with teachers, and the linkage with school principals and teachers. The training intervention showed the least significant effects, a finding consistent with the lack of impact found on learning outcomes; while the largest totals were with linkage and linkage+election interventions, suggesting that the significant effects indeed indicate a pathway towards learning. Surprisingly we find the smallest share of significant effects for the school committee, which was the focus of the pilot.

# _School committee and community support for education (Tables 10-13)_

Here we examine whether any of the interventions has an effect on school committee activities, engagement with the community and perceptions of effectiveness, by the principal, teachers and school committee representatives.<sup>33</sup> First we look at whether the school committee improves interaction and outreach, specifically meetings (e.g., with members only, principals, parents, district or sub-district education offices, village council, teachers), shown in Table 10. Naturally, the number of meetings does not indicate the _quality_ of interactions among stakeholders, but the quantity is at least the first step in improving interaction. On average, school committee meetings with most stakeholders increase, corroborating analysis from midterm data that the grant funds were primarily used for meetings.<sup>34</sup> However, only the grant intervention has a significant effect on the summary index, with individual effects demonstrated for internal meetings (increase by 0.95 meetings) and those with the local education office (increase by 0.32 meetings). Interestingly, with the linkage interventions, meetings initiated by the local education office actually declined significantly, suggesting that the local education office may have pulled back as a result of greater school engagement with a more decentralized administrative body.

While grant and to a certain extent linkage help explain school committee interactions, election interventions improve perceptions of school committee effectiveness, especially by teachers, indicating that the democratic election improves legitimacy (Table 11). The school committee effectiveness summary index is significantly positive for election, linkage+election and training+election, as it is for teachers‟ perceptions of school committee effectiveness. Training in combination with elections makes the effect stronger than the effect of just election alone. However, while perceptions by teachers improve, they are not echoed by principals and school committee representatives. Across all interventions, principals don't report any expansion of school

> 33 We were not able to use the variable on parents‟ perceptions of school committee effectiveness due to high numbers of don't know responses. We added the percent of parents being able to answer this question to the composite parents' awareness of school committee, and  saw no change from any intervention.

> 34 Midterm spending data indicate that on average 43 percent of the grant is used for meetings, which is the plurality of the spending. The second largest category is “other” at 28 percent, followed by 7 percent for extracurricular activities, and four percent for improving school buildings.

18