Not too little, but too late: improving post-primary learning outcomes in India

We evaluate an innovative remedial education program targeted at post-primary school students and aimed at improving their learning outcomes ahead of an important standardized national exam in India. While the program leads to over 0.5σ gains in basic reading and math scores, it fails to translate into better scores on the national exam. We show that this is not because the program crowds out students’ time and effort in studying grade-level material, but because these Grade 9 students lag far behind (i.e., have Grade 3 competencies). We conclude that in settings with severe learning deficiencies in advanced grades, such programs can improve basic learning, but may not be sufficient to overcome accumulated academic deficiencies at grade-level.