As school enrolment and attainment rise across developing countries, policymakers are increasingly directing attention to interventions that affect student learning. In this context, how effective is making schools accountable for performance in addressing deficiencies in service provision? This study evaluates the effect of four randomised interventions aimed at strengthening school committees, and subsequently improving learning outcomes, in public primary schools in Indonesia. It concludes that measures that foster outside ties between the school committee and other parties are more effective than reinforcing existing school committee structures or providing grants and training interventions.
All study schools were randomly allocated to either a control group receiving no intervention, or to treatment groups receiving a grant plus one or a combination of three interventions: training for school committee members, a democratic election of school committee members, or facilitated collaboration between the school committee and the village council, also called linkage.
Nearly two years after implementation, the study found that test scores in Indonesian had improved by 0.17 standard deviations for linkage and by 0.22 standard deviations for linkage and election. Linkage is the most cost effective intervention, causing a 0.13 change in standard deviation in Indonesian test scores for each USD 100 spent. Further:
- Measures to reinforce existing school committee structures, the grant and training interventions, demonstrate limited or no effects. Comparing this model to international evidence, these findings are consistent with, if not more modest than, findings relating to other training and grant interventions.
- In contrast, measures that foster outside ties between the school committee and other parties, linkage and election, lead to greater engagement by education stakeholders and in turn to learning. However such community and local-level engagement measures have fewer international reference points. Those that are available show more varying degrees of success, with interventions reinforcing existing power relations in the community, often by electing or appointing village council members to serve on the school committee.
- The election intervention leads to a rise in overall awareness of the school committee, promotes respect for the committee in the eyes of teachers, and increases the amount of time household members accompany children studying per week. Unfortunately this does not lead to greater learning.
The results of this study suggest that while election interventions can promote positive results, such as household members increasing study time with children, the Ministry of Education may want to consider two important points about replication:
- The implementation manual could incorporate a linkage-like approach
- The study revealed implementation challenges with election compliance despite five facilitator visits to the communities. Thus, when replicating the election process, the Ministry will need to consider who in the district can reliably take on this unbiased, third-party facilitator role of promoting broad participation and potentially working with committee members and headmasters who may be resistant to change.
