teachers should be renewed, recruiting new hires, and allocating the additional resources for improvement that the school receives under the SSA). However, while the VEC itself is a small group, we argue that the three parent members of the VEC could not have real control without the active backing of a large number of other parents. In this sense the VEC model in India is one of direct and indirect control exercised by a large group.

The opportunity to do these experiments arose because by 2005, more than four years after SSA was launched, it was clear that at least in the Jaunpur district of the state of UP, the VEC was not playing its assigned role. A survey of children, parents, and teachers in 280 villages in that district found that while most villages did have a VEC, very few parents knew of its existence, sometimes even when they were supposed to be members of it. VEC members were also unaware of even the most important responsibilities that they have been assigned under the SSA: hiring of additional teachers, allocation of school resources, and monitoring of performance. At the same time the state of education in these villages bordered on the disastrous: 15 percent of children age 7 to 14 could not recognize a letter; only 39 percent could read and understand a simple story (of grade 1 level); 38 percent could not recognize numbers. Yet parents, teachers, and VEC members were often unaware of the scale of the problem and tended to overestimate what children in the village really knew (Banerjee et al. 2006).

Given that the VECs were extant everywhere, but almost entirely non-functional, the study design did not introduce new institutions, but instead promoted greater information and mobilization around the existing ones, and measured whether that led to greater involvement and, ultimately, improved school functioning and learning outcomes. The basic strategy adopted involved a set of three interventions designed and implemented by Pratham, India’s most prominent educational NGO, with the goal of mobilizing the VECs and the community more generally around a program of educational improvement. The interventions that Pratham implemented were designed after several months of piloting in the area. There was a conscious attempt to be sensitive to the specificities of the local environment (in particular the constraints and opportunities resulting from the existing policies of the state government), to follow the available best practice guidelines for community engagement (World Bank, 1996, 2001), and to streamline the design for replicability and external validity.

One presumption behind the program was that lack of relevant knowledge was a factor holding back participatory action. It was clear from the baseline survey that community members did not know what they were entitled to, what they were actually getting, and how they could put pressure on the providers—all of which are critical for participation to be effective (Jenkins and Goetz, 1999; Goetz and Jenkins, 2001; Paul, 1987). A second element in the Pratham’s program design was the need (if participation was to be a reality) to involve more people with the state of education in the village, particularly on learning outcomes, and to turn that interest into some form of coordinated action.

All three interventions shared a basic structure: Pratham activists spent several days in a village facilitating small group discussions in each of the village’s neighborhoods and inviting those neighborhood groups to a large village-wide meeting. These large village-wide meetings were the culmination of the whole process and were also attended by teachers and members of the village administration. In the simplest of the three interventions using this format, village administrators shared information about the structure and organization of local service delivery, especially the role and activities of the VECs. The meetings were followed by the distribution of pamphlets that described the various roles sand responsibilities of VEC members and training of individual VEC members. The second treatment provided this information and, in addition, trained community members to administer a simple reading test for children, and invited 4