Through thick and thin: Varieties of information and incentives in strengthening accountability for remote schools in Indonesia

• In Event: From where you are to where you want to be: How information shapes goals, behaviours and motivation of actors in education

Proposal

Despite substantial increases in education budgets and student enrolment over the past two decades, learning outcomes in Indonesia have stagnated. Furthermore, teacher performance tends to be unsatisfactory, with high rates of teacher absenteeism in rural and remote areas. To address these challenges, the KIAT Guru (Teacher Performance and Accountability) intervention was implemented as a randomised controlled trial in 203 schools in remote districts of East Nusa Tenggara and West Kalimantan, with an additional 67 schools in a control group. The intervention had three treatment arms, each of which included a social accountability mechanism (SAM). Under SAM, each community formulated a multi-stakeholder service agreement for improving local school quality, and conducted monthly scorecard-based evaluations of teachers and principals. The treatment arms differed in the variant of teacher performance pay that was paired with SAM: no performance pay, performance pay based on camera-monitored teacher attendance, and performance pay based on scorecards. An impact evaluation found that all three treatments improved learning outcomes, with the largest gains in the treatment with performance pay based on teacher attendance (Gaduh et al., 2020). A second study of KIAT Guru drew on three rounds of detailed qualitative fieldwork in nine intervention schools (World Bank, 2020).

In this new reanalysis of the qualitative data from the nine schools alongside process monitoring data from all 203 intervention schools, we examine the mechanisms underlying these gains in student learning. We go beyond the typical hypothesis that educational delivery improved because the social accountability mechanism allowed local communities to monitor school performance and punish school leaders and teachers for underperformance. Instead, we ask two research questions that each use a distinct theoretical perspective (Honig & Pritchett, 2019; and Pritchett, 2015). Our research questions are: How did the interplay between accounting-based (or ‘thin’) and account-based (or ‘thick’) accountability affect the efficacy of each treatment arm? Also: To what extent did the KIAT Guru treatments improve the coherence of accountability relationships between teachers, school leaders, local communities, and education authorities?

Our preliminary findings suggest that the ‘thin’ accounting-based information (camera-validated teacher attendance) that was imbedded in ‘thick’ account-based information (narrative discussions about the monthly scorecard evaluations) were pivotal to the most successful KIAT Guru treatment arm. The ‘thin’ and objective accounting-based information became a less-disputable basis for attendance-based teacher incentive, and hence enabled the stakeholders to focus their monthly discussions on strengthening coherence of their joint efforts to improve learning. In contrast, when the ‘thick’ and subjective account-based information became the basis for performance-based teacher pay, teachers considered the community voice to be less compatible with their capacities and educational status. Thus, this study contributes both to the literature on community-driven development, and to research on accountability in education systems.

Authors

• Dewi Susanti, World Bank, Jakarta Office

• Yue-Yi Hwa, RISE Programme

• Sharon Kanthy Lumbanraja, World Bank, Jakarta Office