In summary, the PPP program increased private school enrollment significantly at grade 1, and, as the program matured, the increment in enrollment trickled down to grade 2. The increment seems to benefit both girls and boys. Students in treated private schools also scored higher than students in control private schools, in all the tests conducted.

One potential explanation for these impacts relates to improved governance within private schools as a result of participation in PPPs. A PPP approach could improve private school governance by increasing the level and stability of resources available. It can also be argued that public funding may in fact empower a broader spectrum of lower- and higher-income parents to exercise greater influence in school matters, since under PPP the purely private “ownership” and “control” of schooling is radically transformed to a “contracting out” model of public education service delivery.<sup>14</sup> To test these hypotheses, each of the three surveys (Check 1, Check 2 and Check 3) asked questions about the presence of Board of Governors (BOG), frequency of meetings, changes in ownership, and the content of BOG deliberations. Table 7 presents measures of program impact on school governance and accountability from checks 1 to 3. We only present the intent-to-treat estimates that account for regional fixed effects and baseline characteristics of the school. The program does not appear to impact school governance in a systematic way. The likelihood of having a Board of Governors, the frequency of meetings and the attendance rates of members is not impacted. Changes in ownership in the control schools are very small (range 0 to 0.07), with impacts of the program ranging from -0.015 to 0.03, none of them statistically significant. If anything, the program seems to increase discussion of teacher compensation; with positive point estimates for all survey rounds, and with a statically significant coefficient at Check 3 of 0.313. Also, the results suggest that the program induces more discussion of infrastructure at the beginning (Check 1), but then a reduction (Check 3), in favor for teacher compensation. All in all, we read these results as no adverse effects of the program on school governance.

The second hypothesis we explore is whether private schools use PPP funds to increase or improve school inputs which could in turn impact student performance. The structure of the program can be expected to directly impact investments in the quantity and quality of school inputs and resources. First, certain investments might be necessary for accommodating additional enrollments. Secondly, private schools might strategically invest in school inputs to create a favorable impression on public officials (who have influence on schools’ continued participation in the program), parents and students (especially those that continue to pay fees), and teachers (to maintain motivation in the face of increased class sizes). On the other hand, given that there is limited capacity to enforce expenditure guidelines, the level of per-student subsidy is fairly modest, and some of these institutions are ultimately profit-making entities, input availability perstudent in these private schools might in fact decline with program participation.

We explore program impacts on two critical sets of school inputs - teachers and school infrastructure (Table 8) - and find that treatment schools had a similar number of teachers, with no systematic changes in teacher composition in terms of the share of female and permanent teachers. However, even though levels remain similar, there appear to be significant differences in the utilization of

> 14 On the other hand, it is possible that public financing might undermine the superior management of school inputs that underlie the comparative advantage of private schools. Firstly, the establishment of an additional governance structure, a Board of Governors, a requirement for all licensed secondary schools, whose membership includes a number of public officials and where decisions are made by majority vote, could undermine management quality. Secondly, the power and incentive structures of school governance may be fundamentally altered by the infusion of public money and it is conceivable that as a result of PPP private schools become less responsive to the parents, shift the power away from parents to government officials in school management/governance, and (as a result) provide less information to parents.

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