Improving the quality of education Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee Department of Economics and JPAL, MIT

Modeling quality Let Q represent quality. Let E represent years of education Education = Q.E Quality production function Q = Q(A,I 1,I 2,…..I n ) Where A is ability Cost of inputs E.c 1,E.c 2,…..E.c n

Optimizing quality The optimum quality: choose I 1,I 2,….. I n to maximize E.Q(A,I 1,I 2,…..I n ) - E.I 1 c 1 - E. I 2 c 2 - …- E. I n c n But schools are club goods. Who will do the maximization? More plausibly schools offer different I 1,I 2,….. I n vectors and then people choose the one that matches best with their A The question of who does the optimization of the inputs remains: can we assume that they are on the (Pareto) frontier

Learning the quality production function Why should it be harder to learn the quality production function than any other production function? In a factory it is easy to vary the inputs, observe how the result changes almost immediately. In a school this is much harder to do. In a salon people can immediately see the results and decide whether they like them or not Salons that are losing clients must either shut down or learn to imitate successful salons Long time to learn how badly a (private) school is failing you. With a car it might take long to learn quality but the experience of others is a reliable guide for your expectation With schools you worry that it is your fault.

Therefore Quality optimization is not easy for the market. A monopolistic supplier (like the government) presumably makes it worse. How can we learn about how to produce quality? How can we assess whether quality is bieng produced optimally?

Randomized evaluations Are usually thought of as a way to solve endogeneity issues However here (and elsewhere) they have another, largely unrelated, advantage. Because you control the variation in the inputs, you can study the effect of individual variations Neither the public nor the private system has that many models Very few cases where the same kind of children go to schools that follow different models.

Some examples of quality improvements that worked Remedial teaching (Banerjee et al.), Mumbai, Vadodara Reading coaching (Banerjee et al.), UP. Computer assisted learning (Banerjee et al.,), Vadodara. Tracking (Duflo et al.), Kenya

Some more examples Girl scholarships (Kremer et al.), Kenya Incentives for para-teachers(Duflo et al.), Kenya Teacher incentives (Muralidharan, et al.), India Teacher report cards (Nguen et al.), Mozambique Parental Mobilization (Duflo et al.), Kenya

Some examples of “quality” improvements that didn’t work Textbooks: (Glewwe et al.) in Kenya Flipcharts: (Glewwe et al.) in Kenya Class size: (Banerjee et al.) in Rajasthan Class size: (Duflo et al.) in Kenya Class size: (Banerjee et al.) in Vadodara, Mumbai Parental Mobilization (Banerjee et al.), UP.

Are returns on inputs equalized? Not obviously… Potentially important complementarities. Not clear we are even now at the right level of disaggregation. For example we know that Class size does not matter But para-teachers, volunteer teachers etc. do help a lot. What is going on here? Are para-teachers just a case of better incentives? or is it enthusiasm? Or empathy

Cost per 0.1 Sd increase in test scores