task, as head of education at IDB, was to assess the value of the program, and convince the IDB board to fund it. Six months after seeing the pilot program in action, she secured $151 million to build 12 new schools, renovate 20 existing ones, and provide 500 more schools with satellite technology.

Such innovation represents a kind of “leapfrogging,” or rapid advance to address learning inequality. “One of the biggest challenges facing education systems worldwide, especially those with lower levels of resources and capacity, is how to leverage technology and innovation to meet students where they are,” says Vegas. While technology should be a complement, not a substitute for in-class teaching, she adds, it has the potential to bring personalized learning at a lower cost to more people.

In recent years, Vegas has shifted her focus from improving teacher effectiveness and accelerating learning outcomes to looking at “the nuts and bolts of school finance – how the transfer of funds to schools can improve quality and equity, or recreate inequalities and old problems.” The funding mechanisms in Latin America for instance have not changed much over time, she notes. They continue to be based on the number of students in a school – just as they did when mass education first began – rather than on learning outcomes.

Today, enrollment is rising all over the world, yet learning levels are stagnant. The 2023 UN Sustainable Development Goals Report predicts that 300 million students globally will lack basic reading and math skills by 2030 – unless something changes. To address the challenge, Vegas co-founded the Global Education and Research: Unleashing Potential (GEAR:UP) initiative with Harvard Center for International Development (CID) Director Asim I. Khwaja and Harvard Kennedy School Professor and CID faculty affiliate Michela Carlana. GEAR:UP will support research and programs working towards a “quality education” for all – one that goes beyond basic skills, and empowers everyone, wherever their country may be on the development spectrum, to grow their potential and flourish in a life of their own design.

The ambitious task requires many change agents. Before returning to Harvard as a professor, Vegas had a conversation with one young changemaker who suggested she write a book. The result, a guide to doing meaningful work in international development organizations, is slated to launch in September 2024. Its main title is both a summary of her career and a summons: Let’s Change the World.