Teacher Attendance, Community Monitoring, and Direct Information Flows
Why do workers in London rush to their offices, a blur of activity at
845am, and manic push for punctuality? What, in the broader society,
dictates this norm, and pushes those not obeying into the "outlier"
categorization? What are the personal and professional motivations and
incentives of these workers, how are they aligned with institutional
incentives and motivations, and how can we account for the deviations
that occur in public administration and public sector service delivery
in the developing world?
The basic premise of all educational systems: schools are
only as good as the teachers enlisted to educate. Without teachers in
the classroom, education is a non-starter. And thus, we come to one of
the most pressing issues facing the developing world's educational
systems today: teacher attendance.
Teacher attendance has been
highlighted in a rush of new randomized control trials, which have
attempted to sort out the motivating factors in getting teachers to,
well, teach. However, I will argue, the applicability of these trials,
which I will highlight, is as strictly limited as local cultures and
customs will allow; without accounting for the "unquantifiable" factors,
such as social esteem and prestige attached to the profession, as well
as the critical factor of relative wage earnings, we cannot hope to find
duplicity in any of these efforts. This, perhaps more than any other
"measurable" in educational development, is individualistic in nature;
individualistic in the sense, that, individual values and motivations,
shaped and created by individual power organizations both in familial
structure and in broader community integration, are critical underlying
factors, micro-scale immeasurables surely misplaced for macro-scale
control trials. Thus, the arguments highlighted below must be framed in a
cultural, anthropological approach to understanding individual
incentives and motivations, and addressing these critical factors to
attendance.
Chaudhary, et all, in 2006, showed that at any
given time, 25% of all public school teachers are absent from school in
India, and of those present, only half were actually teaching
when checks were made. This is a startling glimpse into the realities of
educational systems in much of the world. When almost 3/4 of students
are simply not receiving any instruction, any focus on other "input"
mechanisms is simply a waste of time. Thus, in its purest sense, there
is nothing more important than teacher attendance (although the
effectiveness of the teachers in the classroom is obviously vital, as
well).
Innovation must invite scrutiny, especially innovation
that is imposed by outside actors in localized, often rural
communities. Thus, the recent randomized control trials conducted by
Duflo, Hannah, and Ryan (2007), in which cameras were given to teachers
to take photos of themselves, timestamped, in class, to prove
attendance, with pay based on attendance in these photos. Thus, an
innovative approach, which was shown to increase teacher attendance,
(thus underpinning the case for teacher attendance and educational
outcomes); however, scrutiny must be given to the actual manner of this
intervention, and the critical external innovation which was "injected"
into these localized communities. Additionally, "no significant impact"
was seen in additional years of education per $100 spent, which
obviously raises questions on the cost-sustainability of this type of
intervention.
Thus, what can be done in a more localized,
more participatory, and more organic local fashion to support teacher
attendance? Linkages with communities have been cited as crucial for
both interventions and quality of engagement. Teacher empowerment, a
commonly misunderstood mechanism, must be understood as the sum of
individual decisions to be empowered or not to be empowered (yes, I will
suggest that some people, especially many teachers, do not want to be
empowered, especially if they are accustomed to hierarchical leadership
and non-initiative taking in their respective societies). Linking test
scores with teacher pay, as is commonly done in the West with bonus and
performance pay packages, can lead to teachers simply "teaching to the
test" (Kenya: Glewwe, Ilias, Kremer, 2003;
India: Muralidharan and Sundararaman,2010);
though, if assessments are holistic and well-designed, this would not
appear to be a huge problem, the likelihood that assessments are
pedagogically sound and locally relevant is minimal in resource-starved
environments. Contract teachers, often seen as a solution, have been
shown to actually increase the absentee rate of civil service teachers
in many cases, reducing their burden ("Contract Teachers in Extra
Teacher Program in Kenya" Duflo, Dupas 2007).
Community mobilization, commonly seen as the panacea to this
conundrum, has been imposed and analyzed in numerous cases both in East
Africa and South Asia. "Interventions in Rural Communities in India"
(Benerjee, et al, 2008) concluded that community meetings were
ineffective, and that most community members had no awareness of the
process, or that they were even part of community groups, highlighting
the danger of externally-imposed community groups and elite community
capture. "School Communities Evaluate Teachers and Give Prizes to
Teachers in Kenya" (de Laat, Kremer, et all, 2008) had little impact on
teacher attendance as well.
An emerging area of research that
I will focus on is the power of direct information flows, ie: school
report cards, and asymmetrical information flows, in empowering parental
action through unbiased, unfiltered information. Studies conducted in
Pakistan and Madagascar in recent years have shown that these school
report cards have increased educational effectiveness, but these studies
must be amplified to make and conclusive findings. Aligning with my
initial theory on personnel motivation and individual empowerment at the
worker level, this must be coordinated with individual motivation and
individual empowerment at the parental and community level for a
meaningful interaction, a meaningful level of engagement, and,
ultimately, a meaningful level of community ownership to fundamentally
shape and shift teacher attendance. External, one off, and technological
innovation is not the ultimate cure for the ill of teacher attendance.
Direct information flows could be.
