Cameras to prevent teacher absenteeism in rural India

Update: After writing this post, I looked at the original research paper and wrote a much more detailed post on this topic which is worth reading.

Interesting idea:

Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

It was a simple idea, and it worked. Teacher absenteeism plummeted, as measured by random audits, and the class test scores improved markedly.

Found: here.

2 thoughts on “Cameras to prevent teacher absenteeism in rural India”

  1. That seemed to be a very nice use of technology. I just want to know the cost involved in the process.Please also provide the reduction in absenteeism rate, if possible.
    thanks for posting such a nice blog.

    Om Prakash Arya

    Reply

  2. The reduction in absenteeism was substantial:

    Over the 30 months in which attendance was tracked, teachers at program schools had an absence rate of 21 percent, compared to 44 percent baseline and the 42 percent in the comparison schools. Absence rates stayed low after the end of the proper evaluation phase (the first fourteen months of the program), suggesting that teachers did not change their behavior simply for the evaluation.

    Also, there was a measureable improvement in the education imparted to students:

    A year into the program, test scores in the treatment schools were 0.17 standard deviations higher than in the comparison schools. Two and a half years into the program, children from the treatment schools were also 10 percentage points (or 62 percent) more likely to transfer to formal primary schools, which requires passing a competency test.

    See the full paper for details. I don’t have information about the costs of this program. But I am guessing that it isn’t much more than the cost of one camera per school.

    The program was run by Seva Mandir so if you are really interested, I’d think that contacting them for details would be a good idea.

    Reply

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