76
World Bank Working Paper
CONDITIONS IN SCHOOLS Variables related to school facilities have a limited effect. Whether a classroom is permanent or temporary does not affect MSCE pass rates (it is not statistically significant). Similarly, the fact that a school has a library, latrines, water, or electricity does not help bring more students to graduation. Yet, having a lab tends increase the level of the MSCE pass rate (a marginal effect of 0.071). However, schools that possess a lab are usually CSSs. TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS Female teachers tend to display better results than their male peers. All other things being equal, the higher the proportion of female teachers in a school, the higher the MSCE pass rate. Again, it is important not to assume that male teachers are less efficient, because many other unobservable variables are not taken into account, such as the students’ initial level. PT4 to PT1 grade teachers lead to poorer performances at the school level compared to Grade I teachers. All things being equal, the higher their proportion the lower the examination pass rate. It is important to note that those teachers were initially intended to teach in primary school, and may be lacking the necessary competences to teach in secondary schools. And, they may be posted in schools that face harsher working conditions. The great majority of CDSSs employ these teachers, and these schools are known to be less well endowed with quality educational inputs. A third model was run with the grade variable replaced by the academic qualification of teachers. Indeed, the strong correlation existing between the variables led to some bias. The results (not shown) indicate that MSCE holders are performing less well than higher education graduates in education, ceteris paribus. Beyond the limits pertaining to the data in hand, the factors that have been analyzed cover most school costs (for example, teacher salaries, pedagogical materials). That these factors explain just a minor part (from 20 to 40 percent) of school differences in student learning outcomes, tells us that many other factors are at stake. Additional in depth analyses of learning outcomes are required for clear policy orientations. However, these results highlight the need to question aspects of education management by looking more specifically at: i) administrative management concerning the allocation of resources (human, material, and financial) from central to decentralized and to school levels; and ii) pedagogical management that deals with the transformation, at school level, of the allocated resources into student learning achievement. These two aspects are reviewed in the following sections.
Administration Management This section briefly presents the institutional processes pertaining to human resource allocation, before turning to a description of teacher characteristics and the consistency of their deployment across schools. A similar analysis will then be undertaken for the allocation of books and funds. The section ends with an overview of possible economy of scale (based on the size of the schools).