The effects of increasing community participation on school management outcomes: evidence from India

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Policies aimed at improving school governance via community-based management are common but understudied. We present the results of a cluster-randomised trial of a multi-faceted education intervention that involved support for local School Management Committees (SMC) in rural India. The intervention increased SMC meetings held by 17 per cent and completed school improvement plans by 38 per cent, gains that persist 1 year after the intervention ended. There was also a 14 per cent increase in the number of hired teachers but no other improvements in infrastructure. We provide suggestive causal mediation analysis, showing that SMC activities and teachers hired only explain a small and insignificant portion part of the bundled programme’s total effect on learning.