Mathematics, and English.<sup>9</sup> The test was developed one year before it was administered and piloted extensively in rural and urban schools (Andrabi and others, 2002, for the test validation and documentation).<sup>10</sup> Two members of the LEAPS team monitored students during testing, and the children’s teacher was not allowed in the same room. Finally, for a sub-sample of 10 randomly selected children in every school, we also completed a child questionnaire with basic information about the child’s parents, ownership of certain assets, the distance to school and the number of siblings. We thus have test scores in three subjects for over 12,000 and combined testscores and child characteristics for 6,241 children.

The sample of children is representative of children enrolled in third grade in a village with a private school in Punjab.<sup>11</sup> In 2000, 30 percent of all villages in Punjab province (and 50 percent of the population, since private schools disproportionately locate in larger villages) satisfied this restriction; it is likely that this has increased by another 10 percentage points by 2005. The particular strategy affords several advantages, in that we are able to compare performance across schools _in the same village_ , and therefore understand the extent to which learning is driven by school-related factors that vary across villages and across schools in the same village.

# **3.2. India**

The comparison sample from India is based on data from 31 districts in Uttar Pradesh and 9 districts in Madhya Pradesh (Table 3). Within each district, one “block” (several blocks comprise a district) was chosen randomly and within each block, five “Gram Panchayats” (henceforth GP) were chosen randomly.<sup>12</sup> The choice of districts was purposive, rather than random and sought to examine the effect of past institutions on the quality of public services delivered (Pandey 2005). A second set of districts were those that lay on either side of the border of MP and UP.

> 9 Children from Grade 3 were chosen so that we could follow them for 2 years (till the end of Grade 5) before the transition to middle and secondary schooling. Since there are fewer government middle and secondary school, this often means that children study outside the village, which makes the construction of a panel of test-scores on the same children a daunting task.

10 The test used the K-V curriculum as a starting point but did not use the K-V textbooks for the test-design. In the pilot, we noticed that children could verbatim repeat paragraphs from a textbook “as-if” they were reading them; in fact they were not—through the year, they had memorized the paragraph verbatim from the textbook. The test-design used here thus tests the curricular concepts developed by the Ministry of Education.

> 11 Punjab is economically and educationally the most dynamic province in the country with systematically higher enrollments, lower dropouts and greater income than households in other provinces. Within Punjab, villages with private schools tend to be larger, more educated and wealthier than those without (Table 2). 12 A gram panchayat (GP) is an administrative unit between a block and a revenue village. A GP comprises 2-3 revenue villages on average and the local village level government is formed at the GP level.

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