Skip to main content

Scores, camera, action? Incentivizing teachers in remote areas

Submitted by admin on
Abstract

Poor teacher accountability leads to poor education quality, especially in remotely-located schools that are costly to supervise. This paper reports the impacts of three interventions that linked community-based monitoring to a government allowance for teachers working in remote areas in Indonesia. In all treatments, the project helped communities to formulate a joint commitment between schools and community members to improve education. Teacher-specific scorecards were developed based on this commitment and performance was evaluated and disseminated by a newly-formed user committee. Treatments 2 and 3 added to this a pay for performance scheme that relied on the community reports. In Treatment 2 (SAM+Cam), the remote area allowance was made dependent on teacher presence, which was monitored with a camera with a time stamp. In Treatment 3 (SAM+Score), the overall score on the scorecard determined the allowance. The authors find improvements in learning outcomes across all treatments; however, the strongest impacts of between 0.17-0.20 standard deviation (s.d.) were observed for SAM+Cam. In this treatment, teachers increased teaching hours and parents increased investments in their children’s education. The authors show evidence that bargaining and the community’s propensity to punish free-riders may have a role in affecting treatment effectiveness.

Author
Gaduh, Arya
Pradhan, Menno
Priebe, Jan
Susanti, Dewi
Year of publication
2020
Pages
57
Series
RISE working paper
Country (Geographical area)
Level of education
Source database
library
Language
Project
Research on Improving Systems of Education, RISE