Improving children's foundational learning through community-school participation: Experimental evidence from rural India

•Community and community-school interventions exhibit a positive impact on the foundational reading and math skills.•The impact of the interventions is more pronounced for those who completely lack foundational skills.•Children whose parents were more actively involved in their education benefited more, particularly in the community-school intervention.•Our study makes a contribution to decentralization of governance to local entities and the potential of parent-teacher involvement. Due to almost-universal enrolment in primary schools, policy focus has shifted towards improving learning outcomes. One important way of doing this is to enhance accountability, especially in the case of public provision of education. In this context, we examine the effectiveness of two different strategies of increasing accountability – one involving only the community, and the other which builds collaboration between the schools and the community. We implement a randomized controlled trial in 400 villages in India, and find: (i) both interventions led to a significant enhancement in children's foundational literacy and numeracy skills, (ii) we observed limited differences between the impacts of the two interventions, and (iii) the community-school intervention exhibited significantly greater effects when parents reported visiting the school, underscoring the vital role of parent-teacher interactions and their shared responsibility in shaping children's learning outcomes. In terms of mechanism, we find that direct learning inputs play a major role in mediating the observed effects of both interventions. Additionally, parent-teacher engagement and children's studying habits outside of the school are potential important channels through which the observed effects operate in the community-school intervention.