TY - JOUR
T1 - School governance, teacher incentives, and pupil-teacher ratios
T2 - Experimental evidence from Kenyan primary schools
AU - Duflo, Esther
AU - Dupas, Pascaline
AU - Kremer, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Josh Angrist, Paul Glewwe, Alaka Holla, Victor Lavy, Craig McIntosh, Naercio Menezes-Filho, Karthik Muralidharan, and seminar participants at the Harris School, Harvard, UC Santa Barbara, the World Bank, Dartmouth College, NEUDC, EGAP, and Itau International Seminar for their helpful comments and discussions. We thank the Kenya Ministry of Education, International Child Support Africa, and Matthew Jukes for their collaboration. We thank Willa Friedman, Jessica Morgan, Nicolas Studer, Ian Tomb, Victor Pouliquen and Paul Wang for their excellent research assistance. We are grateful to Grace Makana and her field team for collecting the data. We thank the World Bank and the Government of the Netherlands for the funding (Bank Netherlands Partnership Program (BNPP) grants 7135425 and 7135426) that made this study possible. The research protocol was approved by the following IRBs: MIT, Harvard, ICS and IPA Kenya.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014.
PY - 2015/3/1
Y1 - 2015/3/1
N2 - Some education policymakers focus on bringing down pupil-teacher ratios. Others argue that resources will have limited impact without systematic reforms to education governance, teacher incentives, and pedagogy. We examine a program under which school committees at randomly selected Kenyan schools were funded to hire an additional teacher on an annual contract renewable conditional on performance, outside normal Ministry of Education civil-service channels, at one-quarter normal compensation levels. For students randomly assigned to stay with existing classes, test scores did not increase significantly, despite a reduction in class size from 82 to 44 on average. In contrast, scores increased for students assigned to be taught by locally-hired contract teachers. One reason may be that contract teachers had low absence rates, while centrally-hired civil-service teachers in schools randomly assigned contract teachers endogenously reduced their effort. Civil-service teachers also captured rents for their families, with approximately 1/3 of contract teacher positions going to relatives of existing teachers. A governance program that empowered parents within school committees reduced both forms of capture. The best contract teachers obtained civil service jobs over time, and we estimate large potential dynamic benefits from supplementing a civil service system with locally-hired contract teachers brought in on a probationary basis and granted tenure conditional on performance.
AB - Some education policymakers focus on bringing down pupil-teacher ratios. Others argue that resources will have limited impact without systematic reforms to education governance, teacher incentives, and pedagogy. We examine a program under which school committees at randomly selected Kenyan schools were funded to hire an additional teacher on an annual contract renewable conditional on performance, outside normal Ministry of Education civil-service channels, at one-quarter normal compensation levels. For students randomly assigned to stay with existing classes, test scores did not increase significantly, despite a reduction in class size from 82 to 44 on average. In contrast, scores increased for students assigned to be taught by locally-hired contract teachers. One reason may be that contract teachers had low absence rates, while centrally-hired civil-service teachers in schools randomly assigned contract teachers endogenously reduced their effort. Civil-service teachers also captured rents for their families, with approximately 1/3 of contract teacher positions going to relatives of existing teachers. A governance program that empowered parents within school committees reduced both forms of capture. The best contract teachers obtained civil service jobs over time, and we estimate large potential dynamic benefits from supplementing a civil service system with locally-hired contract teachers brought in on a probationary basis and granted tenure conditional on performance.
KW - Contract teachers
KW - Corruption
KW - Decentralization
KW - Institutions
KW - Nepotism
KW - PTA
KW - School-based management
KW - Teacher effort
KW - Test score gain
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.11.008
DO - 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.11.008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84925539653
SN - 0047-2727
VL - 123
SP - 92
EP - 110
JO - Journal of Public Economics
JF - Journal of Public Economics
ER -