DOES PARTICIPATION IMPROVE DEVELOPMENT OUTCOMES?
schools. Although increased spending need not be welfare enhancing for poor households, the authors argue that taken together with improved attendance rates and grade-appropriate placement of children, it is indicative of unmet demand for schooling in these communities.
School-based management.
Several countries have implemented strong versions of school-based management. An early program is the Educación con Participación de la Comunidad (Education with Community Participation [EDUCO]) program in El Salvador. Under this program, the state bore all schooling costs (tuition, uniforms, textbooks). Parents were expected to contribute time and labor to the school. Each school had an Association for Community Education (ACE), with elected parent members. The ACEs managed the school budget; they could hire and fire teachers and monitor teacher performance (Sawada and Ragatz 2005). Half of all rural students in grades 1–9 were enrolled in an EDUCO school by 2001 (Di Gropello 2006). Jimenez and Sawada (1999, 2003) find that students in EDUCO schools had higher attendance and lower dropout rates than students in traditional schools. Attending an EDUCO school raised the odds of school retention by about 64 percent. As the decision to enroll in an EDUCO school is endogenous, the authors use the availability of EDUCO at the municipality level as an instrument for a school being in the EDUCO program. They attempt to isolate the channel through which the EDUCO effect is realized by adding a community participation variable to the estimation. This estimation yields a positive and significant effect, leading the authors to conclude that EDUCO worked mainly through community participation. These results are interesting, but the empirical strategy is not convincing. In practice, any number of municipal characteristics could influence a municipalities’ eligibility for the EDUCO program and thus the odds of a school entering the program. Similarly, any number of community characteristics could affect the odds of a school selecting into the program as well as the observed dropout effects. Jimenez and Sawada (1999) and Sawada (1999) also find positive changes in teacher attitudes and behavior, particularly teacher absenteeism. Sawada and Ragatz (2005) uses propensity score matching to identify the impact of EDUCO on a range of outcomes. Their results also indicate lower teacher absenteeism. Community associations and
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