Can Informational Campaigns Raise Awareness and Local Participation in Primary Education in India?
While primary school enrollment rates have risen sharply in much of the world, the quality of education remains low in many developing countries. Many children who attend school regularly are still unable to read or do basic arithmetic. Community oversight and participation has been advocated to increase education quality. However there is currently little rigorous evidence as to whether this works, and how community participation can be encouraged. Is more direct action by communities to teach their children to read effective?
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, many districts have a literacy rate below 50%. In response to these problems, the government established Village Education Committees (VECs) in every village in 2001. VECs consist of the elected head of the village government (pradhan), the head teacher of the local school, and three parents who are nominated by their community. These committees are responsible for monitoring school performance, claiming public funds and hiring an additional contract teacher in the event of overcrowding.
Despite the promising aspects of this program, a survey conducted in 2005 indicated that 38% of VEC members did not readily identify as being part of the committee, and 25% did not even know they had this role. Only 3.6% of all VEC members knew they had the ability to request funds to hire another teacher, which is one of the main options open to the VEC.
Working jointly with Pratham (a local NGO) and the World Bank, researchers designed three interventions that were randomly assigned in 280 villages in four rural blocks in Jaunpur district, eastern Uttar Pradesh, a populous and educationally struggling area in India. These interventions served to determine if more information and encouragement to use the channels available to them would cause VECs and community members to demand and receive better services. They contrasted this with direct action to improve learning outside the official channels.
- Intervention 1: In 65 villages, field workers started a series of conversations about education in small groups throughout the community. These conversations covered the current status of schools in the village, the quality of local schools, state mandated provisions for schools, mid-day meals, and local funds available for education. People were asked if they knew about the VEC and its membership and responsibilities. After two days of meetings in small groups, a community-wide meeting was held where people were encouraged to ask for information from the VEC, with information gaps filled in by Pratham’s field workers. VEC members also received a pamphlet on their roles and responsibilities from the staff.
- Intervention 2: In addition to all the steps outlined above, communities in another 65 villages were trained and encouraged to conduct testing to see if children could read simple text and solve basic arithmetic problems. Volunteers put together a "report card" for each community, which was presented at the community-wide meeting.
- Intervention 3: In addition to the above two steps, Pratham officers taught volunteers in another 65 villages a simple technique for helping children learn to read. Volunteers were encouraged to start after-school reading classes, and staff returned an average of seven times to provide in-service training. The objective was to use Pratham-designed materials and local volunteers to supplement the normal curriculum, and improve literacy among village children, and 85 villages received no treatment, serving as a comparison.
Impact on Information Gaps: The average effect of all three treatments was an increase of 7.8 percentage points in VEC members who knew they could access public funds, and a 13 percentage point increase of members who had been properly trained. Parents were also 2.6 percentage points more likely to know that a VEC existed in their community.
Impact on Engagement: Despite these improvements in awareness, there was little difference between the VECs’ performance in treatment and comparison villages. The only significant difference was that 20% more contract teachers were hired in Intervention 2 villages (although not in Intervention 3 villages). Also, the intervention did not increase the level of engagement of parents with schools. Parents were no more likely to have visited the school or to have volunteered time or money in the treatment villages than in the comparison villages.
Impact on Reading: In 55 of the 65 Intervention 3 villages, volunteers ran a total of 400 reading courses. The average child in an Intervention 3 village who could not read anything at the baseline was 7.9% more likely to be able to read at least letters. Those who could read only letters at baseline were 3.5% more likely to read at least paragraphs or words, and 3.3% more likely to read stories if they were in an Intervention 3 village. These changes in average literacy across the village came despite the fact that only 8% of children, including 13% of those who could not recognize letters prior to the intervention, attended the classes. If we assume that all the improvement in the villages came from the reading classes then children who attended the classes must have seen very big improvements in reading. In particular, children who could not read at baseline but attended classes ended up being able to read letters at endline, and 98% of children who could read at the word or paragraph level were able to read at the story level.
This was the only intervention which actually improved educational outcomes, by empowering individuals to improve teaching in their own communities. This suggests that enabling local action which does not depend upon large-group participation may be a means of directly affecting educational outcomes.
