Local Bureaucrats and School Governance Reform at Scale: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

We report the results of a randomized evaluation of a management reform program in Tanzania, rolled out to all schools in the country over a period of four years. School quality assurance officers (previously known as school inspectors) visit schools and produce a set of diagnostics and recommendations to improve school quality that are shared with teachers and parents. We evaluate the program in a nationally representative sample of 397 schools, with 199 schools assigned to the control. In half of the treated schools, we send summarized recommendations to front-line local government education officers to encourage follow up. We document three main findings. First, we observe modest gains in learning in the Visit arm with follow up encouragement. We also observe a decline in English test scores in the Visit arm with no follow up. Second, we observe a short run change in teacher effort in the arm with follow up: attendance at midline increased by 7.9 percentage points and teaching practices improved. Third, we find evidence that local government education officers take actions to improve learning in the Visit arm with follow up encouragement. Finally, we show heterogeneous treatment effects that support the bureaucratic monitoring channel.

Speaker: Jacobus Cilliers is assistant professor at Georgetown University. Author: James Habyarimana (Georgetown University)

Please note that the seminar will take place via Microsoft Teams. If you like to participate in the seminar, please send an email beforehand to: jan.priebe@giga-hamburg.de. Upon registration you will receive an email invite including the Microsoft Teams link.