school with bottom-decile PTR benefits from investment in teacher salaries of MWK28,620 per year of schooling, versus just MWK8,434 in schools in the highest decile.

Given other restrictions in facilities, additional teachers in these low-PTR schools offer very little benefit to learning. With the majority of Malawi’s schools lacking sufficient classrooms, rather than allowing smaller classes, the additional teachers typically engage in team-based teaching, with one teaching students while others prepare lessons or simply wait on-site. Reducing the extent of this variation in PTR, by relocating teachers from relatively overstaffed to severely understaffed schools, could reduce the number of overstaffed schools considerably.

This large variation in PTR contributes to Malawi’s poor outcomes in student retention and learning. The significant proportion of schools which are relatively overstaffed, even in overall conditions of teacher shortage, mean that education investment is translated only very inefficiently into student learning. Only 31 percent of primary school students graduate; statistically speaking, the primary system would require 23 years to produce one graduate, versus eight years under efficient conditions. Even those who complete primary education in Malawi lag far behind other countries in regional examinations administered to Grade 6 students for English, Mathematics, and Sciences. In the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) assessment, Malawi scored the lowest in 2013: 494 in Reading and 522 in Mathematics, against average scores among participating countries of 558 and 584 respectively.

Why have conditions of inequitable and inefficient allocation of teachers persisted? The failure of efforts to distribute teachers equitably has its roots in the low quality of administrative systems for teacher management. Surprisingly, given the high level of investment in teachers, the system has incomplete and inconsistent information on the physical whereabouts of its most expensive assets, teachers, and almost no ability to monitor their presence in school or classrooms. Significant inconsistencies exist between the various databases of teacher postings used by local and national government.

In this paper, we argue that the weakness and fragmentation of administrative data in Malawi contributes to the maintenance of staffing disparities by enabling political capture of the system by political interests, particularly teachers’ interests. In an efficient system, with adequate and widely accepted data on school conditions and staffing, policies can be designed to accurately target teachers to the schools with greatest need. In the absence of accurate and up-to-date information in Malawi, policies governing teacher placement remain broad ‘rules of thumb’, leaving officials with a high degree of _discretion_ in decision-making.

The concept of discretion in administrative and bureaucratic contexts has its roots in administrative law. Broadly defined, the term refers to the space allotted by rules and procedures for officials to make, alter, or enact policies (Koch, 1986). In a situation of high bureaucratic autonomy, allowing officials a reasonable amount of discretion can be appropriate to enable them to take proper account of individual circumstances. However, in conditions of neo-patrimonial politics, where bureaucratic autonomy is low, greater discretion can create opportunity for officials to respond to pressure and enable political capture of the system without any visible breach of agreed rules. Ferraz (2007), analyzing the approval of environmental licenses in Brazil, found evidence that local bureaucrats were subject to significant political capture leading to increases in approval of 4