The impact of private provision of public education : empirical evidence from Bogota's concession schools

In 1999 the city of Bogota, Colombia launched the concession school program designed to broaden the coverage and quality of basic education. It consists of a contract between a group of private schools and the public educational system such that private agents provide education for low-income students. This paper tests three main hypotheses concerning the impact of concessions on the quality of education: first, dropout rates are lower in concession schools than in similar public schools; second, other public schools nearby the concession schools have lower dropout rates in comparison with other public schools outside the area of influence; and third, test scores from concession schools are higher than scores in similar public schools. The paper presents evidence in favor of the three hypotheses using propensity score and matching estimators.Tertiary Education,Education For All,Secondary Education,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Economics of Education

Short-run learning dynamics under a test-based accountability system : evidence from Pakistan

Low student learning is a common finding in much of the developing world. This paper uses a relatively unique dataset of five semiannual rounds of standardized test data to characterize and explain the short-term changes in student learning. The data are collected as part of the quality assurance system for a public-private partnership program that offers public subsidies conditional on minimum learning levels to low-cost private schools in Pakistan. Apart from a large positive distributional shift in learning between the first two test rounds, the learning distributions over test rounds show little progress. Schools are ejected from the program if they fail to achieve a minimum pass rate in the test in two consecutive attempts, making the test high stakes. Sharp regression discontinuity estimates show that the threat of program exit on schools that barely failed the test for the first time induces large learning gains. The large change in learning between the first two test rounds is likely attributable to this accountability pressure given that a large share of new program entrants failed in the first test round. Schools also qualify for substantial annual teacher bonuses if they achieve a minimum score in a composite measure of student test participation and mean test score. Sharp regression discontinuity estimates do not show that the prospect of future teacher bonus rewards induces learning gains for schools that barely did not qualify for the bonus.Tertiary Education,Education For All,Secondary Education,Teaching and Learning,Primary Education

The use and misuse of computers in education : evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia

This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have had little effect on students'test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum.Tertiary Education,Primary Education,Secondary Education,Teaching and Learning,Education For All

Efficiency of colombian schools

The main goal of this paper is to study the efficiency of Colombian schools with an eye on understanding what drives school productivity and how much is to be gained by increasing efficiency. The paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to study efficiency and a Tobit model to study the determinants of efficiency. Introduction. The main goal of this paper is to study the efficiency of Colombian schools with an eye on understanding what drives school productivity and how much is to be gained by increasing efficiency. The paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to study efficiency and a Tobit model to study the determinants of efficiency. This is not the first paper to look at the efficiency of secondary schools in Colombia. Gaviria and Barrientos (2001) look at the determinants of test scores in the city of Bogotá. They find that public schools produce lower scores than private schools after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics. More importantly, they find that teacher´s education and infrastructure positively affect scores in private schools but not in public schools, which suggests the existence of inefficiencies in publicly provided education. Nunez et al. (2002) look at the differences between private and public secondary schools in both urban and rural areas for the year 1999. They find that public schools produce, on average, lower scores. However, at the bottom of the distribution, public schools appear to be better than private schools. Finally, Barrera (2003) finds that test scores in both public and private schools increased in the last decade, but that private school scores increased more than public school ones. Initially for the investigation, we analyzed the case of Bogotá. However, given the disparity between this city and the rest of the country and a desire to include municipal level variation, we decided to expand the study to the national level. The results, as we will show, change dramatically in the two samples. We will, therefore, present the results using the national sample and analyze the specific case of Bogotá separately. The paper has the following structure. In the second part, we describe the main methodology used in the analysis. The third part presents the results for the whole country. The next section includes a discussion of the potential role of costs of public versus private education. Finally we close the paper with some general conclusions. In the Appendix we present the analysis of Bogotá as a particular case.Educación, Enseñanza Secundaria, Calidad de la Educación, Rendimiento de la Educación, Colombia

The impact of private provision of public education: Empirical evidence from Bogota's concession schools

In 1999, the city of Bogotá, Colombia launched the Concession School program designed to broaden the coverage and quality of basic education. It consists of a contract between a group of private schools and the public educational system such that private agents provide education for low-income students. This paper tests three main hypotheses concerning the impact of concessions on the quality of education: first, dropout rates are lower in concession schools than in similar public schools; second, other public schools nearby the concession schools have lower dropout rates in comparison with other public schools outside the area of influence; third, test scores from concession schools are higher than scores in similar public schools. The paper presents evidence in favor of the three hypotheses, using propensity score and matching estimators

Evaluating Public Per-Student Subsidies to Low-Cost Private Schools: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from Pakistan

This study estimates the causal effects of a public per-student subsidy program targeted at low-cost private schools in Pakistan on student enrollment and schooling inputs. Program entry is ultimately conditional on achieving a minimum stipulated student pass rate (cutoff) in a standardized academic test. This mechanism for treatment assignment allows the application of regression-discontinuity (RD) methods to estimate program impacts at the cutoff. Data on two rounds of entry test takers (phase 3 and phase 4) are used. Modeling the entry process of phase-4 test takers as a sharp RD design, the authors find evidence of large positive impacts on the number of students, teachers, classrooms, and blackboards. Modeling the entry process of phase-3 test takers as a partially-fuzzy RD design given treatment crossovers, they do not find evidence of significant program impacts on outcomes of interest. The latter finding is likely due to weak identification arising from a small jump in the probability of treatment at the cutoff

Short-run Learning Dynamics under a Test-based Accountability System: Evidence from Pakistan

Low student learning is a common finding in much of the developing world. This paper uses a relatively unique dataset of five semiannual rounds of standardized test data to characterize and explain the short-term changes in student learning. The data are collected as part of the quality assurance system for a public-private partnership program that offers public subsidies conditional on minimum learning levels to low-cost private schools in Pakistan. Apart from a large positive distributional shift in learning between the first two test rounds, the learning distributions over test rounds show little progress. Schools are ejected from the program if they fail to achieve a minimum pass rate in the test in two consecutive attempts, making the test high stakes. Sharp regression discontinuity estimates show that the threat of program exit on schools that barely failed the test for the first time induces large learning gains. The large change in learning between the first two test rounds is likely attributable to this accountability pressure given that a large share of new program entrants failed in the first test round. Schools also qualify for substantial annual teacher bonuses if they achieve a minimum score in a composite measure of student test participation and mean test score. Sharp regression discontinuity estimates do not show that the prospect of future teacher bonus rewards induces learning gains for schools that barely did not qualify for the bonus

The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia

This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have had little effect on students' test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum

Conditional cash transfers in education : design features, peer and sibling effects evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia

This paper presents an evaluation of multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries - the conditional cash transfer - with a student level randomization that allows the authors to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. The analysis tests three treatments: a basic conditional cash transfer treatment based on school attendance, a savings treatment that postpones a bulk of the cash transfer due to good attendance to just before children have to re-enroll, and a tertiary treatment where some of the transfers are conditional on students'graduation and tertiary enrollment rather than attendance. On average, the combined incentives increase attendance, pass rates, enrollment, graduation rates, and matriculation to tertiary institutions. Changing the timing of the payments does not change attendance rates relative to the basic treatment but does significantly increase enrollment rates at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Incentives for graduation and matriculation are particularly effective, increasing attendance and enrollment at secondary and tertiary levels more than the basic treatment. There is some evidence that the subsidies can cause a reallocation of responsibilities within the household. Siblings (particularly sisters) of treated students work more and attend school less than students in families that received no treatment. In addition, indirect peer influences are relatively strong in attendance decisions with the average magnitude similar to that of the direct effect.Tertiary Education,Access to Finance,Primary Education,Secondary Education,Economics of Education

Accounting for Peer Effects in Treatment Response

When one's treatment status affects the outcomes of others, experimental data are not sufficient to identify a treatment causal impact. In order to account for peer effects in program response, we use a social network model. We estimate and validate the model on experimental data collected for the evaluation of a scholarship program in Colombia. By design, randomization is at the student-level. Friendship data reveals that treated and untreated students interact together. Besides providing evidence of peer effects in schooling, we find that ignoring peer effects would have led us to overstate the program actual impact