Publication: Scores, Camera, Action: Social Accountability and Teacher Incentives in Remote Areas
Date
2021-08
ISSN
Published
2021-08
Author(s)
Gaduh, Arya
Pradhan, Menno
Priebe, Jan
Susanti, Dewi
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.
Citation
“Gaduh, Arya; Pradhan, Menno; Priebe, Jan; Susanti, Dewi. 2021. Scores, Camera, Action: Social Accountability and Teacher Incentives in Remote Areas. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9748. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36112 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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