Public Participation in School Management as a Catalytic agent for the Enhancement of Education Quality

Abstract

The right to education is not only indicating the right to access to education but also emphasizing the right to quality education. To improve the quality of education, World Bank and other donor agencies introduced the need of community involvement in school management system in achieving the right to education. Thus, multiple reform programs initiated based on community involvement known as school-Based Management (SBM) or School Management Committee (SMC). Given this, to improve the quality education, many countries initiated multiple reform programs and indicated the need of community involvement through community-school partnership.  Therefore, in Pakistan, like other provinces, Sindh has also formed School Management Committee (SMC). This study is an attempt to evaluate the impact of community involvement i.e. SMC on quality of education in Sindh province, Pakistan. For the analysis, the study has used Sindh Education Management Information System (SEMIS) database for the year 2013-14. To evaluate the impact of SMC intervention, the study has constructed different measures of quality education such as school environment index, teacher’s resource index, promotion rate, repetition rate, and dropout rate. Further, the study has also assessed the quality of matching based on different measures of matching quality. Since the study has selected those schools of Sindh in which SMC is functional. Hence, to control the problem of self-selection bias, the study has used a semi-parametric propensity score matching technique (PSM). The overall findings of the study provide useful insights and reveals that the establishment of SMC has positive and significant impact on access to school and quality of school measures except the one i.e. student’s dropout rate. The study recommends that an impact evaluation is one of the best ways to provide evidence-based useful insights for the policymakers to improve educational outcomes for future generations.