Page 35 103. But do parents get involved in participatory accountability structures? What are the factors that determine whether parents get involved? And if they do participate, does this have an impact on student and school performance?

104. As discussed in earlier sections of this report, the empirical literature exploring the impact of parental involvement in education is relatively new. The existing studies can be categorized generally into two types: those using retrospective survey data of the sort presented earlier; and those that use an experimental or randomized controlled trial (RCT) approach, which involves the random allocation of participatory institutions of various types to different schools. Retrospective studies focus mainly on the existence of participatory institutions and actual parental participation, and their association with school outcomes. As discussed earlier, while these retrospective, ex post evaluations provide encouraging findings, they can be compromised by endogeneity and omitted variables<sup>34</sup> as schools with participatory institutions or more parental involvement in general may differ from other schools in a number of ways that may both drive the difference in parental participation and have an independent effect on school outcomes. This problem can, of course, be addressed by randomly allocating participatory programs to schools and measuring the effect by conducting ex ante and ex post surveys, but this approach can be costly.

105. Parents‟ willingness to participate in holding teachers to account depends on the actual and expected costs and benefits associated with participating. The actual costs include: transportation costs; the opportunity cost of time; and the internal psychological costs that parents may suffer when holding teachers to account, especially when they have personal relationships with teachers or feel somehow inferior or beholden to teachers. The expected benefits from participation include the better education that parents expect their children to receive if teachers are held to account and any intrinsic benefit associated with believing that holding teachers to account is “the right thing to do”. This section of the report discusses the use of experimental techniques to help measure these less tangible intrinsic costs and benefits to parents involvement in structures designed to help them hold service providers to account.

106. The experimental techniques that were deployed in parallel with the survey of school stakeholders in Albania, do not overcome the limitations of retrospective evaluations. Nor are they a substitute for the power of RCTs conducted with an ex-ante and ex-post evaluation strategy. However, they can provide valuable insights that help policymakers avoid what can be costly mistakes in the design and piloting of innovative interventions, particularly in country contexts where there is little or no prior information to guide their efforts.

# **III.b. Controlled Lab Type Experiments: Just Playing Games?**

107. Alongside the Albania School Stakeholder Survey presented in the part two of this report, parents and teachers were invited to participate in the specifically designed controlled, lab-type experiments (LTEs). The retrospective survey was designed to quantify the institutions for increasing accountability (including both external “top down” and participatory “bottom up” structures); to measure the awareness of stakeholders (especially parents), of the school institutional framework in general, and participatory institutions in particular; and to measure actual parental involvement with the school. To complement this valuable data, the LTE was designed to yield insights into parents‟ preferences for participation, i.e. their willingness to forgo personal payoffs in order to hold teachers to account.<sup>35</sup>

> 34 Gunnarsson et al. (2009), in their survey-based ex post evaluation of participatory institutions in eight Latin American countries, found that controlling for the possible endogeneity of school resources and parents‟ participation, substantially increases the estimated impact of parental participation on students‟ test scores.

> 35 It also provided a measure of teachers‟ levels of intrinsic motivation that will be analyzed elsewhere.