Fourth, practitioners emphasize the value of community-owned “score-cards” in mobilizing communities to take action. In interventions 2 and 3 the community created its own report card by testing children in math and reading. Both the results and the tools were transferred to community members.

Pratham is the largest educational NGO in India. It has demonstrated success in several randomized evaluations of its programs and reaches millions of children throughout India. Pratham designed and runs the the Annual State of Education Report (ASER), which tests children in all of India’s nearly 600 districts every year, and is extremely prominent in the discourse on education in India. The organization takes community participation in education very seriously (it is the backbone of its flagship “Read India” program) and devotes considerable resources to make sure that the program is implemented as well as possible. Pratham’s motivation and expertise thus made it an obvious candidate for implementing these interventions.

Taken together this suggests that we can be reasonably sure that what we are evaluating were well-designed and effectively implemented programs. It is also clear that they reached their intermediate goals: encouraging participation, holding meetings focused on education, and generating discussion, interest, and willingness on the part of at least some people to act (as evidenced by the fact that Pratham was effective at recruiting volunteers for the reading camps).

# **3.3 Why might we have expected these interventions to work?**

These interventions involved a combination of more information (about learning levels and levers for change such as the VEC) and more coordination on doing something about education. The predicted impact of more coordination seems unambiguous: More action and better results is what we would have expected.

Giving people more information, on the other hand, need not always promote greater collective action. For example, if the only people who were acting initially were those who believed that the returns to collective action were very large, information that gave everyone a more realistic sense of the effectiveness of collective action might very well reduce the total effort put in. However, in our particular context this effect seems unlikely because for most people the effect of the information should have been to make them, _ceteris paribus_ , more willing to act: First because they were being told that they had more powers than they had previously imagined, and second because they discovered that the problem was more serious than most of them had known and therefore there was a greater need to act.

However, this presumes that they registered the information that they were being given.<sup>10</sup> If they were sufficiently pessimistic about being able to use these powers to start with—possibly based on their previous experience with trying to put pressure on the education system—it would not be surprising if they did not pay very much attention when the powers were being detailed. In particular, the decision to pay attention probably only pays off if others are also paying attention, so it is easy to see that there may be a coordination failure at this preliminary stage. In that case we would see no change in their willingness to participate and no change in outcomes.

> 10 At least in the case of information about learning levels, treatment 2 was designed to help ensure community members understood the information by including them in its generation.

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