Facilitating Innovative Growth of Low Cost Private Schools: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

大多数改善发展中国家教育的干预措施都需要花费大量资金来提高教育系统投入的质量。虽然这通常是一种有用的方法，但在政府薄弱、税收低的国家，可用于投资学校的资源很少。在这些情况下，比如在巴基斯坦，私立学校为低质量的公立学校提供了另一种选择，父母愿意为质量提高的公立学校付费，因此即使在许多偏远的农村地区，父母也可以选择将孩子送到公立学校或村里几所私立学校中的一所。学校的多样性促使我们研究教育市场，而不是学习生产的投入，将研究中小企业（SMEs）的理论应用于私立学校。我们不是去学校告诉他们应该关注哪些投入，而是倾向于问他们是什么阻碍了他们在质量和数量上的扩张。在过去的十年中，我们由Tahir Andrabi（波莫纳学院）、jishhnu Das（世界银行）和Asim Ijaz Khwaja（哈佛大学）领导的研究小组研究了巴基斯坦的教育市场。尽管低成本私立学校（LCPS）部门增长迅猛（从1983年的3300所学校增加到2011年的7万多所），质量也相对优于公立学校（LCPS在学习成果方面比公立学校领先1.5年），但也有证据表明，这一部门仍有大量未开发的创新潜力。该团队收集了原始数据并实施了随机对照试验（rct），揭示了LCPS增长和质量改善的制约因素。造成这种创新限制的两个因素是缺乏资金（金融市场失灵）和获得负担得起的教育支持服务（ESS）（投入市场失灵），这两个因素共同为学校所有者创造了一个非常具有挑战性的环境。目前的项目是一项随机对照试验，旨在解释每次或同时减轻这些限制如何影响学习成果、入学率和学校盈利能力。随机成分意味着学校被随机分配，要么接受贷款产品或股权产品的优惠，以缓解财政紧张，要么获得购买ESS的机会，如教师培训、改进课程或学生测试服务。试验的控制部分意味着一些（随机选择的）学校没有得到任何这些治疗，这使我们能够将治疗结果与反事实进行比较。这两种金融产品是与巴基斯坦最大的小额信贷银行之一共同开发的。股权产品代表了向中小企业提供的金融产品类型的创新，它与LCPS特别相关，因为它的收入或利率（如果学校赚得多，它将支付更高的利率）有效地将一些投资风险转移给了银行，而LCPS往往不得不比其他中小企业进行更多的投资。我们的理论是，风险较低的金融产品将允许学校进行风险更高的投资，例如投资于提高质量的ESS服务。我们早期的研究表明，在大多数情况下，学校在获得资金时更倾向于进行能力提升投资，例如购买更多的椅子，这可能是因为学校所有者可以更准确地预测和宣传购买新椅子的结果，而不是购买教师培训服务。这导致学习成果的质量发展停滞不前，而巴基斯坦农村地区的学习成果本来就很差。总之，本研究将拓宽我们对政策制定者和金融及社会服务产品提供者在存在低收入群体服务的充满挑战的农村环境中如何促进学习成果改善的认识。

Most interventions to improve education in developing countries require spending significant amounts of money on improving the quality of the inputs to the education system. While this is often a useful approach, in countries with weak governments and low tax collection, little resources are available to invest in schools. In these settings, such as in Pakistan, private schools have provided an alternative to the low quality public schools, and parents are willing to pay for the improved quality, and so even in many remote rural areas, parents can pick from sending their child to the public school or one of several private schools in the village. This variety of schools has prompted us to study education markets instead of the inputs to the production of learning, applying theories from studying Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to private schools. Instead of going to schools and telling them which inputs they should focus on, we tend to ask them what prevents them from expanding in quality and quantity.Over the past decade, our research team led by Tahir Andrabi (Pomona College), Jishnu Das (World Bank), and Asim Ijaz Khwaja (Harvard University) has studied the education markets in Pakistan. Despite the tremendous growth in the low cost private school (LCPS) sector (rising from 3,300 schools in 1983 to over 70,000 in 2011) and relatively better quality than the public sector (LCPS are 1.5 years ahead in learning outcomes relative to government schools), there is also evidence of substantial untapped innovation potential in this sector. The team has gathered both primary data and implemented randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that reveal constraints to growth and quality improvement for LCPS. Two factors that contribute to this innovation constraint are the lack of financing (a financial market failure) and access to affordable educational support services (ESS) (an input market failure), which together create a very challenging context for school owners.The current project is a RCT that seeks to explain how alleviating these constraints one at a time or simultaneously would affect learning outcomes, enrolment and school profitability. The randomized component means that schools are randomly allocated to either receiving offers of a loan product or an equity product to alleviate financial constraints, and/or receive access to buying ESS such as teacher training, improved curricula or student testing services. The controlled component of the trial means that some - randomly chosen - schools do not get any of these treatments, which allows us to compare the treatment outcomes with the counterfactual. The two financial products were developed together with one of Pakistan's largest microfinance banks. The equity product represents an innovation in the type of financial product offered to SMEs, and it is particularly relevant to LCPS since its revenue-contingent interest rate (if the school earns more, it will pay a higher interest rate) effectively shifts some of the risk of an investment over to the bank, and LCPS tend to have to make more lumpy investments than other SMEs. Our theory is that a less risky financial product would allow schools to take on more risky investments, such as investments in quality-improving ESS services. Our earlier studies have shown that schools are, under most circumstances, more prone to undertake capacity-improving investments such as buying more chairs when they get access to finance, perhaps because the school owner can more accurately predict and advertise the result from buying new chairs than from buying teacher training services. This results in a stagnant quality development of learning outcomes, which are already very poor in rural Pakistan. In conclusion, the present study will broaden the knowledge about what policy makers and providers of financial and ESS products can do to facilitate the improvement of learning outcomes in challenging rural contexts where LCPS are present.