Transforming public schools: Impact of the CRI program on child learning in Pakistan

This paper evaluates the impact of teaching innovations, introduced in public primary schools under the Children Resources International (CRI) Program, on student outcomes. We estimate students’ learning based on their scores on standardized tests. We match schools and children within the treatment and comparison group and find that the CRI Program has been effective in raising learning achievement. Moreover, the results are robust to unobserved selection bias. The average gain for a CRI student represents an improvement of 0.40 standard deviations. The results stay unchanged when we use alternative estimators for the treatment effect including the bias-corrected estimator proposed by Abadie and Imbens (2006).