I have been reading into the MIT Poverty Action Lab's work since seeing their test results published in the book Economic Gangsters. In looking specifically at their randomized trials in the educational setting, I was drawn to recent work done in Madagascar, which looked at the effects of both a "top down" and a "bottom up" approach to school interventions. Madagascar is filled with the same issues as most of the developing world in terms of lack of truly progressive educational policy and a stagnant public education system riddled with huge systemic problems. The details are as followed for the "intervention:"
Researchers, in collaboration with The Ministry of Education in Madagascar, ran a randomized experiment in 3,774 primary schools in 30 public school districts. These districts represented all geographic areas in the country, but were focused on schools with the higher rates of grade repetition.
All district administrators in treatment districts received operational tools and training that included forms for supervision visits to schools, and procurement sheets for school supplies and grants (district-level intervention). In some of these schools, the subdistrict head was also trained and provided with tools to supervise school visits, as well as information on the performance and resource level at each school (subdistrict-level intervention).
Lastly, several districts also introduced a school level intervention which involved parental monitoring through school meetings. Field workers distributed a ‘report card’ to schools, which included the previous year’s dropout rate, exam pass rate, and repetition rate. Two community meetings were then held, and the first meeting resulted in an action plan based on the report card. One example of the goals specified in the action plans was to increase the school exam pass rate by 5 percentage points by the end of the academic year. Common tasks specified for teachers included lesson planning and student evaluation every few weeks. The parent’s association was expected to monitor the student evaluation reports which the teachers were supposed to communicate to them. These tools allowed parents to coordinate on taking actions to monitor service quality and exercise social pressure on the teachers.
What is so interesting about the results is that the top-down approach, which is the traditional development approach of dealing with school reform, did practically nothing to actually improve the conditions on the ground. What showed large results were the "bottom up" trials, in which parental monitoring, field workers, and community meetings following specific action plans. Here are the details from the MIT site:
Impact from Bottom-Up Approach: The interventions at the school level led to significantly improved teacher behavior. Teachers were on average 0.26 standard deviations more likely to create daily and weekly lesson plans and to have discussed them with their director. Test scores were 0.1 standard deviations higher than those in the comparison group two years after the implementation of the program. Additionally, student attendance increased by 4.3 percentage points compared to the comparison group average of 87%, though teacher attendance and communication with parents did not improve.
