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Citizens and Service Delivery
Box 3.6
Report Cards in Health Report cards are used for reporting performance of health facilities in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. A 1989 New York State public report on cardiac surgery publicized wide variations in mortality rates among providers. Following its release, lower-rated hospitals responded by improving cardiac surgery departments, and one of the poorest-performing hospitals achieved distinction in 2002 by having the lowest risk-adjusted mortality rate of any hospital in the state. A later evaluation of the New York reform found that this report card effort decreased the number of cases seen at lower-performing hospitals and at the same time led to quality improvements at those same facilities. Sources: Chassin 2002; Cutler, Huckman, and Landrum 2004.
a clear picture of the current state of education quality in the village. Information collected at baseline revealed that parents and VEC members tended to overestimate student abilities. But even when citizens were trained to create report cards on their children’s learning levels, this kind of more active engagement did not did not spur them into action, change teacher effort, or improve learning outcomes. School report cards in Pakistan. A randomized experiment of school report cards in Pakistan seemed to change the relationship between providers and parents. A major feature of this study was that the researchers included all the schools in all the villages involved, which allowed for the intervention to affect the entire education market in a village (approximately seven schools on average per village), and each village was randomized into treatment or control. The purpose of the report card was to provide information to parents and schools regarding the academic performance of children both on an absolute scale and relative to other children and other schools. A teacher’s version of the report card included a more detailed breakdown of scores by subject so teachers could identify the areas that needed improvement. The report cards were handed out to parents, accompanied by a discussion about the factors affecting a child’s score so as not to assign blame to the children and to help illiterate parents understand the information in the report cards. This study estimated that the report cards led to positive impacts within the education market. First, average test scores increased by