Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School

  • Research Title: Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School by Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, and Stephen P. Ryan
  • Objectives: The study aims to evaluate if monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absenteeism and improve learning outcomes in Indian schools, particularly in rural settings.
  • Key Findings:
    • Absenteeism Reduction: In treatment schools with financial incentives and daily monitoring (via cameras), teacher absenteeism fell by 21 percentage points compared to control schools.
    • Improvement in Test Scores: Student test scores improved by 0.17 standard deviations in treatment schools.
    • Financial Incentives: Teachers' responsiveness to financial incentives is significant, suggesting that well-structured incentives can lead to increased attendance.
  • Background Context:
    • Education in developing countries, particularly India, has made strides in access but lacks in quality (e.g., a Pratham survey stated 65% of children in grades 2-5 could not read a simple paragraph).
    • High absenteeism rates among teachers (24% on average, as per Kremer et al. 2005) severely undermine educational quality.
    • The lack of monitoring and weak enforcement of attendance rules have been critical barriers.
  • Program Design:
    • Setting: Single-teacher Nonformal Education Centers (NFEs) in rural Rajasthan.
    • Monitoring Mechanism: Cameras were assigned to teachers to document their presence at the beginning and end of each school day, facilitating precise attendance tracking.
    • Incentive Structure: Teachers in treatment schools were paid based on a nonlinear attendance function (fixed base salary plus bonuses for attendance over a threshold).
  • Methodology:
    • Utilized a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to compare teacher attendance and student outcomes across treatment (57 schools) and control (56 schools) groups.
    • Employed structural models to estimate the labor supply elasticity concerning financial incentives.
    • Assessments of school attendance included random checks alongside the photograph data collected.
  • Results:
    • Over 30 months, average teacher absenteeism was significantly lower in treatment schools (21%) versus control schools (42%).
    • Teachers displayed an elasticity of labor supply with respect to the financial bonus between 0.20 and 0.30.
    • Test results indicated a greater learning impact on students, with more instructional days leading to performance boosts (30% more instruction time was recorded).
  • Conclusion:
    • The study demonstrates that financial incentives and monitoring can effectively improve teacher attendance without compromising teaching effort.
    • In addition, treatment schools showed enhanced student performance, indicating that better teacher attendance correlates positively with learning outcomes.
  • Implications and Future Directions:
    • The findings raise questions regarding the feasibility of implementing similar systems in government schools, which may face stronger resistance due to entrenched political forces.
    • The experience suggests potential for policy-making to influence teacher absenteeism positively through structured incentive systems.
  • Acknowledgments: The authors express gratitude to the NGO Seva Mandir for collaboration and logistical support during the evaluation, along with various research assistants and funders contributing to the project.
  • References in the Study:
    • Banerjee et al. (2005), Kremer et al. (2005), Fehr and Schmidt (2004), among others.
  • Contact Information: Authors' affiliations include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Kennedy School, with corresponding emails provided in the study.