Teacher Input Non-Fungibility

In Simple Words

Unlike books or pencils, highly specialized human inputs—such as additional classroom teachers or structured student tracking—cannot be easily purchased or replicated by individual parents at home. Providing an extra teacher is like expanding a municipal power grid: individual households cannot build their own neighborhood power plant, so the public addition directly expands total capacity without private offset.

Research question

Providing fungible material grants leads to severe household expenditure substitution and zero net learning gains, leaving governments uncertain about which school inputs reliably increase learning over multi-year horizons.

Participants

Representative sample of government primary schools in rural Andhra Pradesh, India across 500 evaluation schools.

Study Design

Multi-year randomized controlled trial comparing material block grants ($3/student) against extra contract teacher allocations over two academic years.

Results

Extra contract teacher provision yielded persistent learning gains over two years where two-year cumulative test score gains were twice as large as single-year gains (p < 0.01), contrasting with material block grants where Year 2 gains fell to 0.02 SD.

Takeaway

Direct public education investments toward high-skill human capital and structural classroom organization rather than easily substitutable consumer materials.

Read alongside the research

Plain-English glossary

Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.

Randomized controlled trial

A study that uses chance, like drawing lots, to decide who receives each option being compared. Researchers compare the groups’ outcomes to estimate the effect of those options.

ExampleA lottery assigns volunteers to a training programme or a comparison group. Researchers then compare their outcomes.

GET-IT glossary · Randomized study ↗Read more about randomized controlled trial →

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