Can Incentives Mitigate Educational Triage in Upper Primary: Evidence from Uganda

We conjecture that primary leaving exam systems in Africa create educational triage, limiting educational opportunities for many students. Because leaving exam results receive significant public scrutiny, educators face incentives to devote resources to students who could earn high marks and to encourage weak students to dropout prior to completing upper primary school. These triage behaviors appear to be common in Ugandan primary schools, and we propose an RCT to evaluate a teacher incentive mechanism that should mitigate triage incentives. We will measure effects on the entire student achievement distribution, dropout rates, and secondary school enrollment. We will also gather information about classroom interactions between students and teachers to understand underlying mechanisms. Finally, we will estimate heterogeneous effects by baseline achievement, gender, and family background.