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Arguably nothing is more important to long-run improvement in human well being than a high quality basic education for every child. Promoting the achievement of this goal requires a serviceable positive model of education policies—a coherent causal explanation of why governments actually do what they do. This paper is part of a series of three papers that creates a theoretical framework for educational policy in developing countries. Here I show that "normative as positive" (NAP)-- explaining that the policies actually chosen were chosen because they maximize an individualized social welfare function--fails as a useful general positive model of schooling. While NAP can perhaps accommodate the fact of some direct production of schooling by some governments, the reality is that (nearly) all governments produce education and that, by and large, this is their only support to education. Moreover, NAP fails not just in the large but also the small: there are six additional common facts about educational policies inconsistent with NAP. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Cross-national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large, strongly statistically significant, and negative. These are 'on average' results, derived from imposing a constant coefficient. However, the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons. First, the institutional/governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth. Second, marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant. Third, educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital. The extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education, or the lack thereof.