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" How Effective Are Education Programs and Policies in Improving Access and Learning for Disadvantaged Students? Evidence from Three Disparate Contexts "
Asim, Minahil
Gee, Kevin A.
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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1053171
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TL52288
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| Main Entry
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Asim, Minahil
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| Title & Author
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How Effective Are Education Programs and Policies in Improving Access and Learning for Disadvantaged Students? Evidence from Three Disparate Contexts\ Asim, MinahilGee, Kevin A.
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| College
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University of California, Davis
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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122 p.
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| Abstract
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I study the effectiveness of education policies and programs to improve academic achievement and attainment among underserved students in the K-12 education pipeline in three different country contexts. My first paper investigates the role of information in strengthening local governance of schools in Punjab, Pakistan. My second paper is a study of distributional effects of a literacy intervention targeted at schools, parents, and communities in a rural district in Rwanda. My third paper is an analysis of math course-taking patterns among high school students in California, U.S.A. All three papers use large scale administrative and survey datasets and a combination of quasi-experimental methods and descriptive data analyses to study policies and programs that directly address issues of access and learning for disadvantaged students. My first paper studies the School Council Mobilization Program (SCMP) in Punjab, Pakistan. The SCMP is an information dissemination program through which the provincial government made regular and targeted phone-calls to local governance institutions in education - school councils, comprised of parents, teachers, and community members. The calls informed and encouraged members to utilize a budget provided by the government to improve school and student outcomes. Using multiple administrative datasets and a difference-in-differences quasi-experimental research strategy, I find that SCMP schools, as a result of the outreach program, increased expenditure by 40 percent (i.e., roughly USD 100 per year per school) compared to non-SCMP schools. However, facilities did not improve and additional contract teachers were not hired - outcomes on which members were encouraged to spend the money. Worse, students in SCMP schools scored lower in Math, English, and Urdu by approximately one-tenth of a standard deviation than students in non-SCMP schools. I speculate that mobilizing councils may have interfered with the time and effort teachers put in the classroom and hence, made schooling worse-off for students. From a policy perspective, while SCMP was a low-cost, scalable, and successful program in terms of optics for the government and donor agencies, education reforms in similar contexts have to be drastically re-imagined if learning is what we ultimately care about. For my second paper, I investigate how a clustered randomized control trial in Rwanda that was intended to encourage effective classroom reading pedagogy and engage students, families, and communities in reading activities outside of school, impacted students’ reading along different points of the reading achievement distribution. Using a quantile treatment effects research strategy, I find that the set of interventions had no impact on students at the top (90th) or bottom (10th) percentiles of Kinyarwanda fluency and text comprehension distributions, and girls were the only beneficiaries of the program. Moreover, the treatment arm that focused on changing pedagogical practices in school benefited girls who were struggling to read, but the treatment arm that focused on engaging families and communities, along with introducing effective pedagogical practices in school benefited girls who were already at an advantage in reading. I consider the response to the interventions by students, parents, and teachers within the cultural context of Rwanda, which helps explain the disparate findings along the reading distributions. My work underscores the importance of tailoring programs to the needs of different types of learners and considering whom exactly the program benefits when scaling up. Finally, for my last paper, I explore the patterns in mathematics course-taking among California public high school seniors across demographic and school characteristics. I find that although a large majority of college-bound students enroll in math in their final year of high school, high school seniors do not equally access advanced math pathways. Latinx, African American, and low-income students are underrepresented in math-courses in high schools and in the applicant pool data for post-secondary institutions. Similarly, high-poverty schools have a smaller percentage of students enrolled in advanced math courses compared to low-poverty schools in 12th grade. These disparities at the individual and school-level directly impact students’ post-secondary outcomes, such as the likelihood of applying to and enrolling in college. My work directly responds to the California State University system’s proposed policy that would require students to complete a fourth year of math for college entry. I argue that the additional requirements may pose barriers for students who are either discouraged by an additional step in the highly structured high-school curriculum, or are simply unable to access advanced courses. Together, these three papers contribute to the literature on the effectiveness of education programs and interventions, and inform our understanding of what works and what does not work in improving educational access and outcomes for disadvantaged students in three different country contexts. These papers also provide direct guidance on how policies in environments like Pakistan, Rwanda, and the United States can be designed to maximize the impact for the most vulnerable student populations.
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| Descriptor
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Education policy
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Gee, Kevin A.
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University of California, Davis
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