Page 4 Bank (EIB), and the Council of Europe Bank. The reforms that remain on the agenda for the education sector involve giving greater means for stakeholders in local schools to hold the government and providers accountable for the quality of education.

10. With the support of the Governance Partnership Facility (GPF) a special survey was designed to examine how parents, community members and teachers interact in school governance structures. The _Albania School Stakeholder Survey and Lab-type Experiment_ was designed and deployed in 180 communities drawn randomly to represent the network of basic (primary) schools in Albania. Along with the survey, a set of controlled lab-type experiments (or “behavioral games”) was also conducted with parents and teachers in order to measure their demand for accountability.

11. This paper presents the findings of the survey and lab-type experiments, and is structured into three parts. The remainder of Part I summarizes the findings from analysis of the survey and lab-type experiments. Parts II and III provide greater technical details for interested readers who are statistically inclined. Appendicies explain the design and sampling strategy used to select schools, parents and other stakeholders for the survey and lab-type experiments, as well as more detailed data on school performance dissagregated by RED.

# **I.c. Summary of Findings from the School Stakeholder Survey and Lab-type Experiments**

12. The School Stakeholder Survey, collected in the autumn of 2009, was designed to provide policy makers with data on the functioning of schools and to inform the design of further reforms in the education sector. The survey was designed to: (i) quantify education resources and take stock of institutions for accountability, including both external (“top down”) and participatory (“bottom up”) structures; (ii) measure stakeholders‟ awareness of the schools‟ institutional framework in general, and participatory accountability institutions in particular; and (iii) gage actual parental involvement with the school. In what follows, we present descriptive statistics drawn from the survey to measure -or proxy- school inputs, school and teacher characteristics and effort, “top-down” accountability and transparency, participatory “bottom up” accountability and parental involvement, and parents‟ and community characteristics. The data reveal factors that are significantly correlated with school performance, as measured by student repetition rates, student drop-out rates, and students‟ performance on Albanian language and math exams.

13. Since the new school stakeholder data are drawn from a baseline survey, the analysis discussed in Part II is presented as a series of correlations rather than causal relationships. The results have to be interpreted cautiously as they are drawn from retrospective data collected with a cross-section survey, and are therefore vulnerable to biases due to omissions and endogeneity. Indeed the Albania School Stakeholder Survey was designed first and foremost to collect a baseline so that the impact of interventions the government is still considering can be measured. Nevertheless, the richness of the new data is unique, and allows researchers to investigate the relationship between school outcomes and: (1) school physical and human resources; (2) “topdown” accountability and transparency; (3) “bottom up” participatory accountability institutions and parental involvement; and (4) parents‟ and community characteristics. By employing statistical techniques at the level of RED and district, the problems of endogeneity can be attenuated. And while there is potential endogeneity of parental involvement, this is a greater risk where parents have a choice in determining in which school to enroll their children. In Albania parents appear to have this choice only in large urban areas.<sup>5</sup> In order to limit the problem of possible multicollinearity among variables, principal factor analysis is used on sets of variables that are

> 5 When asked why they chose that specific school to enroll their children, 88% of parents in rural areas point to the vicinity to their house, and 12% mention the presence of good teachers as a reason. These percentages change to 65% and 35% respectively in urban areas.