Transcript Improving School Quality in Developing Countries

Education in India: Challenges
and ways ahead
Esther Duflo
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Two Challenges in education
(1) Bring children to school
– MDGs for education seek to get 100%
participation in primary school and gender
equality in education participation more
general
(2)Teach them something when they are
there.
The situation in India
(1) Progress has been made on the first goal
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Rapid improvement in enrollment rates, at least in primary
school
Situation for girls and in some states can still improve
Secondary school?
(2) Quality is a disaster:
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Absence rate: 24%--Teaching rate 50%
Pratham’s ASER survey: 60% of children aged 7 to 12 cannot
read a simple paragraph
General dissatisfaction: Fraction of children in private school in
India is higher than the Netherlands and Chile (Murgai and
Pritchett)
How to make progress?
• Faced with these two challenges, one is
tempted to come up with silver bullets
(teacher training; school committees;
vouchers; etc.)
• There is probably no silver bullet, one
needs to learn from experience what has
worked and what has not worked and try to
reproduce what has worked.
How do we know what has worked?
• There is no market test for service delivery; we
cannot measure effectiveness by “sales”.
• No automatic way of knowing whether anything
useful is being delivered. Hence there is no
guarantee that the money is well-spent.
• In part this is a matter of making sure that the
program is doing what it was supposed to do:
Process Evaluation.
• In part it is matter of making sure that the program
is having an impact: Impact Evaluation
The role of impact evaluation
• Even well-meant and well-run programs may not
have the intended impact:
– no impact.
– unintended consequences.
• Therefore, there is a need for
experimentation in program design.
• Identifying best practice: Comparison of evaluated
projects on a comparable basis—what works best
• Policy impact: Without a set best practice-everyone feels justified in favoring their pet
project.
The difficulty with impact evaluation
• Answering the counterfactual question is
difficult:
– an individual will not be observed both with
and without the program
• Need an adequate comparison group:
– individuals who, except for the fact that they
were not beneficiaries of the program, are
similar to those who received the program
How to form the comparison group?
• In general, program beneficiaries are specially
selected (poor, motivated, etc…) and are thus not
comparable to non-beneficiaries
• Comparison between beneficiaries before and after
receiving the program is not informative: many other
things happened over time
• One solution to this problem--Experimental approach:
the program is randomly assigned within a given
group, creating strictly comparable treatment and
comparison groups (in education randomization
usually done at school level)
Some findings from randomized evaluation:
Education in Developing Countries
• Participation
• Quality:
– Inputs
– Reform Strategies
Participation in education
• Reducing the cost of education:
– CCT: PROGRESA in Mexico
• 3.4% increase in enrollment on average. Larger
impact at the secondary school levels.
– School Uniforms in Kenya
• School Uniforms distributed to 10,000 students
in grade 6, and then 7 in 163 randomly selected
schools
• Drop out fell by 14% for girls and 16% for boys
Participation in education
• School meals
– Extended nationwide in India without evaluation
– Evaluation for Pre-schools in Kenya: participation
was 30% higher in schools were free breakfast
was given
• School health
– Deworming in Kenya: 0.15 years of extra
education (25% increase in presence)
– Replicated in India (pre-school).
• Incentives for Students
– Girls scholarship program based on good
performance on tests scores in Kenya
Participation in education: Comparing Costs
• With results that are based on similar methodologies,
often in similar settings, and reliable estimates of the
causal impact of the intervention, can combine the
cost per extra year of education induced across
program.
• This is different from the cost per child of the program
(depends on the number of infra-marginal children).
• Take the overall cost and divide by the increase in the
number of kid-year that can be attributed to the
program.
• Can get some interesting surprises.
Improving school quality
• School quality remains very low:
– Descriptive evidence (absence rate, ASER)
– Many of the interventions just described
did not lead to an increase in test scores
for the new students who came in: was it
useful to send them to school if they learnt
nothing?
Evidence is building up
• A number of randomized evaluations have been
conducted on how to improve school quality
• While many of the early results were
disappointing, we have learnt from them and this
has informed the design of new programs (and
the sense of what might work)
• Randomized evaluations with test scores as an
outcomes allow to compare the cost
effectiveness of different programs expressed in
a constant unit ($ per standard deviation)
Providing Inputs
• Disappointing results from
– Textbooks (Kenya: Glewwe et al.)
– Flipcharts (Kenya: Glewwe et al.)
– Extra teachers (India: Banerjee et al.)
• Common thread: More of the same—and
nothing works Perhaps a change in
pedagogy is needed instead?
Providing Inputs—And Change
• Pratham’s programs:
– Remedial Education:
• Balsakhi (Mumbai and Vadodara)
– Score improved by 0.6 SD for the bottom students in the class
– Effect seems entirely due to students who go to the remedial
education class: 1 SD for them, and 0 for the other students
• Read India (rural UP)
– Students in read villages more likely to know how to read.
– Computer Assisted Learning Slide 31
• Large effects as well: 0.3 SD in math distributed across the
entire distribution of test scores
• Glasses (Glewwe et al. : China)
Incentives for Teachers
• Paying for input:
• Incentive can work: Camera project (Duflo and Hanna).
Absenteeism reduced by 50%, test scores went up by 0.17
SD after a year. Slide 9
• Incentives can be perverted: Incentives administered by
headteachers in Kenya led to no increase in presence,
despite increase in reported presence
• Paying for output:
• Multitasking in Kenya: short run increases in test scores but
no improvement in learning
• Apparently more success in India: large experiment
conducted with the government of Andhra Pradesh, the
World Bank, and the Asim Premji foundations foun.
Incentives for Students
• Competitive scholarships
– Girl scholarship in Kenya (Kremer et al.):
• Absenteeism reduced for students and teachers
• Increase in girls’ AND BOYS test scores
• Returns to education
– Information intervention in the Dominican
Republic (Jensen)
• Reduced drop out (a measure of effort).
Cost Benefit Comparisons
• Since all programs are evaluated in a similar
way, and all effects are expressed in terms of
standard deviation, we can compute and
compare the Cost per 0.1 Sd increase in test
scores
• (The graphs include only programs that had
positive effects)
• This is does not tell us about the welfare effects
of these programs, but this can tell us where to
invest scarce resources to arrive at a given
objective
What do we know about school
reform-Vouchers
• Private School vouchers in Colombia:
– Individual lottery among applicants for a
program that had limited funds
• Students who won the lottery were more likely to
attend private schools
• They have better test scores results in the long
run, better chance to graduate, and better end-of
school exams
• However, we do not know what the effect is on the
system.
What do we know about school
reform –Decentralization?
• Decentralization to the local levels, improve
decision making at the community levels
• SSA tries to improve community control through
village education committees, but leaves regular
teachers aside.
• Existing experience mostly not encouraging:
– School committees in Kenya
– Corruption in roads in Indonesia
– However: good results from an information and
mobilization campaign on health in Uganda.
• Descriptive evidence in UP not very
encouragining
What parents and VEC know
What Percent of the Village's
Children Can Do Simple Arithmetic
And What the Village Believes
What Percent of Kids Can Do Simple Arithmetic ?
100%
90%
38%
80%
70%
58%
63%
61%
Cannot Do
Simple
Arithmetic
60%
50%
40%
62%
30%
20%
Can Do Simple
Arithmetic
42%
37%
39%
What Villagers
Believe ¹
What
Headmasters
Believe ²
What the VEC
Believes ³
10%
0%
Actual º
Has Anyone Heard of the VEC?
Villagers Who Don't Know of a Village
Education Committee
Villagers Who Think there is a VEC
92.4%
5.0%
Villagers Who Believe there is a VEC, But Can't
Name Any VEC Members
1.1%
1.5%
Villagers Who Can Name Only One or Two VEC
Members
(the Pradhan and/or Headmaster)
Villagers Who Can Name More VEC Members
than Just the Pradhan and Headmaster
7.6%
* Based on 2,803 household surveys in 4 random blocks in the District of Jaunpur, UP. Each household is weighted by total
number of households in village divided by number households surveyed in village.
Are VEC Members Aware of the Institutions of Education?
Percent of VEC Members Who
Know They Are
Are Aware of the
Are Aware of SSA Funds
Members of VEC
Existence of the SSA
Provided to the Schools
Know
Don't Know
Aware
Not Aware
Aware
Not Aware
Headmasters
Other VEC Members
95.8%
77.3%
4.2%
22.7%
99.5%
32.6%
0.5%
67.4%
95.8%
26.6%
4.2%
73.4%
Conclusions: Challenges ahead
• How to implement system-wide reform.
• What will happen to secondary education?
– As the number of primary school graduates increases
(and hopefully their competency level), the next
frontier will be secondary school.
– Providing quality secondary school education to a
large number of students will be very expensive,
since in a growing economy there are many other
competing uses for the types of people who can make
good secondary school teachers (Banerjee)
• It is essential to think proactively and develop now the
programs we will need in a few years: either experiment
within large programs (SSA) or start more nimble and try
new things until it has been shown they work.
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Textbook
CAL
Camera
Incentives
GSP B&T
GSP B
Balsakhi
y1
Balsakhi
y2
Cost per 0.1 Sd increase in test
scores
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