Policy discourses posit an accountability deficit as an underlying cause of a “learning crisis” in many low-income countries. Many studies understand this perceived deficit from a principal-agent perspective, arguing that incentives facing teachers and schools often do not align to the interests of parents and students. Such perspectives underlie many randomized controlled trials, which associate interventions with outcomes, but which also produce varying or inconsistent results across contexts. This paper seeks to study the accountability of schools and teachers more directly, looking at how it varies across public and private schools and how it relates to students’ literacy and numeracy abilities. We report results from a mixed methods study conducted in Mumbai and Kathmandu. Our results show that there are some relationships between accountability and learning outcomes, but these appear to be specific to the context. Quantitative data also show that differences between public and private models of schooling are negligible when students’ social backgrounds and school composition are considered. Qualitative data show that accountability processes create a significant burden on staff time and embed complex power dynamics that are not always productive. Taken together, these results problematize policies that seek to improve learning through “demand-side” approaches such as privatization. They show that the dynamics of accountability are a complex system, like the motion of a "double pendulum," and therefore simple conceptual approoaches such as the principal-agent model are of limited academic and practical utility.

政策讨论将问责制赤字视为许多低收入国家“学习危机”的根本原因。许多研究从委托代理的角度理解这种感知缺陷，认为教师和学校面临的激励措施往往与家长和学生的利益不一致。这种观点是许多随机对照试验的基础，这些试验将干预措施与结果联系起来，但也会在不同背景下产生不同或不一致的结果。本文旨在更直接地研究学校和教师的问责制，研究它在公立和私立学校之间的差异，以及它与学生的识字和算术能力的关系。我们报告了在孟买和加德满都进行的混合方法研究的结果。我们的结果表明，问责制和学习成果之间存在一些关系，但这些关系似乎是特定于上下文的。定量数据还表明，在考虑学生的社会背景和学校构成时，公立和私立学校教育模式之间的差异可以忽略不计。定性数据表明，问责流程对员工时间造成了重大负担，并嵌入了并不总是富有成效的复杂权力动态。总之，这些结果使寻求通过私有化等“需求方”方法改善学习的政策问题化。他们表明问责制的动态是一个复杂的系统，就像“双摆”的运动一样，