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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). (Contains 4 figures and 11 tables.)

We analyze educational attainment over three generations in rural Punjab, Pakistan, to determine if the fruits of post-independence development have translated into comparable rates of educational and social opportunities for all strata in the village economy. We show that the differences in class status institutionalized at the time of colonial village settlement lead to a sustained divergence in the rate of intergenerational educational mobility, with limited mobility for nonproprietary and marginalized groups compared to proprietary groups. Inter-class differences in the rate of mobility are higher in proprietary landed estates where the colonial state had concentrated land rights and governance in the hands of landowners compared to crown estates that had a more egalitarian arrangement of land rights and governance. We find that the divergence in inter-class mobility is worrying, so much so that the current generation of marginalized households appears to have fallen a generation behind in terms of educational attainment, even though it resides in the same villages as the proprietary households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]