Scores, Camera, Action: Social Accountability and Teacher Incentives in Remote Areas

Arya Gaduh, Menno Prasad Pradhan, Jan Priebe and Dewi Susanti

No 9748, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Remote schools in developing countries are costly to supervise, resulting in low teacher accountability and poor education outcomes. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of three treatments that introduced teacher incentives based on community monitoring of teacher effort against locally agreed standards. The Social Accountability Mechanism (SAM) treatment facilitated a joint commitment between schools and community members to improve learning. Teacher performance was rated against it, discussed in monthly public meetings and passed on to authorities. The second and third treatments combined SAM with a performance pay mechanism that would penalize eligible teachers’ remote area allowance for poor performance. In the SAM+Camera (SAM+Cam) treatment, the cut was based on absence as recorded by a tamper-proof camera; while in the SAM+Score treatment, it was based on the overall rating. After one year, the findings indicate improvements in learning outcomes across all treatments; however, the strongest impact of 0.20 standard deviation is observed for SAM+Cam. The evaluation also finds a small positive impact on the effort of affected teachers for SAM+Cam and SAM, and significant positive improvements on parental educational investments in all treatments. For SAM and SAM+Cam, additional data were collected in the second year (one year after project facilitators left). The findings show that SAM+Cam’s impacts on learning outcomes and parental investments—but not teacher effort —persisted into the second year.

Keywords: Educational Sciences; Social Accountability; Democratic Government; De Facto Governments; Public Sector Administrative and Civil Service Reform; Public Sector Administrative&Civil Service Reform; Administrative&Civil Service Reform; Effective Schools and Teachers; Educational Institutions&Facilities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/94716162 ... -in-Remote-Areas.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9748

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().