School governance, teacher incentives,and pupil-teacher ratios: experimental evidence from Kenyan primary schools

Some education policymakers focus on bringing down pupil-teacher ratios. Others argue that resources will have limited impact without systematic reforms to education governance,teacher incentives,and pedagogy. We examine a program under which Kenyan Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) at randomly selected schools were funded to hire an additional teacher on an annual contract renewable conditional on performance, outside normal Ministry of Education civil-service channels, at one-quarter normal compensation levels. For students randomly assigned to stay with existing classes, test scores did not increase significantly, despite a reduction in class size from 82 to 44 on average. In contrast, scores increased for students assigned to be taught by locally-hired contract teachers. One reason may be that contract teachers had low absence rates, while centrally-hired civil-service teachers in schools randomly assigned PTA contract teachers endogenously reduced their effort. Civil-service teachers also captured rents for their families,with approximately 1/3 of contract teacher positions going to relatives of existing teachers. A governance program that empowered parents within PTAs reduced both forms of capture. The best contract teachers obtained civil service jobs over time,and we estimate large potential dynamic benefits from supplementing a civil service system with locally-hired contract teachers brought in on a probationary basis and granted tenure conditional on performance.