Page 17 56. Conscious of the non-experimental nature of the data employed in this section of analysis, and unresolved endogeneity issues, in the sections that follow, care is taken to present results as correlations rather than causation. Moreover, in order to limit the problem of possible multicollinearity among the independent variables, principal factor analysis is used on sets of variables that are meant to proxy for similar school, household or community characteristics and that appear highly correlated.

57. The survey was designed to: (i) quantify educational resources and institutions for accountability, including both external (“top down”) and participatory (“bottom up”) mechanisms; (ii) measure the awareness of the different stakeholders of the school institutional framework in general, and participatory institutions in particular; and (iii) measure actual parental involvement with the school. In what follows, we present descriptive statistics drawn from the survey to measure or proxy school outputs, school and teacher characteristics, “top-down” accountability and transparency, participatory “bottom up” accountability and parental involvement, and parents‟ and community characteristics. In the first part of this section, we explain the measures that have been selected from the survey data. In the second part, we present descriptive statistics and the results of tests for significant differences between community groups of interest.

# _2.b.1. Measures of students’ performance at the school level_

58. Until the 2006-2007 academic year primary school leaving examinations were designed and administered by school teachers. This system generated opportunities for irregularities and prevented MoES from carrying out objective comparisons of students‟ performance across schools. Starting from June 2008, the locally administered final year examinations were replaced by standardized tests, centrally administered by the division of the MoES that is also in charge of _State Matura_ high school final year examinations. Therefore, since 2008 the performance of primary school students on leaving examinations has been comparable across schools.

59. We focus on five education outcomes at the school level. Three of them are generated by the leaving examinations corresponding to the academic year immediately preceding our data collection (the 2009 final year examinations). In each school, we look at: (1) the proportion of students who failed the final year examination; (2) the proportion of students who excelled (i.e. received a 9 or a 10) in the Albanian language test; and (3) the proportion of students who excelled (i.e. received a 9 or a 10) in the math test. In addition, we consider: (4) the drop-out rate (i.e. the proportion of students who were enrolled in the school in the 2008-2009 academic year and did not return to school the following year<sup>21</sup> ); and (5) the repetition rate (i.e. the proportion of students repeating a year at the time of the survey).

# _2.b.2. Measures of school physical and human resources_

60. The questionnaire directed at the schools‟ administrative representative provided extensive information about the status of the buildings and physical resources available in each school. Guided by the existing literature, we focus on the following school characteristics: the urban vs. rural location of the school; the distance (in kilometers) from the nearest town; whether the school can be reached by public transportation; the number of days with no electricity in a typical month; whether the school has a telephone; the proportion of classrooms in poor condition that cannot be

> 20 Gunnerson et al. (2009) use retrospective data to study the impact of parental participation and school outcomes on education outcomes in eight Latin American countries. They find that correcting for endogeneity substantially increase the estimated impact of parental participation on students‟ test scores.

> 21 Note that this may be also due to the family moving to a different location, or the student being transferred to a different school, where more than one are available.