TY  - BOOK
AU  - Banerjee,Abhijit V.
AU  - Banerjee,Abhijit V.
AU  - Banerji,Rukmini
AU  - Duflo,Esther
AU  - Glennerster,Rachel
AU  - Khemani,Stuti
TI  - Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence From A Randomized Evaluation in Education in India 
PY  - 2008///
CY  - Washington, D.C.
PB  - The World Bank
KW  - Education
KW  - Education for All
KW  - Effective Schools and Teachers
KW  - Health Monitoring and Evaluation
KW  - Health, Nutrition and Population
KW  - Human Development
KW  - Interventions
KW  - Learning
KW  - Learning outcomes
KW  - Primary Education
KW  - Primary schools
KW  - Public schools
KW  - Quality of education
KW  - Reading
KW  - Teachers
KW  - Tertiary Education
KW  - Universal primary education
N2  - Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools, into committees and gives these powers over resource allocation, monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey this paper finds that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. The paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. The authors find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it
UR  - http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-4584
ER  -