Michel Kremer (Harvard)Willa Friedman (Berkeley)Edward Miguel (Berkeley)

Rebecca Thornton (Michigan)

EDUCATION AS LIBERATION?

1) INTRODUCTION

� Education policies have been motivated by political impact.

� Third UN Millennium Development Goal= expanded girls educational access.

� This paper randomized merit scholarship competition for adolescent girls in Kenyan schools.

� Less development countries have experienced a massive increase on education and democracy (past half century).

Theories about Education political impact1.Modernization theorists: education weakens traditional attachments based on gender, ethnicity and religion. Authors: Lipset (1959), Dahl(1971), Huntington (1991).

2. Education tool of cultural indoctrination.

3.Education individual autonomy and empowerment.

4. Davies (1974): “Rapid expansions in opportunities build up expectations which, if unmet, we lead to frustration and violence”.

� Main difficulty in estimating the impact of education in behavior: reverse causality.

� Limitation of micro-experiment approach: measure the impact of a particular policy in a single population.

2) BACKGROUND

2.1) Study Setting� Kenyan girls in setting: socially marginalized and political

disempowered, female and young, residents of a rural backwater and for the ethnic political weak Luhya and Teso.

� Women are also disadvantaged in Kenyan society.

� Area of study: Busia (64% of them below poverty line).

� Kenyan school system: quite authoritarian (corporal punishment), uniforms, learning by rote, and promote democratic values, national Kenya and oppose to national identity.

2.1) Gir ls Scholarship Program (GSP)

� March 2001, ICS introduced a merit scholarship competition in 34 primary schools with 35 serving as control group.

� GSP: provided an award to grade 6 in treatment schools whose performance on governments end of year exam placed in top 15%.

� Award: 6,4$ to school fees, 12,8$ girls families during 2 years.

� Randomized treatment vs control: computer random number generator.

� Competition: 2001 and 2002

3) DATA, ESTIMATION AND PRIGRAM

3.1) Follow-up data collection (2005-2007)� Goal: measure long-term effect.

� Girls 17-21 years old.

� 81% of responders was still alive (1,387 girls).

� Shorts tests in English, Swahili, arithmetic, reading and spatial reasoning. Also questions on marriage, migration and political attitudes.

3.2) Estimation strategy

� Outcomes (POLIT).

� GSP Treatment (TREAT).

� Control Variables (X)= student cohort, age at survey, mean pre-program (2000), school test score, parent education and month survey.

� To express the magnitude of human capital effect and allow comparison between experimental estimates vs non-experimental estimates use instrumental variable (IV) estimates of impact of human capital on political endogenous variable (H).

� Normalize average test scores across all subjects (mean=0 and SD=1).

� First stage equation:

� Second Stage equation (2SLS):

� Compare OLS vs IV Hausman (1978)

� Mean effect: on each set of outcomes. The groupings of related variables are denoted by

� Standardize each outcome by subtracting the mean and dividing by standard deviation among GSP control group.

� The standard variables are , and regress this index on TREAT or on H.

� Resulting coefficient= mean effect size (captures the average impact in terms of SD of outcome variable).

3.3) Impacts in Human Capital

4) IMPACTS OF AUTHONOMY WITHIN HOUSEHOLD

5) IMPACTS ON POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES

5.1) Impact on “ Modern” Attitudes

5.2) Impact on Political knowledge and Satisfaction

5.3) Empowered for what?

6) CONCLUSIONS� Contribution experimental results to relationship between

education vs political and social attitudes.

� GSP reject legitimacy of domestic violence and arrange marriages.

�GSP Don’t weaken ethnic attachment, promote secularization and democracy.

� GSP increase political knowledge, less willingness to differ authority and less satisfaction with Kenyan political and economic situation.

� Results are relevant for rural Kenyan females at margin of transitory from primary schools to secondary schools.