across villages; indeed the largest differences are _between schools_ in the _same_ village, so that there are some good (and some bad) schools in every village. The policy implications are stark. If factors across villages drive variation in learning, district education boards, the educational atmosphere in the village and local returns to education, all of which are difficult to change, play an important role. The findings suggest that there are no “bad” villages and “good” villages; to improve learning, we need focus only on the characteristics of schools.

This paper does _not_ address what school characteristics to focus on. A long history of research on learning achievement and school inputs points to technical and methodological issues that severely bias our understanding of the relationship between school inputs and learning achievement and we believe that a responsible answer is best left to further research. Towards the end of the paper, we speculate though, that the large differences across schools reflect differences in teacher commitment and motivation—whether children learn in government schools largely depends on whether their teachers are heroes or zeros.

Very low learning achievement is not a Pakistan-specific problem and requires a serious SouthAsia wide policy response. The parallel analysis with data on government schools from the state of Uttar Pradesh in India helps contextualize the results from Pakistan within a broader SouthAsian context. Contrary to the popular picture of Pakistan as a “failed-state” (Singer, 2001) and the popular “India-Shining” slogan, levels and patterns of learning are very similar. Children know little and most variation is across schools rather than across households: the gap in learning, for instance, between a child in a high-performing and a low-performing government school is five times the gap in learning between a child with a literate mother and a child with an illiterate mother.<sup>2</sup> Given the commonalities across the two countries, the analysis sheds some light on the necessary ingredients for a system of monitoring performance and learning; this is discussed in

> 2 The results presented here are thus not meant as a comparison of performance in the two countries. The studies were independently designed with inherently different purposes. Consequently, the tests are different (and not comparable), the studies sample different portions of the relevant population, and the grades tested are different (third grade in Pakistan and fourth grade in India). Nevertheless, there are several reasons for using these data rather than other secondary data. In a number of tests available to us, the data for our analysis are not available: we do not have access to the original questions (and in some cases these are proprietary), the secondary data are presented as test-score “totals” rather than question-by-question responses, which does not allow us to construct the item response scores, and household attributes are not available in some cases. Furthermore, we cannot find _any_ tests in India that allow us to replicate the analysis in Pakistan—there have been almost no large-scale tests of children in _rural_ private schools (Pratham, 2006 is an exception); furthermore, samples have usually been drawn by picking a single school in every village so that comparisons across schools within the same village are not possible.

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