1. Education in India: Challenges and ways ahead Esther Duflo
A B D U L L A T I F J A M E E L P O V E R T Y A C T I O N L A B

2. Two Challenges in education
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.

3. The situation in India Progress has been made on the first goal
Rapid improvement in enrollment rates, at least in primary school
Situation for girls and in some states can still improve
Secondary school?
Quality is a disaster:
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)

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

8. 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)
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

9. Some findings from randomized evaluation: Education in Developing Countries
Participation
Quality:
Inputs
Reform Strategies
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

10. 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
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

11. 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
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

12. 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.
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

14. 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?
De worming efforts decrease absenteeism by 25% but had no noticeable effect on test scores of students.
??Kremer and Miguel suggest this may be due to the high variability in student test scores.
Providing free meals increased test scores only in schools where teachers were initially well-trained.

15. 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)

16. 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?

17. 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)

18. 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.

19. 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).

20. 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

21. 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.

22. 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

23. What parents and VEC know

26. 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.

28. Cost per 0.1 Sd increase in test scores