There’s something haunting South Asian schools: “ghost teachers.” These aren’t the specters of teachers past. They’re fictitious teachers, who exist only on paper to misappropriate education funds, or they’re real teachers who rarely show up to their jobs. In July, internal records from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education revealed that 1,100 schools were receiving funding for ghost teachers’ salaries — funding that poured in from USAID’s $769 million program to improve Afghani education. Though tracing the money that disappears into these schools is difficult, local officials in Afghanistan claim that US educational funds have gone into the pockets of warlords and even the Taliban.
Corruption in Afghanistan may not come as much of a surprise, but the country is far from the only one in the developing world afflicted by teacher absenteeism. In India, Kenya, and Uganda, the average teacher fails to show up to one out of every four days. By contrast, New York State teachers are absent one out of every twenty days. But teacher absenteeism in the developing world has much more severe ramifications than teacher absenteeism in the United States. Especially in rural areas of the developing world, when a teacher is absent, there is no substitute teacher and no school. Students simply walk home with little more than some unintended exercise. While countries across the globe struggle with high teacher absenteeism for different reasons, unaccountability — whether due to union power, government oversight, or corruption — is an important common denominator.
It’s tough to understate the effect that high teacher absenteeism has on students. The American Economic Review estimated that eliminating teacher absenteeism for a single year raised Indian students’ test scores by about one standard deviation. Given that policymakers generally consider a program that improves test scores by a tenth of a standard deviation to be worthy of investment, that’s a drastic finding. The effects of teacher absenteeism also extend far beyond test scores. There’s a strong consensus among economists that quality of education plays a major role in driving economic growth in developing countries. High rates of teacher absenteeism in a country correlate strongly with low average incomes, and there’s little doubt that the poor educational outcomes that absent teachers generate depress students’ future incomes. Furthermore, teacher corruption discourages government investment in education from both domestic and foreign sources. In particular, this inefficiency also deters international aid, since wealthy countries cannot condone the misappropriation of foreign aid money when there are so many worthy programs in need of funding.
These problems have been particularly apparent in India, where government teachers wield outsized union power. In India, 22 cents from every government dollar invested in education go toward paying absent teachers, with teachers siphoning off educational funds to the tune of $2 billion annually. Much of this behavior is facilitated by unions like the All India Federation of Teachers’ Organizations (AIFTO) and School Teacher’s Federation of India, which unify all teachers’ organizations across the country into massive federations.
These unions use their size to exert massive political power and have helped make ghost teachers a persistent problem in India’s schools. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, teachers account for 12 to 24 percent of the membership in the Legislative Council. With this bloated political power, government teachers have been able to command salaries three to eight times what private and contracted teachers in comparable Indian schools receive. Disturbingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, teachers’ salaries are not conditional upon results. The Indian government does not dock teacher salaries for unexcused absences, and the recourse against teachers for absence, tardiness, or misuse of school time remains toothless. In a survey of 3,000 headmasters of pub-lic schools across India, only one reported ever firing a teacher due to absenteeism. The most common punitive action against teachers shirking work — which has only been taken by a paltry 0.5 percent of head-masters — was reassigning the absent teach-er to a less desirable school. This “paid if you do, paid if you don’t” privilege has hurt Indian students’ test scores. The average pupil of a unionized teacher scores roughly a quarter of a standard deviation below those taught by a nonunion teacher.
However, union power cannot explain all teacher absenteeism. While Indian teachers miss one out of every four days, Indian factory workers, who are also protected by firm labor laws, miss only one out of every ten. This discrepancy may arise from a lack of teacher oversight. While factory workers face the social pressure of managers and coworkers, some teachers, particularly those in rural areas, can miss work without drawing the ire of any supervisor. Like that in many developing countries, India’s education system is highly centralized. State governments employ teachers and foot the bill for schools but simply do not have the resources necessary to monitor thousands of schools, especially in rural areas. That responsibility falls to the principals at government schools — or rather, it would fall to principals if they did not typically have even higher absence rates than the teachers they oversee.
To its credit, the government is well-aware of its inability to properly monitor schools and it has tried to improve the situation, to no avail. In the 2005 draft of India’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), government officials tried to decentralize schools by requiring that government schools report to School Management Committees (SMC) — local groups of parents and community members, similar to a school board, with the power to distribute and deduct teacher salaries based on attendance. But AIFTO General Secretary Dharam Vijay Pandit denounced the provision, stating that, “SMC members may not have the least [bit of] knowledge of [the] education system in the country. We feel that it would result in corruption in the functioning of schools.” When RTE finally passed in 2009, the SMCs had been stripped of all punitive power.
The corruption Pandit alluded to is certainly endemic to school operations, and it starts at the beginning of a teacher’s career. Since the turn of the century, India has suffered numerous reports of favoritism in the teacher appointment process, including one chief minister who forged documents to appoint 3,206 teachers in the state of Haryana. Some teachers have bribed officials to receive favorable school postings and transfers. But while these examples are egregious and certainly hurt the country’s quality of education, India’s largest source of educational corruption remains teacher absenteeism.
Though often attributed to laziness, the forces behind absenteeism are often more complex. One study found that the difference between schools with the worst infrastructure and the best infrastructure correlated with a 10 percent reduction in absences. While a lack of basic necessities, such as electricity or running water can certainly frustrate teachers, these areas are also often those most in need of education. The forces of absenteeism can also be predatory. Primary school teachers have been known to privately tutor their pupils for a fee, an unethical practice that encourages teacher absenteeism in order to drive up demand. When teachers can receive private tutoring fees from their own students, they can withhold school lessons to coerce students into paying for private ones. This creates a conflict of interest for teachers: They can either teach children in school or make extra cash.
In response to India’s dismal public school system, a booming private school industry has emerged. Today, 31 percent of Indian children attend private schools — almost double the proportion from a decade ago. Parents often prefer the curricula of these schools; unlike government schools, private schools often teach in English and focus more on learning than rote drilling. Teacher absenteeism has played an important role in the success of Indian private schools. Private school teachers are 8 percentage points less likely to be absent than government teachers. This lower absence rate might arise from the fact that private school teachers are far more likely to be fired. In the aforementioned survey of Indian headmasters, 35 of 600 private school headmasters had fired a teacher for repeated absences — compared to the singular public school administrator in the 3,000 surveyed. Despite the fact that private school teachers tend to generate higher test outcomes than public school teachers, they receive substantially lower salaries than government teachers. While this disincentives teachers from working at private schools, it does help the schools themselves succeed, as some private schools can charge as little as $2 per month.
Shifts in India’s education system have also originated outside the private sector. State governments have begun to invest more heavily in para-teachers — contract teachers that do not receive the same union protections as government teachers and may be hired on more flexible contracts. Para-teachers have lower qualification requirements and salaries than government teachers do, but the quality of education they provide is comparable, and they may actually improve student learning in some circumstances. As a result, state governments have drastically increased the number of para-teachers they hire. These teachers now account for an estimated 15 percent of all teachers in India. Unfortunately, both union and para-teachers suffer from similar rates of teacher absenteeism.
Luckily, technology has made it easier to monitor teachers. In 2003, researchers asked Indian para-teachers to take photos of the class at the beginning and end of the day using a tamper-proof camera. Teachers were paid on a sliding scale based on the number of days they were present to take photos. The results were phenomenal. Before the camera program, the schools’ teacher absence rate was 44 percent. After the camera program went into effect, that absence rate fell to 21 percent. Additionally, average test scores rose by 0.17 standard deviations compared to schools that did not receive the camera program. To sweeten the deal, the program cost only $2.20 per additional day of teacher attendance. This monitoring-and-incentives one-two punch is the full package: a scalable method to cut teacher absenteeism in half and increase test scores without breaking the bank.
Indian teachers’ unions are staunchly opposed to monitoring attendance. In 2013, when the state of Andhra Pradesh proposed introducing a biometric attendance system for school staff, the United Teachers’ Forum and Andhra Pradesh Teachers’ Association threatened an indefinite strike. The government’s move to increase attendance came in the wake of evidence that school teachers were skipping class to privately tutor students, work as insurance agents, and run small businesses. Nonetheless, the unions demanded that the government improve school facilities rather than monitor teachers. This past July, more than two and a half years after the initial proposal, the Andhra Pradesh Minister of Education confirmed that, despite union protests, the biometric attendance system would be installed in schools across the state.
Not all reforms have attracted union ire, however. In Western India, a computer-assisted learning program offered students two hours of computer time per week during which students could play educational games involving math. The computer program effectively took the place of a teacher in the classroom. Surprisingly, the computer actually outperformed teachers in improving test scores, leading to improvements in student math scores by 0.35 standard deviations over the course of a year. According to the study, “no teachers objected to the program, and many believed it was beneficial.” By planning around teacher absenteeism rather than trying to control it, the researchers were able to create a politically viable program to improve academic achievement and reduce the effects of teacher absenteeism without being stalled by the teachers’ unions. Similarly, an Indian program that removed lagging students from government school classrooms to attend two-hour long remedial classes with a community member raised struggling students’ test scores by 0.14 standard deviations. Even this program, which teachers initially met with some hesitation, was increasingly well-received among faculty, as teachers realized that the program took some of the struggling children out of their classrooms. These and other similar programs provide politically feasible solutions to reduce the negative effects of teacher absenteeism by treating teacher absenteeism as a given, at least in the short term.
While India has moved toward using technology to work around teacher absenteeism, other countries have taken more direct and even militaristic approaches. Like India, Pakistan suffered from a high rate of teacher absenteeism during the 1990s. In an effort to combat the issue, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered Pakistan’s army to search 56,000 primary schools throughout the country’s largest province in a hunt to identify ghost schools. When the project came to an end, the army had uncovered over 4,500 bogus schools and 20,453 fake teachers. In its efforts to reduce teacher absenteeism, the Punjab government took a number of steps: firing thousands of absent teachers, instituting a new salary payment process to better track education spending, and merging dysfunctional schools to allow for closer monitoring. Imran Masood, a provincial education minister who helped lead the charge, describes the period as a “cleansing session of the education department.” It worked: The Pakistani government has since cut teacher absenteeism from 20 percent in 1997 to around 10 percent in 2011.
Of course, military engagement doesn’t account for all of this change. Pakistan has also undertaken a number of softer initiatives to curb teacher absenteeism, including introducing a biometric attendance system like the one mooted in India. Either way, Pakistan’s methods and results — while far from a drag-and-drop remedy for its South Asian neighbors — do provide hope that other developing countries can also win the battle against ghost teachers.
Nevertheless, that hope can only continue if states and foreign entities demand accountability from their education systems. In 2012, the United States laid the final brick of the Deh-e-Bagh Primary School in Afghanistan’s Dand district. According to military records, the nine-room schoolhouse was furnished with latrines and protected by a wall, and the building served as a “tangible source of community pride and legitimacy.” But the school was only as tangible as a ghost can be. Deh-e-Bagh never had a latrine or a wall — it never even had a student. Paralyzed by local corruption, the project slowly faded away, along with the nearly $100,000 in Pentagon funding that had gone into making it. Today, roughly 50 children study in a small mosque across from this empty school. But these children don’t need Ghostbusters — they need transparency.
Art by Alyssa Schulman