CCTs+in+India

At the World Bank blog, Lance Pritchett writes about the predictable consequences of government mismanagement of education, in this case in India. There, the quality of publicly-funded schools is appalling, Not only do children not learn in those schools, but there is a considerable probability that they will actually be mistreated physically. Given a choice, of course, no-one would willingly stay in such a situation. The government might deal with the child's desire to drop out by improving the schools and the treatment of children in them. But instead, it took the usual government way out - intervention that produces the opposite of the stated goal. "Conditional cash transfers" (CCTs) pay families to keep their children in schools. Thus, if children try to drop out, the family income is reduced. This allows the government to trumpet high enrolment figures as evidence that their education system is working. But Pritchett argues that the children are just being kept in schools - they're not learning anything:

"For the state and those that see for the state and like the state, see the problem of child drop-out is a problem of the household not complying with the state’s objective to universalize enrollment. The obvious solution is to make the poor child and poor households more accountable to the state’s narrowly drawn objective of increasing enrollment. That the real goal was to properly educate the child gets lots in the counting. Once the problem of education is re-defined so that the state can easily see and measure it as schooling then forcing a child back into a disastrous school counts exactly as much in increasing enrollment as attracting children to stay in school because they are learning."

In other words, there are two basic ways to keep children in school: give them a good experience or punish their families if they drop out. The government of India chose the latter. As Pritchett observes:

"Of course when CCTs force children back into school the children might not learn to read and might not learn to divide, but they will learn an important, if tragic, life lesson: when you are poor the state has power and you do not."