school notice board. The school committee developed an expenditure plan with the assistance of the facilitators supported by the project, who coached school committees on how they might address problems at the school with the block grant (but only those that could be implemented in two years, or the life of the experiment), approved expenditure proposals from school committees, authorized transfer of the block grant (once they approved expenditure proposals), ensured transfer of the grant to school committees‟ bank accounts, and monitored the use of the block grant. On average, one facilitator was assigned to ten schools, and visited each school committee 13 times.<sup>10</sup> Using these estimates on the number of visits, time facilitators spent in the schools, and staff salaries to break down the facilitation costs, and considering other treatmentspecific costs, we estimate that the cost of implementing the grant was about US$321 (excluding the grant itself) per school.

The eight million Rupiah (US$870) block grant was transferred directly from the MoNE into a bank account held by the school committee, in two tranches, with the first tranche amounting to three million Rupiah (US$326). This first tranche was disbursed in January 2008, three months later than planned, due to budgeting problems at the MoNE. The second tranche also confronted Government budgeting delays. It was to be disbursed to the schools subject to sufficient progress achieved by the school committee in using the first tranche of the grant; but, in practice, all schools received the second tranche, and received it ten months late, in December 2008, after the endline survey.<sup>11</sup> Thus, these results measure the impact of the first tranche, and the anticipation of getting remaining funding.

# _Intervention 2: Training_

Other factors hypothesized to be holding back school communities from realizing their role was information, such as their lack of knowledge about the decree; and capacity, such as how to engage the community, how to play a role in school management, and how to promote student learning. Thus, a two-day, district-level training attended by four school committee members (principal, teacher, parent, and one village representative)<sup>12</sup> covered planning, budgeting and steps the school committee could take to support education quality. The budget session focused on a plan for spending the block grant. Materials drew heavily on the Creating Learning Communities for Children (CLCC) model developed by UNICEF,<sup>13</sup> which provides prolonged training and facilitation to schools on active learning, school-based management and

> 10 Based on interviews by the authors with two district facilitators after completion of the project.  According to PPA, the project employed 50 facilitators for a period of 15 months, and six district facilitators who managed the district teams. The interventions were implemented consecutively – elections, linkage, and then training. 11 The endline survey had to be conducted before the second tranche was disbursed because the grant from the Japan Social Development Fund that financed the survey was about to expire.

> 12 For the schools that also received the linkage treatment, one additional representative from the village council was invited.

13 For more on Creating Learning Communities for Children, see http://www.unicef.org/indonesia/resources_7230.html. 7