Social interactions and student achievement in a developing country : An instrumental variables approach

This paper identifies endogenous social effects in mathematics test performance for eighth graders in rural Bangladesh using information on arsenic contamination of water wells at home as an instrument. In other words, the identification relies on variation in test scores among peers owing to exogenous exposure to arsenic contaminated water wells at home. The results suggest that the peer effect is significant, and school selection plays little role in biasing peer effects estimates.Tertiary Education,Education For All,Teaching and Learning,Primary Education,Secondary Education

Madrasas and NGOs : complements or substitutes ? non-state providers and growth in female education in Bangladesh

There has been a proliferation of non-state providers of education services in the developing world. In Bangladesh, for instance, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee runs more than 40,000 non-formal schools that cater to school-drop outs from poor families or operate in villages where there's little provision for formal schools. This paper presents a rationale for supporting these schools on the basis of their spillover effects on female enrollment in secondary (registered) madrasa schools (Islamic faith schools). Most madrasa high schools in Bangladesh are financed by the sate and include amodern curriculum alongside traditional religious subjects. Using an establishment-level dataset on student enrollment in secondary schools and madrasas, the authors demonstrate that the presence of madrasas is positively associated with secondary female enrollment growth. Such feminization of madrasas is therefore unique and merits careful analysis. The authors test the effects of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee primary schools on growth in female enrollment in madrasas. The analysis deals with potential endoegeneity by using data on number of the number of school branches and female members in the sub-district. The findings show that madrasas that are located in regions with a greater number of Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee schools have higher growth in female enrollment. This relationship is further strengthened by the finding that there is, however, no effect of these schools on female enrollment growth in secular schools.Primary Education,Tertiary Education,Education For All,Gender and Education,Teaching and Learning

Poisoning the mind : arsenic contamination and cognitive achievement of children

Bangladesh has experienced the largest mass poisoning of a population in history owing to contamination of groundwater with naturally occurring inorganic arsenic. Continuous drinking of such metal-contaminated water is highly cancerous; prolonged drinking of such water risks developing diseases in a span of just 5-10 years. Arsenicosis-intake of arsenic-contaminated drinking water-has implications for children's cognitive and psychological development. This study examines the effect of arsenicosis at school and at home on cognitive achievement of children in rural Bangladesh using recent nationally representative school survey data on students. Information on arsenic poisoning of the primary source of drinking water-tube wells-is used to ascertain arsenic exposure. The findings show an unambiguously negative and statistically significant correlation between mathematics score and arsenicosis at home, net of exposure at school. Split-sample analysis reveals that the effect is only specific to boys; for girls, the effect is negative but insignificant. Similar correlations are found for cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes such as subjective well-being, that is, a self-reported measure of life satisfaction (also a direct proxy for health status) of students and their performance in primary-standard mathematics. These correlations remain robust to controlling for school-level exposure.Education For All,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Tertiary Education,Urban Solid Waste Management

Returns to Education in Bangladesh

This paper reports labour market returns to education in Bangladesh using national level household survey data. Returns are estimated separately for rural and urban samples, males, females and private sector employees. Substantial heterogeneity in returns is observed; e.g. estimates are higher for urban (than rural sample) and female samples (compared to their male counterparts). Our ordinary least square estimates of returns to education are robust to control for types of schools attended by individuals and selection into wage work.

Schools, Household, Risk, and Gender: Determinants of Child Schooling in Ethiopia

Drawing upon data from Ethiopia, we highlight the relationship between investments in child schooling and key factors related to household characteristics, supply and quality of schooling, and income shocks. The unique contribution of this study stems from our examination of the effect of adverse income shocks on gender-differentiated child schooling outcomes. While there are several empirical studies that test the degree to which households are able to smooth consumption in response to a covariate shock, only few studies probe the gender-differentiated impacts of those shocks within the household. We find a strong bias against investments in female education in rural Ethiopia. Controlling for key supply and demand side factors such as household income, parental education, distance to and quality of schools, girls who reside in rural areas are almost 12 percent less likely to be enrolled in primary school compared to boys. Furthermore, while an adverse weather-induced crop shock has no discernable impact on the schooling of boys, the same adverse shock has a deleterious impact on both the probability of enrollment and completion of schooling for girls. Besides the impact of adverse income shocks on child schooling, we find that investment in child schooling is significantly influenced by positive education externalities with the household and community, availability and distance to schools, and quality of school infrastructure.Key words: Income shocks; Schooling; Ethiopia.

Religious Schools, Social Values and Economic Attitudes: Evidence from Bangladesh

This paper examines the social impact of a madrasa (Islamic religious school) reform program in Bangladesh. The key features of the reform are change of the curriculum and introduction of female teachers. We assess whether the reform is making any contribution in improving social cohesion in rural areas. We use new data on teachers and female graduates from rural Bangladesh and explore how attitudes toward desired fertility, working mothers, higher education for girls vis-à-vis boys, and various political regimes vary across secondary schools and modernised madrasas. We find some evidence of attitudinal gaps by school type. Modernised religious education is associated with attitudes that are conducive to democracy. On the other hand, when compared to their secular schooled peers, madrasa graduates have perverse attitude on matters such as working mothers, desired fertility and higher education for girls. We also find that young people's attitudes are interlinked with that of their teachers. Exposure to female and younger teachers leads to more favourable attitudes among graduates. These estimated effects are robust to conditioning on a rich set of individual, family and school traits. We conclude by discussing other social and economic implications of these findings.

Student Achievement Conditioned Upon School Selection: Religious and Secular Secondary School Quality in Bangladesh

In this paper we present new evidence on the impact of school characteristics on secondary student achievement using a rich data set from rural Bangladesh. We deal with a potentially important selectivity issue in the South Asian context: the non-random sorting of children into madrasas (Islamic faith schools). We do so by employing a combination of fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation techniques. Our empirical results do not reveal any difference in test scores between religious and secular schools when selection into secondary school is taken into account. However, we document significant learning deficit by gender and primary school type: girls and graduates of primary madrasas have significantly lower test scores even after controlling for school and classroom-specific unobservable correlates of learning.

Equality of educational opportunity and public policy in Bangladesh

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Pay differences between teachers and other occupations: some empirical evidence from Bangladesh: SKOPE Research Paper No. 58, November 2005

This paper addresses a popular debate on teacher pay in a developing country context, namely whether teachers are under-paid or over-paid. Using national level household survey data from Bangladesh, we find that teachers are significantly under-paid in comparison to non-teachers who possess similar human capital and other observed characteristics. A decomposition exercise of the teacher non-teacher wage gap reveals that the teacher non-teacher salary difference is driven mostly by differential returns to observed characteristics and not by differences in the endowment of those characteristics. Our results suggest that there is some equity justification for allowing an "across-the-board" increase in teacher pay particularly for female, rural and aided school teachers in Bangladesh

Intra- and inter-household externalities in children's schooling: evidence from rural residential neighbourhoods in Bangladesh

This article tests for neighbourhood effects on children's schooling, using unique data on rural residential neighbourhoods from Bangladesh. We find that school completion of children is positively and significantly affected by the mean grade completion of other children in the neighbourhood. We then present three pieces of evidence that suggest that the social effect offers a valid explanation. Firstly, the evidence we find of inter-household externalities is not driven out by control for a host of neighbourood and household attributes. Secondly, the result remains robust to neighbourhood composition effects: it is unchanged as we purge our main sample of the households within the neighbourhood that are potentially linked in terms of their recent history of partition. Thirdly, a similar peer effect is found for adults who completed schooling before the introduction of existing educational reforms in rural areas suggesting that the observed effect of growing up in educated neighbourhood does not merely capture the influence of common exposure to various government educational interventions. As a by-product, the article also provides evidence of intra-household externality in children's schooling, net of neighbourood externalities. We conclude by discussing the implication of these findings for education policy design.