The Evidence on School Grants This presentation draws heavily on previous presentations by Dan Levy, Rachel Glennerster, Arianna Legovini, Paul Gertler, and Sebastian Martinez. Africa Impact Evaluation Initiative World Bank

School Grant Programs Motivation: It is not clear that additional school resources translate into better school quality, both in developed and developing countries. The reason is not that resources are not useful, but that these extra resources may not be spent effectively. Basic Idea: Can we improve the effectiveness of school spending by investing in good school projects as opposed to providing universal funding to all schools?

Questions Does this idea really work? Are the best projects in rich schools, so that we end up contributing to an increase in inequality? (Efficiency and Equity) There is not much evidence on this topic. I only know of two programs which were properly evaluated: PEC in Mexico, and School Grants in Uganda.

Mexico Shapiro and Skoufias (2006), Murnane, Willet and Cardenas (2006) PEC provides $15000 5 year grants to 10% of Mexican public primary schools. All schools may participate, but targeting of disadvantaged urban schools through media.

Mexico – PEC Plan 4 Activities: Staff and parents prepare plan Grant disbursement: first 4 years 80% of grant needs to be spent on supplies, infrastructure, and other physical goods; 50% in fifth year (remaining for teacher training and development). Parental involvement in designing and implementing plan, and purchasing goods. Training of school principals.

Evaluation: DD + Matching 24% reduction in dropout 31% reduction in repetition Murnane et al (2006) use one extra year of data and argue that common trends assumption is false. Only the dropout result survives

Uganda Bjorkman (2006) Per-capita grant to cover instructional material and other non-wage expenditures at the school level. Problem: By 1995, most of the grant was being captured by corrupt local district officials and politicians for purposes unrelated to education. The average school only go 20% of the grant, and 70% of the schools got close to nothing.

Evaluation – Newspaper Campaign In order to fight corruption, in 1997 the government introduced mass information campaign through monthly publication in newspapers of transfers to schools. Compare outcomes of students in schools in districts with high and low exposure to newspapers (measured by circulation), before and after the information campaign.