Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India

By K. Muralidharan, V. Sundararaman. 2013

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The large-scale expansion of primary schooling in developing countries has led to the increasing use of non-civil-service contract teachers who are hired locally by the school, are not professionally trained, have fixed-term renewable contracts, and are paid much lower salaries than regular civil-service teachers. This has been a controversial policy, but there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of contract teachers in improving student learning. We present experimental evidence on the impact of contract teachers using data from an 'as is' expansion of contract-teacher hiring across a representative sample of 100 randomly-selected government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. At the end of two years, students in schools with an extra contract teacher performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.16σ and 0.15σ, in math and language tests respectively. Contract teachers were also much less likely to be absent from school than civil-service teachers (18% vs. 27%). Combining the experimental reduction in school-level pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) induced by the provision of an extra contract teacher, with high-quality panel data estimates of the impact of reducing PTR with a regular civil-service teacher, we show that contract teachers are not only effective at improving student learning outcomes, but that they are no less effective at doing so than regular civil-service teachers who are more qualified, better trained, and paid five times higher salaries.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Subfields: Education, Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e8883130bf68b5e948e8c9394924f96fec9e545

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. A. Ganimian
2. Richard J. Murnane
3. K. Muralidharan
4. Eric A. Hanushek
5. David K. Evans

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Richard J. Murnane
2. A. Ganimian
3. K. Muralidharan

In Safety Research

1. A. Ganimian
2. Richard J. Murnane
3. K. Muralidharan
4. F. H. Rogers
5. M. Ravallion
6. David K. Evans

Citations in the corpus

• Improving Education in Developing Countries (2016, background): “For example, Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2013) found that contract teachers in primary schools in Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2005 were much less likely than regular teachers to be absent from school (18% vs. 27%).”
• The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers (2017, unknown): “In Kenya and India, Duflo et al. (2011) and Duflo et al. (2014) and Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2013) show that contract teachers cost less, but the test-score gains of children assigned to contract teachers are higher.8 Our study demonstrates that the findings of Duflo et al. (2011) and Duflo et”
• School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools (2012, unknown): ““Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India.””
• Improving Learning in Primary Schools of Developing Countries (2015, unknown): “…it challenging to separate incentive effects from those of concomitant reductions in class size (Bold et al., 2012; Duflo, Dupas, et al., 2012; Muralidharan & Sundararaman, 2010a), instructional materials and training (Banerjee et al., 2007, 2012; Cabezas, Cuesta, & Gallego, 2012; He et al.,…”
• Double for Nothing? Experimental Evidence on an Unconditional Teacher Salary Increase in Indonesia (2017, background): “…and Das 2017), and with studies finding that contract teachers who are paid much lower salaries than civil-service teachers are no less effective (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2013, Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer 2015, Bau and Das 2017). any increases in worker productivity in response to an…”
• Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Evaluations (2014, background): “Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2013b) evaluated a program in Andhra Pradesh, India that allowed school committees to hire an additional teacher on a contract that is renewed annually.”