Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

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 infonnation, 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.

The Negative Consequences of Overambitious Curricula in Developing Countries

“…27 This experience demonstrates that lowering the curricular gap need not even be very challenging. Village volunteer tutors were trained for a mere four days and as a result, could offer children fundamental skills required for them to succeed in school (Banerjee, Banerji , Duflo, Glennerster, & Khemani, 2010).…”

Improving Education in the Developing World: What Have We Learned from Randomized Evaluations?

“…A reading intervention in rural India trained community volunteers who had a tenth- or twelfth-grade education for four days to teach children how to read and significantly improved reading achievement (Banerjee et al 2009). In 55 of the 65 villages that received the program, volunteers started reading camps, which enrolled roughly 8% of all children in the treatment villages, with initially poor readers more likely to attend the camps.…”

“…Similarly, treatment parents were not more involved with their children’s school nor were they more likely to know about the state of education in their village or consider it a major issue. (Banerjee et al 2009). Both interventions also failed to improve teacher and student absence, which remained high at 25% and 50%, respectively.…”

Field Experiments

“…This is unfortunate because replication is an important tool to establish the robustness of effects in experimentation. Some researchers have replicated their experiments in different locations, and find close to identical results in some instances (Bobonis et al, 2006;Miguel and Kremer, 2004), while being unable to replicate the original effect in others (Banerjee et al, 2010;Duflo et al, 2007).…”