The effect of ratio between PTA teachers and Government employed teachers on Education outcomes in Kenya Primary Schools

Do locally hired teachers benefit pupils f school achievements more than governmental employed teachers? This is the question to examine in this paper. Although social experiment results have shown that the marginal product in terms of test score is positive and significant when pupils are taught by PTA teachers, it is not yet known about the grelative h effectiveness between government teacher and locally hired teachers. This paper is going to find whether the PTA teacher ratio (the ratio of locally hired PTA teachers against total number of teachers in one primary school) has statistically significant explanatory power on pupil test score, after controlling various factors. In Republic of Kenya (below referred as Kenya), there are two types of teachers teaching in public primary schools. One is those teachers employed by the government and the other is those hired by the local school community, named gPTA teacher h. Although wage level for PTA teachers in public primary schools in Kenya is one fourth of that of government teachers, school outcomes of pupils taught by locally hired contract teachers are higher than those of pupils taught in controlled group schools, according to the result of social experiment (Duflo et al. 2012). This paper will examine, by using nationally representing observational data, to estimate the relative effect of PTA teachers on school outcome. In the end, by using Propensity Score Matching Estimation method, the result shows that the effect of PTA teacher ratio is positive and significant on school test score in all three subjects for lower standard grade pupils except Kernel and Radius matching and in Kiswahili subject for all seven different matching algorisms, though the magnitude of coefficient is relatively small. Although background mechanism of this finding is not solely determined, this paper is to assume that the effort level of PTA teacher in teaching tends to be higher than that of governmental teachers, based on several reasons.