Local Bureaucrats and School Governance Reform at Scale: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

We report the results of a randomized evaluation of a management reform program in Tanzania, rolled out to all schools in the country over a period of four years. School quality assurance officers (previously known as school inspectors) visit schools and produce a set of diagnostics and recommendations to improve school quality that are shared with teachers and parents. We evaluate the program in a nationally representative sample of 397 schools, with 199 schools assigned to the control. In half of the treated schools, we send frequent and summarized recommendations to front-line local government education officers to encourage follow up. We document three main findings. First, we observe modest gains in learning in the Visit arm with follow up encouragement of about 0.1-0.2 SD. Observed gains are concentrated in regions exposed to a donor program that provided front-line bureaucrats with resources to monitor. Second, we observe higher teacher preparation and student responsiveness as well as a greater local bureaucrat attention to recommendations in the follow up arm. Third, we observe a short run change in teacher e ort in the arm with follow up: attendance at midline increased by 7.9 percentage points and teaching practices improved. Finally, the absence of any treatment effects in the no-follow-up arm support a bureaucratic monitoring mechanism.