evaluation also focuses on public primary rural schools – public because this evaluation was designed by the Ministry, which has the authority over public schools,<sup>20</sup> and rural because the majority of schools in the country are in rural or semi-rural areas, and it was hypothesized that accountability would be easier to engender in smaller, closer-knit areas.

So, from two provinces, nine districts and primary schools, the sampling frame was further restricted by excluding subdistricts containing fewer than eight villages,<sup>21</sup> schools with extremely good or bad average sixth grade examination scores in mathematics or Indonesian,<sup>22</sup> and schools with parallel classes in grade four.<sup>23</sup> We used a two stage sampling procedure, first drawing 44 subdistricts and then 520 schools. Each potential sample school in the pool had an equal probability of being sampled. No more than one school was drawn for each village, to reduce the risk of spill over between interventions.<sup>24</sup> In drawing the school sample, we ensured that the sample was balanced with schools with low, medium and high grade six leaving exam scores across interventions in each cell. The resulting sample of 520 schools was randomly allocated to interventions according to Table 1.<sup>25</sup> A disproportionate share of the sample was allocated to the cells receiving nothing or just the block grant, in order to be able to separately identify the effect of the block grant. The training intervention was made slightly smaller than the non-training cells because training is a relatively costly intervention.

The baseline survey took place in January 2007, midline in April 2008, and the endline survey in October 2008, as shown in Table 2.<sup>26</sup> Tests in mathematics and Indonesian, designed by MoNE, were administered to all students in grade four at baseline and six at endline.<sup>27</sup> Survey questions center around hypothesized

> 20 MoNE supplies some support to private schools, but has direct oversight over public schools.

> 21 This restriction was imposed because in the initial design, facilitated meetings with sub-district government education officials were envisioned, and too few villages per meeting would make this intervention ineffective. However, this idea was never implemented, making the restriction unnecessary.

> 22 That meant those with the grade six average student scores below four or above eight. School-level score data obtained from MoNE.

> 23 Parallel classes are grades with more than one section or teacher. This restriction was imposed because the evaluation was not planning on assigning student IDs or ensuring that the student population was identical over time. With only one class per grade, and low dropout and repetition rates, the evaluation team was confident that the same children interviewed in grade four would be in grade six two years later. However, this actually became an issue, since several schools merged, but the team was able to match student names, see below.

> 24 The sampling probability was increased accordingly for schools that were located in villages with more than one school to keep the probability of being sampled equal across schools.

> 25 Random allocation conducted by authors.

26 The survey was conducted by a Moores Roland, a survey firm by MoNE. Five out of 520 schools were not included in the endline survey. Two schools merged, and one school refused interview. In two other schools, the implementer implemented the treatment in schools different than those surveyed in the baseline, so the team felt it unnecessary to survey non-randomly selected schools for which there was no baseline information.. In addition, there were some difficulties with non-response in some of the schools, so we have complete information on 508 schools and partial information on seven schools.

> 27 In the original sample selection, schools with multiple parallel classes were excluded (so all sample schools started out with one grade 4 class), and thus we did not assign student IDs; but in the endline survey, it was discovered that several schools had more than one grade six class, due to schools merging.  We only have data on the number of

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