An Analysis of Urban-Rural Differences in School Effectiveness:

The Case of Ugandan Primary Education

抄録

  In recent years, the promotion of regional equity in developing countries has become an important topic for both researchers and policy makers. In Uganda, this policy issue is particularly important because the country is currently plagued by wide regional inequalities in income and living standards. Moreover, one of the most important factors that explained regional inequality in income welfare was found to be inequality in educational attainment. In the primary education subsector, the rapid expansion in enrolment following the launch of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy in 1997 posed several challenges in quality and equity, including urban-rural inequality issues. Although these challenges in the primary education system have cast a shadow over the sustainability of high economic growth in the future, few studies have analyzed such inequality issues.

  This study explores school inputs that would effectively contribute to the reduction of the urban-rural gap in school performance in Ugandan public primary education. The following research questions are addressed: (1) What is the difference in the effect of school inputs on aggregate pupils’ learning achievement between urban and rural government schools? (2) In both urban and rural government schools, how does the effect of each school input on aggregate pupils’ learning achievement at different performance levels vary?

  The significance of this study is in its investigation of the urban-rural differences in school effectiveness and application of the estimation strategy, which takes into account the possibility that the effect of school inputs on output varied according to the school achievement level. The study applied OLS and quantile regression methods in building an analytical model, using Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) III data collected in 2007.

  One of the key findings from the study is that school inputs relating to the education level of the head teacher and handling of homework by classroom teachers have a significant and positive relationship with a school’s average test score only in rural government schools. Also, these two types of inputs have a significant effect only among the well-performing schools, with the effect size tending to increase when the school performance level goes up. These findings potentially suggest that interventions from government, such as deploying more qualified head teachers and improving teaching strategies of classroom teachers in rural government primary schools, might effectively reduce the urban-rural gap in primary school performance by improving the rural areas. However, the findings also suggest that the government needs to exercise care when supporting poorly performing schools in rural areas because simply increasing school inputs might not be able to raise student performance in target schools. Sufficient school equipment might have to be prioritized to bolster the most poorly performing of rural government schools. Furthermore, the practice of parents making additional contributions to supplement regular teacher salaries, which showed to be of significant positive effect, is observed only in urban government schools. This may suggest that financial support from parents is a determinant of school output in urban areas, even among government schools under the UPE policy.