enrolled in school were unable to read a simple text or do basic arithmetic, but many parents overestimated their children’s learning levels. In addition, during the piloting the field staff noted that even when people talked about education, it was rarely about learning—if anything got them excited it was the state government’s scholarship program, or the new school-meals program. The second intervention aimed at sharing information about the status of learning in the villages with parents, teachers, village leaders, and VEC members, to help parents focus on the issue of learning in their discussions about education. To this end, the Pratham staff taught interested villagers how to evaluate a child using the simple testing instrument used by Pratham everywhere (including for our own data collection), which we describe in more details below. In each neighborhood, a number of citizens tested all the children, and in just a few days the villagers generated their own “reading report card,” which was then discussed a the village meeting. Villagers who had participated in creating the report card for their locality were encouraged to speak out at the village meetings and present their findings and experiences. This had the impact of generating the necessary information, actively engaging the community, and shifting the conversation in the general meeting toward learning issues. In addition, this intervention also transferred to the community a specific monitoring tool, which could make it easier for villagers to monitor progress.

The third intervention supplemented interventions 1 and 2 by providing a way for a motivated citizen to directly act to improve education levels. Pratham introduced the villagers to a simple technique for teaching children how to read used in its own flagship “Read India” program. It invited local volunteers to get trained in the technique and start reading classes to be held after school. The training lasted for four days. Volunteers were then supported by periodic visits from Pratham staffers, who checked that the classes were held and provided some in-service training. Each village in treatment 3 received about 7 visits from staffers. The third intervention therefore offered the community a direct and individual way to improve learning levels. Such direct interventions by the village community is specifically mentioned in the UP state government pamphlet on VECs as one of the things that a community member can and should do to improve education in their village. However, it is worth emphasizing one key difference between this piece of the third intervention and everything else that was implemented in this experiment. This was the one thing that sections of the community could do _without engaging at all with the school system_ or even the majority of the village.

Each of these interventions was implemented in 65 villages, randomly selected out of the 280 villages in the baseline between September and December 2005. A fourth group of 85 villages formed the control group. Monitoring data suggests that the interventions were well implemented: All treated villages had at least one meeting, and some had more than one. A total of 215 village-levels meetings were held in the 195 villages. The meetings were well attended (the general meeting had on average 108 participants, 95 percent of whom were present during the entire meeting), with good representation from different hamlets and castes of the village (37 percent of the meeting attendees were women). In terms of who spoke, 72 percent of the meetings had participation from a wide range of groups and castes, and in 55 percent of the meetings, men and women were equally likely to be talking (in 84 percent of the remaining meetings, males did most of the talking). In 55 of the 65 treatment 3 villages (i.e., 84 percent of the total), there were volunteers who started reading classes. On average, there were 7.4 reading camps per treatment 3 village, each led by a different volunteer—but with the considerable variation of between 0 and 16 groups per village—and 7,453 children attended camps. Therefore, in each of the 55 villages with reading camps, about 135 children were enrolled in these camps.

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