Though India has recently experienced a tremendous financial boom, and its universities are consistently climbing up the international rankings, the elementary education system is still languishing far behind. About 65% of children from second to fifth grade are unable to read a simple paragraph of text, and over half the children were unable to properly complete a division problem.

One of the main problems in the elementary education system is the absence of teachers from classes. When researchers conducted a survey among 3,000 schools, they discovered that teachers were only present in class about 65% of the time, and of all 3,000 schools only one reported a teacher who was fired due to absences.

When a plan of encouragement and supervision was proposed to the government, the researchers were met with a highly detailed objection: teachers who don’t want to teach won’t do so, even if they’re forced to come, meaning – this is the human material at our disposal and we have to make do with what we have. To test these claims, researchers Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna and Stephen Ryan joined the “Saba Mandir” organization in the Udaipur region of India, which operates informal schools where hired teachers teach about 20 children Hindi and basic mathematics. The absence rate among teachers at the organization’s schools was 44%.
One of the major problems in the elementary education system is the absence of teachers from classes. When researchers conducted a survey among 3,000 schools, they discovered that teachers were only present in class about 65% of the time.
The teachers were randomly divided into two groups: the experiment conditions in which intervention was conducted and the control conditions, where nothing was changed. The teachers allocated to the experiment conditions received cameras from the researchers which time-stamped the date and time, and were asked to take pictures with the students at the start and end of each school day. The teachers were promised a base salary of 500 rupees, and 50 additional rupees for each of the 21 school days they documented using the camera.

The teachers in the control conditions were told that if the time differential between the morning photo and the end-of-day photo was less than five hours, their wages for the day would be calculated accordingly. The teachers in the experiment group could accumulate a total salary of 1,300 rupees, 300 more than the standard wages of teachers, like those selected for the control group.
Teachers’ attendance in the experiment group versus the control group.
The results exceeded expectations, as attendance among the teachers of the experiment group leapt up to 79% versus a mere 58% among the control group teachers What this meant for the children was 34 more school days each year. When the implications for educational continuity in the schools were examined, it became clear that in the experiment group 36% of the teachers were present for over 90% of the school days, versus a single teacher in the control group…

Simultaneously, the researchers conducted supervision to ensure that these were not teachers who reported to school in order to win the prize money without actually teaching. Surprise visits indicated that teachers who consistently arrived chose to teach during the added days. You could see the positive influence of intervention in the students’ achievements as well – their grades improved by 0.17 above the standard deviation, and their chances of being accepted to national schools improved by 62%. Though the pilot was only meant to prove its feasibility, the program was among the best cost-benefit programs dealing with the phenomenon of teachers’ absences. The cost of each additional day of studies per child was translated to a mere 11 cents.
The choice not to come to class was, as with most decisions, influenced by an array of circumstances and considerations, minor and major, and all that was required to tilt the scale in favor of the desired choice was light encouragement.
The field experiment proved that sometimes all that is needed is light encouragement to do the right thing. Had the teachers chosen to be absent for so many days intentionally, one might assume the need to take pictures with students would not have caused them to invest further efforts in the teaching itself during those days. The choice not to come to class was, as with most decisions, influenced by an array of circumstances and considerations, minor and major, and all that was required to tilt the scale in favor of the desired choice was light encouragement.

In another experiment, the researchers distributed journals to the students, asking them to briefly summarize what they were taught during the day. Their parents were briefed to make notes in the journal for every day they reviewed the class material for that day. The purpose of the intervention was to report to the parents regarding days when the teacher was absent, and thus encourage the teachers to be more present. But surprisingly, monitoring the journals had no influence on teacher absences. At the same time, even if the intervention did not manage to reduce the phenomenon of teacher absences, parents were more satisfied because the journals made them feel involved in the education of their children.