Working Paper: NBER ID: w14311
Authors: Abhijit Banerjee; Rukmini Banerji; Esther Duflo; Rachel Glennerster; Stuti Khemani
Abstract: Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes both locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools into committees and gives these groups powers over resource allocation, and monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey we found that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. This paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation through these committees: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. We find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, we do find that the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had a large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained to teach, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.
Keywords: Participatory Programs; Education; India; Randomized Evaluation
JEL Codes: I21; O12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Large group interventions may not effectively mobilize community action (C92) | Small group interventions can yield substantial educational benefits (C92) |
| Interventions aimed at increasing community involvement through information dissemination and training (O36) | No significant changes in community engagement with public schools or improvements in teacher effort or student learning outcomes (I21) |
| First two interventions failed to mobilize parents or increase their involvement in school activities (I24) | No increase in the number of parents visiting schools or volunteering time or resources (I21) |
| Third intervention trained volunteers to conduct reading camps (I24) | Large increase in community participation with over 400 reading camps established and approximately 7500 children enrolled (I24) |
| Children who attended the reading camps (Y50) | Substantial improvements in reading skills (I21) |