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We use a panel survey of [approximately]19,000 primary-school-aged children in rural Tamil Nadu to study 'learning loss' after COVID-19-induced school closures, and the pace of recovery after schools reopened. Students tested in December 2021 (18 months after school closures) displayed learning deficits of [approximately]0.7[sigma] standard deviations in math and [approximately]0.34[sigma] standard deviations in language compared to identically-aged students in the same villages in 2019. Two-thirds of this deficit was made up within 6 months after school reopening. Further, while learning loss was regressive, the recovery was progressive. A government-run after-school remediation program contributed [approximately]24% of the cohort-level recovery, and likely aided the progressive recovery. [Financial support was provided by the RISE Programme--funded by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Financial support was also provided by the Asociacíon Mexicana de Cultura, A.C.]

While the idea of teacher performance-pay is increasingly making its way into policy, the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs is both limited and mixed. The central questions in the literature on teacher performance pay to date have been whether teacher performance pay based on test scores can improve student achievement, and whether there are negative consequences of teacher incentives based on student test scores? The literature on both of these questions highlight the importance of not just evaluating teacher incentive programs that are designed by administrators, but of using economic theory to design systems of teacher performance pay that are likely to induce higher effort from teachers towards improving human capital and less likely to be susceptible to gaming. Also, while there is a growing body of high-quality empirical studies on the impact of teacher performance pay on education quality, most of these evaluations stop after two or three years, and so there is no good evidence on longer-term impacts (both positive and negative) of teacher performance pay on students who have completed most of their education under such a system. In this paper, the author contributes towards filling this gap with results from a five-year long randomized evaluation of group and individual teacher performance pay programs implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP). The main questions addressed in this paper are: 1) What is the impact of teacher performance pay (implemented for five years) on student test scores at various points of program exposure? 2) Are there any negative consequences of the teacher performance pay program? 3) What is the relative effect of group and individual teacher incentive programs? There are three main results in this paper. First, the individual teacher performance pay program had a large and significant impact on student learning outcomes over all durations of student exposure to the program. Students who had completed their entire five years of primary school education under the program scored 0.54 and 0.35 standard deviations (SD) higher than those in control schools in math and language tests respectively. These are large effects corresponding to approximately 20 and 14 percentile point improvements at the median of a normal distribution, and are larger than the effects found in most other education interventions in developing countries (see Dhaliwal et al. 2011). Second, the results suggest that these test score gains represent genuine additions to human capital as opposed to reflecting only "teaching to the test". Students in individual teacher incentive schools score significantly better on both non-repeat as well as repeat questions; on both multiple-choice and free-response questions; and on questions designed to test conceptual understanding as well as questions that could be answered through rote learning. Most importantly, these students also perform significantly better on subjects for which there were "no incentives"--scoring 0.52 SD and 0.30 SD higher than students in control schools on tests in science and social studies (though the bonuses were paid only for gains in math and language). There was also no differential attrition of students across treatment and control groups and no evidence to suggest any adverse consequences of the programs. Third, the authors find that individual teacher incentives significantly outperform group teacher incentives over the longer time horizon though they were equally effective in the first year of the experiment. Students in group incentive schools score better than those in control schools over most durations of exposure, but these are not always significant and students who complete five years of primary school under the program do not score significantly higher than those in control schools. However, the variance of student outcomes is lower in the group incentive schools than in the individual incentive schools. The authors measure changes in teacher behavior and the results suggest that the main mechanism for the improved outcomes in incentive schools is not reduced teacher absence, but increased teaching activity conditional on presence. Finally, the authors also measure household responses to the program--for the cohort that was exposed to five years of the program, at the end of five years--and find that there is no significant difference across treatment and control groups in either household spending on education or on time spent studying at home, suggesting that the estimated effects are unlikely to be confounded by differential household responses across treatment and control groups over time.

In this paper, we use a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to school vouchers across both markets and students in rural India to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. In the first step of the research design, we develop an empirical model of school choice subject to liquidity and credit constraints that is estimated using data from only the control markets. Based on this exercise, we estimate that the voucher generated welfare gains exceeding four times the average private school's annual tuition on average to the students induced into private schooling. The second step of the research design will validate the estimated welfare impacts by comparing model predictions for a simulated voucher program in control markets with the data from the treatment group. The results in this paper are based on the first step (using only control data) and this draft serves as a pre-commitment to the model estimates and predictions before examining the experimental data.

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving educational outcomes in schools, but the empirical evidence to date on its effectiveness is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). Students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.19 and 0.12 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" components of the tests suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives. We find no significant difference in the effectiveness of group versus individual teacher incentives. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly-chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value. Appended are: (1) Project Timeline and Activities; and (2) Project Team, Test Administration, and Robustness to Cheating. (Contains 17 tables, 6 figures, and 53 footnotes.)