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The Non-Monotonic Effects of Monitoring Teachers A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Lichand, Guilherme; Wolf, Sharon Working Paper Arm-wrestling in the classroom: The non-monotonic effects of monitoring teachers Working Paper, No. 357 Provided in Cooperation with: Department of Economics, University of Zurich Suggested Citation: Lichand, Guilherme; Wolf, Sharon (2020) : Arm-wrestling in the classroom: The non-monotonic effects of monitoring teachers, Working Paper, No. 357, University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Zurich, http://dx.doi.org/10.5167/uzh-188754 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/222570 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu University of Zurich Department of Economics Working Paper Series ISSN 1664-7041 (print) ISSN 1664-705X (online) Working Paper No. 357 Arm-Wrestling in the Classroom: The Non-Monotonic Effects of Monitoring Teachers Guilherme Lichand and Sharon Wolf July 2020 Arm-Wrestling in the Classroom: The Non-Monotonic Effects of Monitoring Teachers By Guilherme Lichand and Sharon Wolf∗ Teacher absenteeism and shirking are common problems in de- veloping countries. While monitoring teachers should ameliorate those problems, mobilizing parents to do so often leads to small or even negative effects on learning outcomes. This paper provides causal evidence that this might result from non-monotonic effects of monitoring teachers. Cross-randomizing nudges to teachers and parents in Ivory Coast { to motivate and monitor teachers directly, and to mobilize parents {, we find that in schools where either par- ents or teachers are nudged, student dropouts decrease by nearly 50%. In contrast, in schools where both are nudged, there is no effect on dropouts. JEL: C93, D23, D91, I25 Keywords: Moral Hazard; Monitoring; Education; Teachers A famous cartoon portrays parents' reactions when their child comes home with an `F' grade, in the 1960's and in the 2000's: parents from the past confront their child about her poor grade; in contrast, parents from the present side with the child to confront the teacher instead.1;2 While teacher accountability might have indeed changed over time, the cartoon hints at a more fundamental question: is monitoring teachers good or bad for children's education? This paper investigates the effects of monitoring teachers through different strategies, providing first-hand causal evidence that the answer to that question might depend on monitoring intensity. Teacher effectiveness has been identified as a key hurdle to human capital forma- tion in developing countries. Across seven Sub-Saharan African countries, Bold et al. (2017) document that not only do many teachers lack minimum knowledge in language and mathematics, they are also very often absent from the classroom (on average, 44% of the time). That outcome is unsurprising in face of moral ∗ Lichand: Department of Economics, University of Zurich (email: [email protected]); Wolf: Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania (email: [email protected]). We ac- knowledge helpful comments from Anne Brenoe, Ana Costa-Ram´on,Ernst Fehr, Diana Moreira, Joana Naritomi, Jo~aoRamos, Hannes Schwandt and Ulf Z¨olitz.Study undertaken in partnership with Trans- forming Education in Cocoa Communities (TRECC) and generously funded by the Jacobs Foundation Science of Learning initiative. Guilherme is a partner and chairman at Movva, the startup that imple- ments the interventions evaluated in this study. Excellent research assistance by Julien Christen and Maite Deambrosi, and field supervision by Nicolo Tomaselli and Innovations for Poverty Action. All remaining errors are ours. 1https://www.pinterest.com/pin/108649409733682544/. 2Changes in parenting styles over the last decades, in response to several economic and societal changes, might actually have led parents to monitor both students and teachers to a greater extent; see Doepke and Zilibotti (2017). 1 2 MONTH YEAR hazard: parents delegate the provision of costly inputs to their children's educa- tion but cannot perfectly observe the extent to which teachers put effort into it. Since teachers are typically not paid by performance, this tends to induce under- provision of effort relative to what parents would have optimally set. As such, having parents monitor teachers more closely should increase effort and lead to better educational outcomes. Having said that, monitoring might actually crowd out intrinsic motivation and effort (Fehr and G¨achter, 2000), e.g. because teach- ers perceive it as an indication of distrust (Frey, 1993). Which effect dominates? Does too much monitoring backfire, with parents and teachers \arm-wrestling" over children's education? We study this question in the context of Ivory Coast, a West-African country where about half of 6th-graders are considered not competent in reading and nearly 2/3 are not competent in Math (World Bank, 2018). We cross-randomize nudges to teachers and caregivers across 296 classrooms (2nd, 4th and 6th grades) in 100 public schools.3 Nudges to teachers aim at increasing their effort directly, encouraging attendance and time-on-task, and monitoring them about compliance with suggested activities. Because the program was run in partnership with the Ministry of Education, it carried an official weight. Nudges to parents aim at increasing their engagement in their children's education, including showing up in school to monitor teachers. In treated schools, teachers report that parents show up to inquire about their children to a much greater extent: in those schools, 24% of teachers report that the typical parent shows up at least once a week, compared to 14% in the control group.4 Both teachers and caregivers receive nudges twice a week through text messages (SMS) over the course of the whole school year.5 Our experimental design has several advantages. Nudging teachers and parents independently allows us to estimate the causal effects of monitoring teachers through different strategies { directly, or through community monitoring { on teachers' effort and educational outcomes. In turn, nudging teachers and parents concurrently allows us to estimate the causal effects of higher-intensity monitoring. Results are as follows. We find that nudges to teachers decrease student dropouts across all grades by 2.23 p.p., a nearly 50% reduction relative to control schools. Similarly, nudges to parents decrease dropouts by 2.47 p.p. In contrast, in schools where both parents and teachers are nudged, there is no impact on dropouts relative to the control group (a -0.32 p.p. effect size). While there is no one-to-one relationship between student dropouts and teachers' attendance, the way the latter responds to the different interventions is revealing about the 3For many public school students in developing countries, primary caregivers are not the parents but, rather, close relatives (e.g. grandparents). In this paper, we use parents and caregivers interchangeably for ease of exposition. 4Nudges to parents have been shown to significantly improve educational outcomes in Brazil; see Bettinger et al. (2020). 5We also randomized whether parents received Eduq+ over SMS or automated phone calls (Interactive Voice Response units, IVR). Results are shown in Appendix E. VOL ISSUE ARM-WRESTLING IN THE CLASSROOM 3 underlying mechanism. While teachers' attendance is not affected when they are nudged independently, it actually decreases relative to the control group when teachers and parents are nudged concurrently. This is not because nudges to parents are disruptive on their own: in schools where only parents are nudged, teachers' attendance actually increases relative to the control group (although not statistically significant). The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that mon- itoring mitigates moral hazard at first, but eventually backfires as its intensity becomes too high. Since the only dimension of teachers' effort that we capture is attendance, it could be that high-intensity monitoring leads to worse educational outcomes not because teachers put in less effort as a result, but rather because monitoring (inefficiently) displaces teachers' effort to other margins (e.g. from teaching in the classroom to grading homework).6 We rule out that alternative mechanism in our setting by taking advantage of heterogeneous treatment effects by teachers' attendance at baseline. Among below-median attendance teachers, absenteeism and dropouts both decrease relative to the
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