This project seeks to estimate the effect of incentives on teacher attendance, and of increased teacher attendance on students' attendance and on students' abilities in math and Hindi. Illiteracy rates in India are alarmingly high, and this can be attributed in part to the low quality of education. Studies have shown that the rate of absence of teachers is very high in India. Furthermore, previous studies show that teachers from the schools included in this study attend class only 60% of the time. The study will offer financial bonuses to teachers who maintain good attendance in randomly selected informal education centers run by Seva Mandir, an NGO in Udaipur, India. In order to monitor teacher attendance, each teacher will be required to photograph the class at the beginning and end of each school day. The camera's timestamp feature allows us to determine when and for how long each school was open. This technological monitoring provides a more cost effective method for staff to monitor attendance since staff visits will be reduced from daily to once every three weeks.

Non-formal Education Centers within Udaipur district in southern Rajasthan, India

The program resulted in an immediate and long lasting improvement in teacher attendance rates in treatment schools, as measured through monthly unannounced visits in both treatment and comparison schools. Over the 30 months in which attendance was tracked, teachers at program schools had an absence rate of 21 percent, compared to 44 percent baseline and the 42 percent in the comparison schools. Absence rates stayed low after the end of the proper evaluation phase (the first fourteen months of the program), suggesting that teachers did not change their behavior simply for the evaluation.

Although we find that teachers are sensitive to the financial incentives, we see no evidence of multitasking. When the school was open, teachers were as likely to be teaching in treatment as in comparison schools, suggesting that the marginal costs of teaching are low conditional on attendance. Student attendance when the school was open was similar in both groups, so student in treatment group received more days of instruction. A year into the program, test scores in the treatment schools were 0.17 standard deviations higher than in the comparison schools. Two and a half years into the program, children from the treatment schools were also 10 percentage points (or 62 percent) more likely to transfer to formal primary schools, which requires passing a competency test. The program's impact and cost are similar to other successful education programs.

Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, J-PAL Periodicals.

Addressing Absence
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo.
January 2006

Monitoring Works: Getting Teachers to Come to School
Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, Stephen Ryan.
February 2008

J-PAL Policy Briefcase No. 6
J-PAL Periodicals.
September 2008

Seva Mandir

India

Education

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foudation, Russell Sage Foundation

To read about this project in the News click the link(s) below:
Inside the Machine: Toward a new development economics
Trial and Error
Camera Schools: The way to go
Camera & cash pill for truant tutors
Special Report: The $25 billion question - Aid to Africa