Improving the quality of education

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee

Department of Economics and JPAL, MIT

Modeling quality

Let Q represent quality. Let E represent years of education Education = Q.E Quality production function

Q = Q(A,I1,I2,…..In) Where A is ability

Cost of inputs E.c1,E.c2,…..E.cn

Optimizing quality

The optimum quality: choose I1,I2,….. In to maximize

E.Q(A,I1,I2,…..In) - E.I1c1 - E. I2c2 - …- E. In cn

But schools are club goods. Who will do the maximization?

More plausibly schools offer different I1,I2,….. In

vectors and then people choose the one that matches best with their A

The question of who does the optimization of the inputs remains: can we assume that they are on the (Pareto) frontier

Learning the quality production function Why should it be harder to learn the quality production function

than any other production function? In a factory it is easy to vary the inputs, observe how the result

changes almost immediately. In a school this is much harder to do.

In a salon people can immediately see the results and decide whether they like them or not Salons that are losing clients must either shut down or learn to

imitate successful salons Long time to learn how badly a (private) school is failing you.

With a car it might take long to learn quality but the experience of others is a reliable guide for your expectation With schools you worry that it is your fault.

Therefore

Quality optimization is not easy for the market.

A monopolistic supplier (like the government) presumably makes it worse.

How can we learn about how to produce quality?

How can we assess whether quality is bieng produced optimally?

Randomized evaluations

Are usually thought of as a way to solve endogeneity issues

However here (and elsewhere) they have another, largely unrelated, advantage.

Because you control the variation in the inputs, you can study the effect of individual variations Neither the public nor the private system has that many

models Very few cases where the same kind of children go to

schools that follow different models.

Some examples of quality improvements that worked

Remedial teaching (Banerjee et al.), Mumbai, Vadodara

Reading coaching (Banerjee et al.), UP. Computer assisted learning (Banerjee et al.,),

Vadodara. Tracking (Duflo et al.), Kenya

Some more examples

Girl scholarships (Kremer et al.), Kenya Incentives for para-teachers(Duflo et al.),

Kenya Teacher incentives (Muralidharan, et al.),

India Teacher report cards (Nguen et al.),

Mozambique Parental Mobilization (Duflo et al.), Kenya

Some examples of “quality” improvements that didn’t work

Textbooks: (Glewwe et al.) in Kenya Flipcharts: (Glewwe et al.) in Kenya Class size: (Banerjee et al.) in Rajasthan Class size: (Duflo et al.) in Kenya Class size: (Banerjee et al.) in Vadodara,

Mumbai Parental Mobilization (Banerjee et al.), UP.

Are returns on inputs equalized?

Not obviously… Potentially important complementarities. Not clear we are even now at the right level

of disaggregation. For example we know that Class size does not matter But para-teachers, volunteer teachers etc. do help

a lot. What is going on here? Are para-teachers just a case of better

incentives? or is it enthusiasm? Or empathy

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