Poor Economics

by Abhijit Banerjee

  Given these results, many organizations would have rested on their laurels. Not Pratham. The idea of resting anywhere, least of all on their laurels, is entirely foreign to Madhav’s personality or that of Rukmini Banerji, the human dynamo who is the driving force behind Pratham’s spectacular expansion. One way in which Pratham could reach more children was by having communities take over the program. In the Jaunpur District in the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and one of the poorest, Pratham volunteers went from village to village testing children and encouraging the community to get involved in the testing to see for themselves what their children knew and didn’t know. The parents were not thrilled by what they saw—their first instinct often was to try to smack their children—but eventually a set of volunteers from the community emerged, ready to take on the job of helping their little brothers and sisters. They were mostly young college students who held classes in the evening in their neighborhoods. Pratham gave them a week of training but no other compensation.

  We evaluated this program as well, and the results were quite dramatic: By the end of the program, all the participating children who could not read before the program could at least recognize letters (in contrast, only 40 percent of those in the comparison villages could read letters by the end of the year). Those who could read only letters at the beginning were 26 percent more likely, by the end, to be able to read a short story if they had participated than if they had not.24

  More recently, Pratham has shifted its focus to working with the government school system. In Bihar, India’s poorest state and the state with the highest measured teacher absentee rate, Pratham organized a set of remedial summer camps for schoolchildren in which the teachers from the government school system were invited to come and teach. The results from this evaluation were surprising: The much-maligned government teachers actually taught, and the gains were comparable to the gains from the Jaunpur evening classes.

  Pratham’s results are striking enough that many school systems in India and around the world are reaching out to the organization. A version of the program is now being tested in Ghana, in a large-scale RCT run as collaboration between a research team and the government: Youth who are looking for a first job experience will be trained to provide remedial education in school. Delegations from the Ministry of Education in Senegal and Mali have visited Pratham’s operations and are thinking of replicating the program.

  This evidence poses a set of puzzles: If volunteer and semi-volunteer teachers can generate such large gains, private schools can clearly adopt the same kinds of practices and should do even better. Yet we know that in India a full one-third of fifth-graders in private schools cannot read at first-grade level. Why not? If government teachers can teach so well, why don’t we see it in the school system? If such large learning gains are so easily available, why don’t parents demand them? Indeed, why was it that in Pratham’s Jaunpar program, only 13 percent of the children who could not read attended the evening classes?

  No doubt, some of the usual reasons that markets do not work as well as they should are at work here. Perhaps there is not enough competitive pressure among private schools, or parents are not sufficiently informed about what they do. Broader issues of political economy that we will discuss later may explain the poor performance of government teachers. But one key issue is unique to education: The peculiar way in which expectations about what education is supposed to deliver distort what parents demand, what both public and private schools deliver, and what children achieve—and the colossal waste that ensues.

  THE CURSE OF EXPECTATIONS

  The Illusory S-Shape

  Some years ago we had organized a parent-child collage session in an informal school run by Seva Mandir in rural Udaipur. We had brought a stack of colorful magazines and asked parents to cut some pictures out from them to represent what they thought education would bring to their children. The idea was for them to build a collage with the help of their children.

  The collages all ended up looking rather similar: The pictures were studded with gold and diamond jewelry and various recent models of cars. There were other images available in the magazines—peaceful rural vistas, fishing boats, coconut trees—but if the evidence of the collages is to be believed, this is not what education is all about. Parents seem to see education primarily as a way for their children to acquire (considerable) wealth. The anticipated route to those riches is, for most parents, a government job (as a teacher, for example), or failing that, some kind of office job. In Madagascar, parents of children from 640 schools were asked what they thought a child who had completed primary education would do for a living, and what a child who had completed secondary education would do. Seventy percent thought that a secondary-school graduate would get a government job, when in fact 33 percent of them actually get those jobs.25

  Yet very few of these children will make it to sixth grade, let alone pass the graduation exam that, these days, is typically the minimum qualification for any kind of job that has an education requirement. And it is not that parents are fully unaware of this: In Madagascar, where parents were asked their view of the returns to education, it was found that parents get it right on average. But they greatly overstate both the upside and the downside. They see education as a lottery ticket, not as a safe investment.

  Pak Sudarno, a scrap collector in the slum of Cica Das in Bandung, Indonesia, who, very matter-of-factly told us that he was known to be the “poorest person in the neighborhood,” explained this succinctly. When we met him in June 2008, his youngest son (the youngest of nine children) was about to enter secondary school. He thought that the most probable outcome was that after completing secondary school, the boy would get a job in the nearby mall, where his brother was already working. This is a job that he could have had already—but nevertheless, Pak Sudarno thought it was worthwhile for him to complete secondary school, even if it meant three years of forgone salary. His wife thought that the boy might be able to enter a university. Pak Sudarno felt that this was a pipe dream—but he thought that there was some chance that he could get an office job, the best job possible, for the security and respectability it offered. In his view, it was worth taking the chance.

  Parents also tend to believe that the first few years of education pay much less than the next ones. For example, in Madagascar, parents believed that each year of primary education would increase a child’s income by 6 percent, each year of junior high education by 12 percent, and each year of senior secondary education by 20 percent. We found a very similar pattern in Morocco. There, parents believed that each year of primary education would increase a boy’s earning by 5 percent, and each year of secondary education by 15 percent. The pattern was even more extreme for girls. In the view of parents, each year of primary education was worth almost nothing for them: 0.4 percent. But each year of secondary education was perceived to increase earnings 17 percent.

  In reality, available estimates show that each year of education increases earnings more or less proportionally.26 And even for people who do not get a formal-sector job, education seems to help: For example, educated farmers earned more during the Green Revolution than uneducated ones.27 Moreover, there are also all the other, nonfinancial benefits. In other words, parents see an S—shape where there really isn’t one.

  This belief in the S—shape means that unless parents are unwilling to treat their children differently from one another, it makes sense for them to put all their educational eggs in the basket of the child they perceive to be the most promising, making sure that she gets enough education, rather than spreading the investment evenly across all their children. A few doors down from Shantarama (the widow whose two children were not in school), in the village of Naganadgi, we met a farming household with seven children. None of them had studied past second grade, except the youngest, a twelve-year-old boy. They were not satisfied with the quality of the government high school, where had spent a year. So the boy was attending seventh
grade in a private boarding school located in the village. A year at school cost the family more than 10 percent of its total income from farming, a considerable commitment for just one child and clearly an impossible expense for seven. The lucky boy’s mother explained to us that he was the only intelligent child in the family. The willingness to use words like “stupid” and “intelligent” to refer to one’s own children, often in their presence, is entirely consistent with a worldview that puts a large premium on picking a winner (and in getting everyone else in the family to back the winner). This belief creates a strange form of sibling rivalry. In Burkina Faso, a study found that adolescents were more likely to be enrolled in school when they scored high on a test of intelligence, but they were less likely to be enrolled in school when their siblings had scored high.28

  A study of conditional cash transfer in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, found compelling evidence of the propensity to concentrate resources on one child. The program had limited funds, and parents were offered the option to enter any of their age-eligible children into a lottery. Parents of winners would get a monthly transfer as long as the child attended school regularly. Lottery winners were more likely to attend regularly, more likely to reenroll each academic year, and, in the version of the program where part of the transfer was conditional on college enrollment, much more likely to attend college. The disturbing finding was that in families that entered two or more children and one won, the child who lost the lottery was less likely to be enrolled in school than children in families where both lost. This is despite the increase in family income, which should have helped the other child. A winner was picked, and resources were concentrated on him (or her).29

  Misperception can be critical. In reality, there should not be an education-based poverty trap: Education is valuable at every level. But the fact that parents believe that the benefits of education are S—shaped leads them to behave as if there were a poverty trap, and thereby inadvertently to create one.

  Elitist School Systems

  Parents are not alone in focusing their expectations on success at the graduation exam: The whole education system colludes with them. The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace. Despite the influx of new learners, teachers still start from the premise that their mandate remains to prepare the best students for the difficult exams that, in most developing countries, act as a gateway either to the last years of school or to college. Associated with this is a relentless pressure to “modernize” the curriculum, toward making it more scientific and science oriented, toward fatter (and no doubt weightier) textbooks—to the point where the Indian government now sets a limit of 6.6 pounds on the total weight of the book bag that first- and second-graders can be asked to carry.

  We once followed some Pratham staff to a school in the city of Vadodara, in western India. Their visit was preannounced and the teacher clearly wanted to make a good impression: His idea was to draw an enormously complex figure on the board, representing one of the fiendishly clever proofs that Euclidian geometry is famous for, accompanied by a long lecture about the diagram. All the children (students in third grade) were neatly arranged in rows on the floor, and sat very quietly. Some might have been trying to draw a simulacrum of the figure on their tiny slates, but the quality of the chalk was so low that it was impossible to tell. It was clear that none of them had a clue what was going on.

  This teacher was not an exception. We have seen countless examples of this kind of elite bias among teachers in developing countries. In collaboration with Pascaline Dupas and Michael Kremer, Esther helped design a reorganization of Kenyan classrooms, taking advantage of an extra teacher to divide the class in two. Each class was separated by prior achievement, to help children learn what they did not know yet. Teachers were then randomly assigned to the “top” or “bottom” track by a public lottery. Teachers who “lost” the lottery and were assigned to the bottom track were upset, explaining that they wouldn’t get anything out of teaching and would be blamed for their students’ low scores. And they adjusted their behavior accordingly: During random visits, teachers assigned to the bottom track were less likely to teach, and instead more likely to be having tea in the teachers’ room, than those assigned to the top track.30

  The problem is not the high ambition per se; what makes it really damaging is that it is combined with low expectations of what the students can accomplish. We once went to see some testing of children in Uttarakand, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. It was a brilliant fall day, and it was hard not to feel that the testing was something of an intrusion. The child we were trying to test certainly thought so. He vigorously nodded when we asked him whether he went to school and seemed agreeable enough when we told him we would ask him some questions, but when the interviewer handed him a sheet to read, he resolutely looked the other way, as only a seven-year-old can. The interviewer tried very hard to coax him to just glance at the sheet, promising nice pictures and a fun story, but his mind was made up; his mother kept muttering words of encouragement, but a certain halfheartedness in her efforts suggested that she did not expect him to change his mind. As we walked toward the car after the “interview,” an elderly man in a short dusty dhoti (the loincloth farmers wear in the area) and a yellowing T-shirt fell into step with us. “Children from homes like ours . . . ,” he said, leaving us to guess the rest. We had seen the same pessimism in the mother’s face and in faces of many mothers like her: She was not going to say it, but we were wasting our time.

  References to a certain old-fashioned sociological determinism, whether based on caste, class, or ethnicity, are rife in conversations involving the poor. In the late 1990s, a team led by Jean Dreze prepared a report on the state of education in India, the Public Report on Basic Education in India (PROBE). One of the findings was:Many teachers are anxious to avoid being posted in remote or “backward” villages. One practical reason is the inconvenience of commuting, or of living in a remote village with poor facilities. . . . Another common reason is alienation from the local residents, who are sometimes said to be squandering their money on liquor, to have no potential for education, or simply to “behave like monkeys.” Remote or backward areas are also seen as infertile ground for a teacher’s efforts.

  A young teacher simply told the team that it was impossible to communicate with “children of uncouth parents.”31

  In a study designed to find out whether this prejudice influenced teachers’ behavior with students, teachers were asked to grade a set of exams. The teachers did not know the students, but half of the teachers, randomly chosen, were told the child’s full name (which includes the caste name). The rest were fully anonymous. They found that, on average, teachers gave significantly lower grades to lower-caste students when they could see their caste than when they could not. But interestingly, it was not the higher-caste teachers who were doing this. The lower-caste teachers were actually more likely to assign worse grades to lower-caste students. They must have been convinced these children could not do well.32

  The combination of elevated expectations and little faith can be quite lethal. As we saw, the belief in the S—shape curve leads people to give up. If the teachers and the parents do not believe that the child can cross the hump and get into the steep part of the S—curve, they may as well not try: The teacher ignores the children who have fallen behind and the parent stops taking interest in their education. But this behavior creates a poverty trap even where none exists in the first place. If they give up, they will never find out that perhaps the child could have made it. And in contrast, families that assume that their children can make it, or families that don’t want to accept that a child of theirs will remain uneducated, which tend to be, for obvious historical reasons, more elite families, end up confirmed in their “high” hopes. As one of his ea
rly teachers likes to recall, when Abhijit was falling behind in his schoolwork in first grade, everyone somehow managed to persuade themselves that this was because he was too far ahead of the class and bored. As a result he was sent up to the next grade, where, once again, he immediately fell behind, to the point where the teacher took to hiding his homework so that the higher-ups would not question the wisdom of having promoted him. If, instead of being the child of two academics, he had been a child of two factory workers, he would almost surely have been assigned to remedial education or asked to leave the school.

  Children themselves use this logic when assessing their own abilities. The social psychologist Claude Steele demonstrated the power of what he calls “stereotype threat” in the U.S. context: Women do better on math tests when they are explicitly told that the stereotype that women are worse in math does not apply to this particular test; African Americans do worse on tests if they have to start by indicating their race on the cover sheet.33 Following Steele’s work, two researchers from the World Bank had lower-caste children in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh compete against high-caste children in solving mazes.34 They found that the low-caste children compete well against the high-caste children as long as caste is not salient, but once low-caste children are reminded that they are low castes competing with high-caste children (by the simple contrivance of asking them their full names before the game starts), they do much worse. The authors argue that this may be driven in part by a fear of not being evaluated fairly by the obviously elite organizers of the game, but it could just as well be the internalization of the stereotype. A child who expects to find school difficult will probably blame herself and not her teachers when she can’t understand what is being taught, and may end up deciding she’s not cut out for school—“stupid,” like most of her ilk—and give up on education altogether, daydreaming in class or, like Shantarama’s children, just refusing to go.