Whether you are looking at the link from education to economic growth, household earnings or individual happiness, there’s no doubt that a better-educated population is good news. But how can policy improve education in a cost-effective way? You might assume that a good route would be to improve the management of schools, but existing research is not conclusive, and often top-down attempts to improve management meets opposition from administrators.

An experiment in Brazil has evaluated a program to improve management using existing resources in Rio de Janeiro. Tiago Cavalcanti, of University of Cambridge, Sao Paulo School of Economics & CEPR, and Felipe Puccioni of the Court of Accounts of Rio de Janeiro came up with the experiment, and they tell Tim Phillips about why universal education doesn’t necessarily mean universal learning – and how they became celebrities on national television when their successful project hit the headlines.