《Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers》.pdf

Incomplete Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers: Results from a Social Experiment in Mexican High Schools * ** * Jere R. Behrman Susan Parker Petra E. Todd * Kenneth I. Wolpin And Estimating a Coordination Game within the Classroom * * Petra E. Todd and Kenneth I. Wolpin *University of Pennsylvania ** CIDE I. Introduction1 This paper evaluates the impact of a large-scale social experiment (the Aligning Learning Incentives, or ALI, program), involving 88 Mexican Federal high schools, designed to promote mathematics achievement through performance-based monetary incentives. High schools were randomly allocated to three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment one (T1) provides individual incentives to students only and treatment two (T2) to teachers only. Treatment three (T3) o§ers both individual and group incentives to students, teachers and school administrators, thus rewarding cooperation among all of the education actors in the school. An important rationale for utilizing monetary incentives rather than intervening in the educational process directly is that policy makers are not likely to know the best means of improving education given the heterogeneous attributes of students, teachers and administra- tors across schools. The production process by which school, student and family