Supporting teachers for better student outcomes in Rwanda

In Rwanda, reading levels among 2.5 million primary-school enrollees are slightly below average of Sub-Saharan African (Angrist et al., 2021) and 46% of fourth-grade students do not meet third grade expectations in numeracy (Republic of Rwanda, 2012). Gaps in learning are particularly large in low-income school districts with difference in learning levels having an impact far beyond the classroom and accounting for between 20-50% of income differences across countries (Angrist et al., 2021).

Teachers are key to student raising learning outcomes and central to addressing this learning crisis. However, in Rwanda 20% of primary schools teachers resign every year and low salaries exacerbate skill shortages (World Bank and Government of Rwanda, 2019). Thus, government capacity to recruit, motivate, and retain effective teachers is crucial to the goal of raising student learning outcomes.

A growing body of evidence suggests that when offered at the individual-teacher level and designed to incentivize student learning, teacher performance contracts are an evidence-based innovation that have enhanced student learning outcomes in contexts from India (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2011; Muralidharan 2012) to Israel (Lavy, 2009) to Tanzania (Mbiti et al., 2019) to Uganda (Gilligan et al., forthcoming).

In Rwanda, the scale-up of this approach relies on rigorous evidence drawn from a randomized controlled trial conducted in partnership with the Rwanda Education Board (Leaver et al., 2021). In this model, the pay-for-performance contracts were based on a combination of three measures of teachers’ classroom inputs: their attendance, their preparation and their pedagogy. The results showed that teacher performance contracts delivered annual learning gains equivalent to an additional year of status-quo learning (Crawfurd, 2021), accompanied by improvements in teacher presence and classroom pedagogy.

The STARS scale-up leverages Rwanda’s existing teacher management system, which already includes a performance-based teacher payments model –the “imihigo” – which did not reward teacher’s efforts optimally, and student learning assessment system.

To assess its heterogeneous impacts at scale, a base model and five contract variations were successfully tested:

• Model A: The components of the base model included measurement of teachers’ “Five Ps”: (1) Presence in the classroom, (2) Preparation of lesson plans, (3) Pedagogy, (4) Participation in Comprehensive Assessment Management Information System (CAM-MIS), and (5) Pupil learning.
• Models B1 to B5: These models build on the base model by incorporating additional elements such as subjective assessments of teachers’ performance by the head teachers, regular performance feedback, tiered bonus systems, enhanced auditing of students assessments and incentives for head teachers. The overall rational is to enhance teacher motivation and improve the accuracy of performance metrics.