Education Reforms, Bureaucracy and the Puzzles of Implementation: A Case Study from Bihar

Creating Education Systems Coherent for Learning Outcomes

“…Coherence across the same relationship of accountability in different relationships, for instance, is the information used to assess education performance coherent between politics, compact, management and client power? Coherence across the system, for instance, while management and client power might be internally coherent they might be incoherent as the fundamental delegation of management may be incoherent with the fundamental delegation of client power, that is, parents/students/communities might judge performance on outcomes relevant to their needs whereas management may entirely centered on input oriented criteria and process compliance (Banerji 2015), (Aiyar, Dongre et al 2015).…”

Improving Public Sector Management at Scale? Experimental Evidence on School Governance India

“…Third, we illustrate the nature of bureaucratic incentives and how these can lead to divergence between the perceived and actual success of a program. Specifically, our detailed qualitative interviews illustrate how paperwork and the appearance of activity may be an end in itself even when ultimate goals are unaffected (Gupta, 2012;Aiyar, Dongre, and Davis, 2015;Levy et al, 2018). Thus, the program was deemed a success by administrative metrics since there was a paper trail of assessments done and reports uploaded to prove it.…”

Teachers as Agents and Policy Actors

“…A somewhat similar argument is made by Aiyar et al (2015) when tracing the implementation of an educational reform program in Bihar, India. Emphasizing the idea of informal norms that shape bureaucratic behavior and organization culture, the authors argue that the overwhelming focus on "discipline" becomes the normative framework through which all levels of the education administrative system understand, interpret and implement their work.…”