Education in India: Challengesand 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

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• 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:• 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 Kids Can Do Simple Arithmetic ?

42% 37% 39%

62%

58% 63% 61%

38%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

What VillagersBelieve ¹

WhatHeadmasters

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What the VECBelieves ³

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Has Anyone Heard of the VEC?

1.5%1.1%

5.0%7.6%92.4%

Villagers Who Don't Know of a VillageEducation Committee

Villagers Who Think there is a VEC

Villagers Who Believe there is a VEC, But Can'tName Any VEC Members

Villagers Who Can Name Only One or Two VECMembers (the Pradhan and/or Headmaster)Villagers Who Can Name More VEC Membersthan Just the Pradhan and Headmaster

* 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 WhoKnow They Are Are Aware of the Are Aware of SSA Funds

Members of VEC Existence of the SSA Provided to the SchoolsKnow Don't Know Aware Not Aware Aware Not Aware

Headmasters 95.8% 4.2% 99.5% 0.5% 95.8% 4.2%Other VEC Members 77.3% 22.7% 32.6% 67.4% 26.6% 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.

Cost per 0.1 Sd increase in test scores

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