Scores, Camera, Action? Incentivizing Teachers in Remote Areas
The impacts of 3 interventions that linked community-based monitoring to a government allowance for teachers working in Indonesia
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 3 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 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. We 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. We show evidence that bargaining and the community’s propensity to punish free-riders may have a role in affecting treatment effectiveness.
This research is part of the ‘Research on Improving Systems of Education’ programme
Citation
Gaduh, A., Pradhan, M., Priebe, J., and Susanti, D. 2020. Scores, Camera, Action? Incentivizing Teachers in Remote Areas. RISE Working Paper Series. 20/035. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-WP_2020/035.
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