Scaling Up What Works: Experimental Evidence on External Validity in Kenyan Education

By J. Aker. 2013

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity. We investigate two concerns—heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers—in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools. The intervention, previously shown to raise test scores in NGO-led trials in Western Kenya and parts of India, was replicated across all Kenyan provinces by an NGO and the government. Strong effects of shortterm contracts produced in controlled experimental settings are lost in weak public institutions: NGO implementation produces a positive effect on test scores across diverse contexts, while government implementation yields zero effect. The data suggests that the stark contrast in success between the government and NGO arm can be traced back to implementation constraints and political economy forces put in motion as the program went to scale.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e9129f2d0ac375e0f5e1c78eb5b6ea3d1c47890

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Citations in the corpus

Direct and Indirect Effects of Malawi's Public Works Program on Food Security (2015, background): “Recent evidence from the implementation of a tutoring program in Kenya suggests that the same program can have very different effects under different implementation conditions (Bold et al. 2013).”
Learning from Experiments When Context Matters (2015, background): “…programs in the developing world – as demonstrated by the contrasting performance of parallel experiments NGO- and government-led experiments in Bold et al. (2013) for Kenyan education, the 7Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman (Forthcoming) implicitly make this point by avoiding any calculation of…”
Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials (2016, unknown): “Bold et al. (2013), who ran parallel RCTs on an intervention implemented either by an NGO or by the government of Kenya, found similar results there.”
Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (2017, unknown): “16 Bold et al. (2013). Capability for policy implementation”
Teacher performance pay: Experimental evidence from Pakistan (2015, background): “Separately, implementation performance may be sensitive to program implementer characteristics such as the implementer’s interest, commitment, capability, and effort (Allcott 2015), and governments may be more likely or have larger shortfalls in these characteristics relative to, for example, (certa”
The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers (2017, unknown): “A recent paper by Bold et al. (2013) repeats the experiment in Duflo et al. (2014) with a NGO and the government.”
Improving Early-Grade Literacy in East Africa: Experimental Evidence from Kenya and Uganda * (2014, background): “…2010; Muralidharan & Sundararaman, 2011; Podgursky & Springer, 2007); to encourage school-based management and parent participation (Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2012); and to hire teachers with flexible job contracts (Bold et al., 2013; Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2012; Muralidharan & Sundararaman, 2012).”
Donor Political Economies and the Pursuit of Aid Effectiveness (2015, unknown): “2012; and Bold et al. 2013.”
Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India (2016, background): “…at scale by a government addresses one common concern about randomized trials in developing countries: that studying NGO-led pilots may not provide accurate forecasts of performance at scales relevant for policy-making (see for example Banerjee et al. (2008); Acemoglu (2010); Bold et al. (2013)).”
Site Selection Bias in Program Evaluation (2015, unknown): “For example, “job training” often takes different forms at different sites (Dehejia 2003, Hotz, Imbens, and Klerman 2006), and the effects of “contract teachers” could depend markedly on the teacher’s ability and even who employs them (Bold et al. 2013).”