Education service delivery in nine African countries
17 | “Mastering” refers to having more than 70 percent of correct answers across all students in the school group. 18 | Obtained through a simple multivariate regression at the school level of mean student test scores on an urban-rural indicator controlling for country fixed effects and with robust standard errors. 19 | These differences are obtained by doing a simple t-test of means between the top and bottom 5 percent of public schools. 20 | This finding does not necessarily contradict the results of Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer (2015), who find that lowering class size by adding more centrally hired civil service teachers does not improve student learning outcomes. They attribute this null effect to existing teachers’ reducing their effort in response to the new hires and helping their relatives to get hired into a significant portion of the new teaching slots. 21 | Results from a multivariable linear regression of student test scores on school inputs controlling for country fixed effects and proxies for poverty and accessibility to school. 22 | The remaining 0.5 percent corresponds to the category “other.” 23 | These results come from regressions at the teacher level controlling for school locality, teacher formal training, and country fixed effects. 24 | For instance, in Tanzania a joint intervention providing teacher incentives coupled with school grants has had significantly larger effects on student test scores than providing incentives or grants separately (Mbiti et al. 2019).
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