Partnership Schools for Liberia: Impact on Accountability Mechanisms and Education Outcomes

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Liberia's public education system is moribund. The civil war of 1999-2003 and the Ebola epidemic of 2014 have left the Ministry of Education with little capacity to run a national school system. An effort to clean thousands of ghost teachers from Ministry payrolls was cut short (New York Times, 2016), and while systematic data is scarce, teacher absenteeism appears common (Mulkeen, 2009). Nearly two-thirds of primary aged children are not in school, including over 80 percent of children in the poorest quintile, placing Liberia in the lowest percentile of net enrollment rates in the world, and at the 7th percentile in youth (15-24) literacy (EPDC, 2014).Faced with these dire statistics, the Liberian Ministry of Education announced in early 2016 that it would contract the operation of government primary schools to a group of private companies. Key features of this public-private partnership are that (a) all schools will remain free to students, and (b) teachers will be unionized civil servants, drawing from the existing teaching corps.We propose a large-scale field experiment to study the effect of this new Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL), comparing 120 schools that have been delegated to management by private operators to 120 control schools under government management. The randomized field experiment will allow us to investigate three main aspects of accountability:1. Managerial accountability (of teachers to private operators). A central hypothesis underlying Liberia's charter school program is that private operators with greater capacity to implement routine performance management systems, regularly monitor teacher attendance, and provide teachers with frequent feedback and support will help to overcome teacher absenteeism and low education quality. This is not about carrots and sticks. We will test private operators' ability to generate accountability without authority to fire teachers or hire new teachers on flexible contracts.2. Bottom-up accountability (of teachers and operators to parents). An underlying hypothesis behind charter schools is that they will be more reactive to parents demands than traditional public schools because their funding is linked directly to enrollment numbers. We will test this by comparing student transfers (exit) and parental involvement (voice) in PSL and control schools.3. Top-down, results-based accountability (of private operators to the Ministry of Education). Charter school operators' contracts can be terminated if they do not achieve certain pre-established standards, commonly known as results-based accountability. The first year of the PSL pilot (2016/17) will lack any formal mechanism to hold operators accountable for results. A major innovation and focus of the year 2 expansion under study here is to develop and test different forms of top-down accountability based on measurable learning gains.This proposal seeks support for a follow-up study to track the longer-term effects of the PSL program in years two and three of operation (2017/18 and 2018/19) focused on scalability and sustainability. A separate evaluation of the first year PSL pilot (2016/17) is already underway and will be nearing completion when DFID-ESRC funding decisions are made. The longer-term follow-up study is of paramount importance for several reasons. First, it is important to document whether any learning gains achieved in year 1 can be maintained over a longer horizon. Second, the year 1 pilot has been heavily subsidized and disproportionately concentrated in Monrovia, whereas years 2 and 3 will focus on more cost-effective and sustainable models, including new schools in more remote and underserved areas. Third, in years 2 and 3 the program will introduce new top-down results-based accountability measures mentioned above, which are a major focus of our current proposal.