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.

Does Information Lead to More Active Citizenship? Evidence from an Education Intervention in Rural Kenya

“…Banerjee et al (2010) find that providing information to citizens in Uttar Pradesh about the role of the local village education committee and about the quality of learning in local schools had no impact on parental involvement in the school system. Keefer and Khemani (2011) employ a natural experiment in Benin built around within--commune variation in access to community radio programming to evaluate the effects of information dissemination on literacy, government inputs to education, citizen involvement in Parent--Teacher Association meetings, and private investments in children's learning.…”

“…One of the advantages of the intervention we study here is that it combines these different types of information. Like Banerjee et al (2010) and Pandey et al (2009), the interventions we evaluate involve information about both the quality of children's learning and how citizens might improve it. 8…”

Improving Educational Quality through Enhancing Community Participation: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment in Indonesia

“…Following Banerjee et al (2010), we condition on the baseline values of all variables included in the summary index. For instance, for outcome variable d included in summary index d, the impact is estimated by…”

Participatory accountability and collective action: Experimental evidence from Albania

“…In education, reforms aiming to improve accountability by increasing parental participation in schools -also called schoolbased management reforms (e.g. Banerjee et al, 2010;Blimpo and Evans, 2011;Duflo et al, 2011;Pradhan et al 2011) provide mixed evidence of success, yet the reasons for the contrasting results obtained in different societies are unclear.…”