Pre and post assessment of school management committee: A Pre and post assessment of school management committee: A case study of Sindh case study of Sindh

In Pakistan, the focus and concern of the educational planners and managers increasing interest in improving the school eﬃciency has shifted the attention from overall education system, particularly towards the functions of the schools. This study is an attempt to evaluate the causal impact of school-based management reform program namely school management committee (SMC) with a focus on Sindh province of Pakistan. Here, the study assesses the pre-post eﬀect of SMC on various indicators of access and quality of education such as student-ﬂow rates, school environment and teacher quality. Furthermore, for robustness analysis, the study assesses the regression model of DID method to estimate the impact of SMC on outcomes of interest. Finally, the study checks the balance of covariates used in the models at baseline. In order to conduct a pre-post analysis of SMC on quality measures of educational attainment, the study uses a sophisticated quasi-experimental technique known as standard diﬀerence-in-diﬀerences (DID). The ﬁndings of the standard DID model reveals that in Sindh, SMC has signiﬁcantly improved the quality of schools by providing a better and developed environment of the school. However, the negative impact of SMC on other two outcome measures of quality of education implies ineﬃciencies in the utilization of SMC funds. These funds usually spend on re-pairs and maintenance of school instead of focusing on enhancing the quality of education such as improvement in student-survival rate and decline in dropout rate. Moreover, the ﬁndings of the robustness check based on regression analysis of DID method ﬁnd similar estimates of SMC on all the outcome variables. Finally, the balance check of baseline covariates used in the analysis show that


Introduction
The national and international agencies have diverted funds towards education sector particularly with a focus in improving the quality of education.Given the objective of the program, there is a need to assess its impact on program effectiveness and efficiency in delivering the quality education.Thus the research question of the study is to evaluate the causal impact of school-based management reform program namely school management committee (SMC) with a focus on Sindh province of Pakistan.The objectives of the study are threefold.In first step, the study assesses the pre-post effect of SMC on various indicators of access and quality of education such as studentflow rates, school environment and teacher quality.The study uses school-level census data called Sindh Education Management Information Survey (SEMIS), collected by Reform Support Unit of government of Sindh.For this, the study employs 2004-5 as pre-intervention and 2013-14 as postintervention periods.However, the second step is based on robustness analysis, the study assesses the regression model of DID method to estimate the impact of SMC on outcome of interest.Finally, the study checks the balance of covariates used in the models as baseline.The DID design is an ideal technique for assessing the causal effect of SMC on quality of education.The findings of the standard DID model reveals that SMC has significantly improved the quality of school by developing the environment of the school.However, the significantly negative impact of SMC on other two outcome measures of quality of education implies inefficient utilization and delays in receiving the small amount of funds.The findings of the robustness check based on regression analysis of DID method find similar estimates of SMC on all the outcome variables.Finally, the balance check of baseline covariates used in the analysis show that covariates are balanced and their differences are different from zero for each outcome of interest.This study proposes the policy implications to make the procedure of SMC functional and effective.This includes improved student access to school, quality of teachers, monitoring, management, curriculum and financing of the program.
A vast literature though available on the topic, however the studies are mainly based on the international evidences however, In case of Pakistan only limited literature is available.Wing, et al. (2018) explained the technique of difference-in-differences (DID) technique, which is commonly used for the causal relationships in public health settings due to the infeasibility of randomized con-Business Review: (2023) 18(1):48-70 L. Naz, A.A, Qureshi, and F. Sohail trolled trials (RCTs) in such studies.The key focus of the study was to review the DID designs on public health policy research.Nasar and Kakar (2017) evaluated the impact of community involvement on students enrolment and dropout in the schools.For the analysis, the study has conducted primary survey based on purposive sampling through interviews of 40 respondents.The findings of the study revealed that the role of Parent-Teacher School Management Committees (PTSMCs) was significant through which the enrolment of the number of children who were out from the school increased and the study further found decline in students dropout rate.Conclusively, the study showed that the impact of community involvement has significant impact on overall quality of education.
The study conducted by King and Ozler (1998) found decentralization as a significant factor of institutional reform around the World.However, in education sector, decentralization can be seen in school: administration, revenue generation, curriculum design, and hiring and management of teachers.The policy which allows regional/municipal governments or school in decisions to these functions of schools is commonly known as school-based management (SBM), school based governance, school self-management and school management committee (SMC) (De Grauwe 2005), and Gertler et al 2012.The SBM reforms were initiated in Australia in 1970 and a growing number of countries decentralized their schools by adopting such technique for instance, Hong Kong (China), Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Nepal, Philippine and Paraguay and Mexico (World Bank, 2007).Various studies evaluated the impact of SBM and found ambiguous effects on quality of education.For instance, the studies conducted by (Guha 2022;Skoufias and Shapiro 2006;Gertler et al 2012;Sawada and Ragatz 2005) revealed that SBM improved the educational outcomes, while the study of (Bardhan 2002) argued that the impact of SBM worsen the quality of education particularly (weakest) schools.
In Pakistan, to improve the quality of education, multiple reform programs have been initiated and each province has played its role by introducing reform programs based on school interventions.In this context, the government of Sindh introduced a sector reform program for primary as well as secondary education known as the Sindh Education Sector Reform Program (SERP).Additionally, this program was financially supported by the World Bank during the Fiscal Year 2006/07 to 2011/12.The Second Sindh Education Sector Reform Program (SERP-II) was introduced to improve the quality of service delivery and to increase the students participation in schools.SMC is formed to provide a support to the head-teachers in order to deliver quality.education without any delay to the children, the monitoring of teachers attendance and performance in the classroom.Finally, SMC is also formed to improve the students performance by increasing the students enrolment and reducing the dropout from the school.Thus this study represents planning commissions PC-V, which is based on impact evaluation of an intervention (Government of Pakistan).
The study contributes to the existing empirical literature on the effectiveness of SMC in Sindh using school-level data for 2004-05 and 2013-14.For this, it evaluates the pre-post impact of SMC on various measures of access and quality of education using quasi-experimental difference-indifference (DID) technique Pre and Post Assessment of School Management Committee: ... of impact evaluation.The findings of the study are consistent with literature which confirms the effectiveness of SMC in improving the quality of schooling in Sindh only.Nonetheless, SMC seems ineffective in improving the student-flow rates and quality of teachers.The remainder of the study is organized as follows: the next section displays the econometric model specification and source of data used in the study; section 3 proposes a sophisticated quasiexperimental methodological approach i.e. difference-in-differences (DID) technique; followed by section 4 which discusses the empirical findings and final section highlights the implications for future and discusses the limitations of the study.

An Overview of Sindh Education Sector
Educational reforms in Sindh are based on the National Education Policy (NEP) -2009 while NEP focuses to achieve the goals of EFA (Education for All).The goals are to expand early childhood care and education, provide free and compulsory primary education for all, to achieve gender parity and gender equality and improve the quality of education.To implement article 25-A of the 18th amendment (legal obligation) that mandates Provinces to provide Free and Compulsory Education to all children aged five to sixteen years (SESP 2014-18) and therefore, Government of Sindh (GoS) has prepared Sindh Education Sector Plan (SESP) 2014-18.
Sindh Education Sector Plan (SESP) categorizes Education Reforms in Sindh into four policy areas -interventions.First one concerned with the improvement in government schools, specific initiates taken at this level includes recognition given to School Management Committee (SMC) and focus given to school specific budget.The second one aimed to provide better learning outcomes and increased quality of education-specifically through merit based recruitment of teachers, introducing Standardized Achievement Test (SAT) system and adopting public private partnership for the delivery of quality education, Sindh Education Foundation (SEF).The third one is related to the availability, timeliness, richness and robustness of data initiatives taken Biometric verification of Teachers, establishment of Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS) and Directorate General for Monitoring and Evaluation.While the fourth one related to the allocations and spending made on education Sindh committed to spend at least 20% of its total budget on education (SESP 2014-18).
This sub-section of the chapter presents an overview of the education sector of Sindh province of Pakistan.For this, the following figures display the trend in students enrolment, Standardized Achievement Test (SAT) scores, students flow rates over the period of 2008-09 to 2016-17.
Figure 1 depicts overall decline in enrollment through class 1 to XII in both the periods.However, the trend of enrollment shows a decline from class 1 to 6 in 2016-17 over 2008-09 whereas, an increase in middle through higher sec-Business Review: ( 2023  The quality of education can also be measured by students learning outcomes for instance Standardized Achievement Score (SAT).The figure 3 presents the students SAT scores for grades V and VIII over the period.It is evident from the figure that on average SAT scores improved over the period of 2013-14 to 2016-17.
The decline in repetition rate indicates that the quality of education is improving.The repetition rate was high in all classes in 2008-09 but showed sharp decline in 2016-17.As compared to other provinces of Pakistan, the literacy rate of Sindh is much lower that is 55%.However, for education, the provincial governments budget was 13.4 % of total allocated budget in 2011 and grown to 18.5% in 2017 (GoS, 2019).There are 12 million children in Sindh between the age of 5 Business Review: (2023) 18(1):48-70 and 16, of which 6.7 million more than half of them are out of school and half of these are girls.Out of the total schools in Sindh almost 91% are primary, 5% are middle while only 4% are high schools showing imbalance in supply of schools.Further to this 46% government primary schools are single teacher school.There are at least 6,164 non-functional and ghost schools in Sindh [Alif Ailaan The State of Sindh Education].The situation demand essential Planning and urgent reforms.There are several initiatives taken by GoS to achieve the objectives of SESP.The key issues discussed by SESP and targets to meet the challenges related to equitable access, improving learning outcomes, governance and accountability and transparent financing.
However, it is interesting to note that the number of primary schools is around 91% of total schools in Sindh which completely outnumber middle and secondary schools (SESP 2014-18).However, the strategies to eliminate social exclusion and provision of greater opportunities for access need to be revisit.Interventions are needed to address the issues of access and dropout, by targeting the districts that are farthest away from EFA goals.Finally, the SESP-2014-18 has been implemented which provide comprehensive framework to move forward but the achievements are yet not completely realized.However, SESP certainly proved that GoS has recognized the challenges in the equitable access to quality education.Education in Sindh is facing challenges of access, quality, governance and financing and SESP attempts to targets all these challenges.With the commitment of the government to pursue the directions given in SESP, the policy interventions will definitely result in the better state of education in 2019-2024.

Literature review
The following review of the existing and relevant literature is based on community participation that is School Management Committees (SMCs) in schools and studies evaluated the impact of education and health programs.The impact of a program is evaluated using different techniques such as Propensity Score Matching (PSM), Difference-in-differences (DID) and Randomized Control Trials (RCT).
Guha (2022)evaluated the impact of school-based management on public schools in India.The study examined the impact of the SMCs on school infrastructure and services such as classrooms physical condition, availability of electricity connection, library, tap water connection and availability of medical checkup facility in these schools.For estimating the impact of intervention, the study utilized panel data from Uttar Pradesh and used difference-in-difference approach.The study found that SMCs improved the availability of libraries and medical checkup facilities in the schools.
Ismail (2020) evaluated the community involvement in the school management system in Pakistan.The study's finding revealed that after passing almost 30 years, the core objective of the committee has not been achieved.The study critically evaluated the policy at the different stages of development and the loopholes in implementing the program.Based on the analysis, the study sug-https://ir.iba.edu.pk/businessreview/vol18/iss1/3DOI: 10. 54784/1990-6587.1497Published by iRepository, June 2023 Pre and Post Assessment of School Management Committee: ... gested that the committees worked differently in all parts of Pakistan.This conclusion was made on the detailed and extensive field experience and the involvement of different communities by taking a deep analysis of training, organizing and mobilizing hundreds of School Management committees (SMCs) of Pakistan.SATI (2019) highlighted the importance of community participation and empowerment in educational governance.For analyzing the impact of community participation, the study selected 25 SMCs and 67 members from such committees through questionnaires and focus groups.The study revealed that the parental involvement improved the outcomes of their children in educational activities.Additionally, the role of community participation in relation with an educational policy has improved the quality of education at elementary level in Uttarakhand state.Moreover, the School management committees (SMCs) have played a significant role in enhancing the students access to schools, number of enrolled children and their retention in the school.Additionally, the number of dropouts reduced and the schools' monitoring was successfully maintained.Baral et al (2019)conducted a study to evaluate the attitude to parents and teachers towards the execution of the School Management Committees (SMCs).Further, the study observed the differences in the behaviour of parents for such committees, particularly for parents by region and teachers by gender.A descriptive survey method was employed for this purpose by selecting 20 elementary schools both from the rural and urban regions of Sambalpur district, Odisha.The study sample of 160 was randomly selected, consisting of both parents and students.The study performed a t-test to evaluate the findings.It was exposed in the study's findings that the formation of the SMCs is appreciated by both parents and teachers.However, parents from rural areas welcomed the decision of SMCs at elementary level as compare to the parents of urban region.The study further revealed that the gender of the teachers showed same attitude towards the implementation of such committees in schools.
Garcia-Moreno et al (2020) evaluated the first experimental assessment of the school-based management intervention called Programa Escuelas de Calidada (PEC) at national level in Mexico State of Colima.The program was initiated in 2001 and ended in 2014 and designed to evaluate the students learning outcomes (test scores) in the school.The study used difference-in-difference technique to evaluate the impact of the program.The findings of the study show that the impact of the PEC has improved the students test scores after one year of the impact evaluation.
Wing et al ( 2018) explained the technique of difference-in-differences (DID) technique, which is commonly used for the causal relationships in public health settings due to the infeasibility of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in such studies.The key focus of the study was to review the DID designs on public health policy research.The study highlighted the importance of DID research design and recommended that modern researchers take an active approach with this research design by actively engaging in the major assumptions of the design and discussing analytic tactics, supplementary analysis, and the methods of statistical implication, which are commonly crucial for the applied research.Although the DID design is not the perfect substitute for the randomized exper-Business Review: (2023) 18(1):48-70 iments, it frequently gives the causal relationship about the quasi-experimental techniques, which is essential for the coming innovative idea about the DID approach.
Sayeed (2016)evaluated the impact of female conditional cash transfer programme on schooling, age at marriage and age at first child birth in Bangladesh.For analyzing the impact of such intervention, the study used difference-in difference (DID) and regression discontinuity design (RDD).The findings showed that the impact assessment of the programme has increased the females education (completed years of schooling) and also reduced the early marriages and early first child birth by delaying in marriages and first child birth.

3. Model Specification and Sources of Data
This section discusses the econometric model and variables definition used in the analysis.In addition, it provides the source of school-level census data used for impact evaluation of SMCs on different measures of quality of education.

Model Specification
Where Y it represents the outcome variables for school i in time t (i.e.school environment index, student-flow rates and teacher quality index) T i represents the time variable, T = 1 indicates pre-intervention period and T = 0 indicates post-intervention period P t represents the treatment variable, P = 1 if school receives the SMC intervention in time t or T = 0 if not Sit represents the status of school i in time t G it represents gender of school i in time t R it represents the pupil-class ratio of school i in time t Here, Yi indicating the five outcome variables namely school environment index, student-flow rates (promotion rate, repetition rate & dropout rate) and teacher quality index.These variables are constructed using composite index.For instance, teachers resource index, since teachers characteristics are comprised of numerous indicators, thus, a single variable composite index is constructed using principal component analysis (PCA) 1 .Such characteristics are comprised of teachers designation (PST, JST, HST, SS, SLT, OT, PTI, WIT, HMs, DT, others), their academic qualification (doctorate, M.Phil., masters, bachelor, intermediate, matriculation and below matric), type of post and professional training (PTC, CT, B.Ed., M.Ed., other trained and untrained).These indicators were initially discrete in nature, first converted by taking proportion of each variable from the total number of teachers and PCA is applied.
The school environment index is constructed using a number of school-level indicators which are first converted into a dummy and scale variable.A scale Pre and Post Assessment of School Management Committee: ... variable is defined as the variable which was initially discrete in nature, converted into a scale of ranges from 0 to 2. A scale of 2 is assigned to the highest level or degree, 1 is assigned to moderate degree and 0 to the lowest degree.For example, in case of school facility index, a scale ranges from 0 to 2 is assigned to a variable pupil-classroom ratio in such a way that a scale value of 2 is assigned if the ratio ranges from 1 to 25, scale value of 1 if the ratio is 26 to 50 and a scale value of 0 if the ratio value is above 50.The school facility index is constructed using 10 school-level indicators namely boundary wall, building condition, type of building, electricity connection, electric fan availability, drinking water facility, library facility, and pupil-classroom ratio.Thus, PCA is applied to construct a composite-school facility index based on the variables discussed above.
However, PCA is a commonly used statistical technique for transforming orthogonally a large number of indicators into a composite index (indices) which can be further defined as the process of converting correlated variables to linearly uncorrelated components.Each component of PCA is a linear (weighted) combination of original indicators that follows the common arrangement.The construction of first PCA i.e. school facility index is consisting of 9 indicators.Out of these 9 indicators, 6 indicators have 2 dimensions and 3 having 3 dimensions.
However, the student-flow rates are calculated using student cohort method.The cohort student-flow rate method, adopted from UNESCO, is used for calculating the student-flow rates (promotion rate, repetition rate, and dropout rate) by taking class-wise enrolment and numbers of repeaters.To calculate the class-wise promotion rate, the number of students from a cohort enrolled in a given class at a given school year t + 1 is divided by the number of students from the same cohort enrolled in the previous class in preceding school year t.Like promotion rate, the students repetition rate is also derived by dividing the number of repeaters in a given class in a given year t+1 by the enrollment of same class but in the previous year t.Finally, the students class-wise dropout rate is calculated by subtracting the former students flow rates (promotion rate and repetition rate) from 100.

Source of Data
This study has used the annual school census data i.e.Sindh Education Management Information System (SEMIS), conducted by the School Education and Literacy Department of Govt. of Sindh.The data provides comprehensive schoollevel information (public) consisting of school infrastructure and availability of school facilities, class-wise enrollment and number of repeaters and detailed teacher related information across gender, district and tehsil level.The data comprises of 45,484 and 46,724 public schools in 2004-5 and 2013-14 respectively.
In order to evaluate the pre and post analysis, the study has used 2004-5 as pre-treatment (pre-intervention) and 2013-14 as post-treatment (postintervention) period.Moreover, student flow rates, teacher quality and school Business Review: ( 2023 4 Estimation Technique: Difference-in-Differences Technique (DID) In order to evaluate the impact of community involvement on educational attainment, the study seeks to identify the causal impact of School Management Committee (SMC) on quality of education (outcome of interest) using quasiexperimental technique such as difference-in-differences technique (DID).The DID design is an ideal technique for assessing the causal effect of SMC on quality education.
The DID uses few notations such as i = 1, 2, 3, .I be the cross sectional unit (schools) and t = 1.T be the time period.Now let P it = 1 if school i attains treatment (involves in community parent partnership through SMC) in time t and P it = 0 if school i belongs to the control group in time t.The potential outcomes for the two hypothetical scenarios such as let Y(1)it be the outcome of interest for the treatment group that is quality of school for unit i at time t if the school involves in community partnership and Y(0)it be the potential outcome for the control group that is, if the school had not been involved in SMC are presented.Given this, the causal effect for school i at time t can be expressed as follows: The above causal effect indicates an individual effect (school i) that can be observed in experimental studies.However, in non-experimental studies, an individual effect is unobservable for same unit (individual) in two different scenarios (treatment / control) but in practice, applied researchers observe each unit for only one scenario in one time period.Thus the fundamental problem of causal effect is controlled by Heckman (1997); Dehejia and Wahba (2002)), the average effect of treatment on schools can be defined as follows: In the above equation, the second term defines the counterfactual problem that generally occurs in causal effect.Like propensity score matching, a standard DID design is also a quasi-experimental in nature which is independent of random assignment to deal the problem of bias that occurs as a results of unobservable confounders.However, standard DID designs assume that these unobservable group confounders are time-invariant across the groups and timevarying confounders are group-invariant commonly known as the common trend assumption.
Two Groups -Two Time Period The DID design with two groups (i.e.i =1, 2) and two time periods (i.e.t = 1, 2) is symbolized by a 2 x 2 box and called a simplest form of DID design.In time period 1 (pre period), both the groups are called control groups.However, in period 2, only group 2 is exposed to treatment.Let T i = 1 (for i = 2) be a time invariant dummy variable which identifies observations in group 2. Pt = 1 (for t = 2) is also a dummy variable which identifies observations for period 2. Thus, in simple DID design, the treatment variable is obtained by multiplying these two dummy variables i.e.D it = T i xP t .
Moreover, the effect of SMC on quality education for two time periods can be expressed as follows: The model for the two potential outcomes under the simple DID design can be written as: The above equation shows that in the absence of treatment, 0 is the average outcome in group 1and period 1 and the sum of the coefficients ( 0 + 2 ) in period 2. However, the sum of the coefficients (β0 + β2) is the average untreated outcome in group 2 and period 1and (β 0 + β 2 +) in period 2. On the basis of common trend assumption, the coefficient of Ti (1) is the group effect which captures the time invariant difference in outcomes of the two groups.However, the coefficient of Pt ( 2) is the time trend, captures the combined effect that change over the two periods.
The treated potential outcome: In above equation the treated potential outcome is the sum of untreated potential outcome and treatment effect (constant).The general formula for both the treated and untreated potential outcome along with treatment effect can be written as: The model specification: The Common Trends Assumption The DID designs depend on the common trends assumption that the (important unmeasured) variables are either timeinvariant (group effect) or time-varying factors (time trend).In other words, the assumption implies that the outcomes of a group should change by a constant in each period and should depict a similar period-specific change.Moreover, the common trends assumption also holds for the restricted sample of groups Business Review: (2023) 18(1):48-70 https://ir.iba.edu.pk/businessreview/vol18/iss1/3DOI: 10. 54784/1990-6587.1497Published by iRepository, June 2023 (matched sample) which can be obtained using propensity score matching then to estimate the treatment effects, DID design is used on the matched /restricted sample.

Findings of the Study
This section discusses the findings of pre-post impact of SMC on various measures of quality education in Sindh.For this, the section comprises of standard DID analysis and a robustness analysis based on regression analysis.Finally, the section provides baseline balance check of covariates used in the analysis.

Findings Based on DID
The tables below provides the findings based on standard DID method of prepost analysis.Table 1 presents the estimates of pre-post effect of SMC on school environment.The first half of the table is showing the pre-treatment effect of SMC and non-SMC schools and consisting of mean outcome of both groups (treated & control) along with their single difference (0.564).This estimate of pre-intervention provides positive and statistically significant impact.Whereas the second half of the table provides positive and statistically significant post-intervention impact of SMC on school environment which shows that the provision of SMC has improved the overall environment of the school.Moreover, the last row displays the DID estimator (before & after treatment effect of SMC).The positive and statistically significant impact implies that SMC has improved the environment public schools in Sindh over the period of 2004-05 to 2013-14.Furthermore, this positive impact also reflects that schools that timely received funds and utilized these funds efficiently in developing their infrastructure and repairs and https://ir.iba.edu.pk/businessreview/vol18/iss1/3DOI: 10. 54784/1990-6587.1497Published by iRepository, June 2023 Pre and Post Assessment of School Management Committee: ... maintenance, resulted in an improved environment of the school.Table 2 explains the impact of SMC on another quality measure that is student flow rates.The pre-intervention impact shows positive effects on promotion and repetition rates and negative effect on dropout rate.These findings are consistent with the studies of King and Ozler (1998); Di Gropello and Marshall (2005); Pellini (2005); Gertler et al (2012).However, the post-intervention impact is similar to the pre-intervention effect except the repetition rate which is negative and statistically insignificant.In addition, the post-intervention effect is smaller than the pre-intervention effect.Thus, the study finds negative but statistically significant impact that is DID estimate of promotion, repetition and dropout rates.The alarming negative impact is mainly reflects inefficiencies in the utilization of SMC funds.These funds usually spend on repairs and maintenance of the school instead of focusing on enhancing the quality of education such as improvement in student-survival rate and decline in dropout rate.Next table 3 displays the DID impact of SMC on teacher quality.The treatment effect of DID given in last row provides negative but statistically significant impact of SMC on teacher quality in Sindh over the period of 2004-05 through 2013-14.This negative impact is also reflecting the inefficiencies lies in SMC intervention which could be reduced particularly in order to improve the quality of teachers by providing a number of teachers training programs and an improved accountability of teachers and head teachers.However, in this case, SMC is not functioning well in enhancing the quality of teachers.Thus having good infrastructure does not indicate good quality of education.

Robustness Analysis Based on OLS Regression
In addition to this, the study has conducted a robustness check analysis to confirm the above DID treatment effect of SMC on outcomes of interest.For this, the study evaluated the average treatment effect of SMC using regression model of DID as discussed in equations 1 and 8.The tables B1 through B3 given in annexure, display the estimates of regression results of DID method.However, table B1 provides the similar treatment effect of SMC on quality of school as discussed in table 1.The positive and statistically significant interaction coefficient (Period* SMC = 0.28) reflects that the average treatment effect of SMC has improved the quality of schools in Sindh.Additionally, tables β 2 and β 2 depict the similar negative but statistically impact on student-flow rates and teacher quality index.
Finally, tables given in annexure B present the baseline balance check of the key covariates used in the analysis for each outcome variable.The balance check is consisting of t-test particularly used in DID method which shows that the baseline covariates are balanced and differences are significantly different from zero for each outcome of interest.

Conclusions and Implications
This study evaluates the impact of a community based management that is school management committee (SMC) in Sindh and found surprising effects on various outcome variables.A number of studies have discussed the functions of SMC but not evaluated the pre and post impact empirically.Here, the study revealed that over the nine years of SMC implementation in Sindh, SMC could only focus in developing the infrastructure of the school.However, it could not focus on development of student outcomes and the quality of teachers in the school.The main reason behind these findings is the inefficient utilization of SMC funds and lack of monitoring and governance in the sector.
Study also proposes the policy implications to make the procedure of SMC functional and effective.This includes, improved student access to school, quality of teachers, monitoring, management, curriculum and financing of the program.For this, the government of Sindh should enhance the implementation of the program by revising a number of training and guidance programs for the schools and communities as well, so that the gap between them will be minimized and the functions of SMC will become more efficient.To improve the student access to schools and reduction in dropouts can only be achieved by adopting improved curriculum and assessment strategies in the schools.
In addition to this, teachers quality also plays their role in promoting good environment to the students in the school.There are certain factors which could help to improve the quality of teachers and teaching in the schools.For instance, the training of the teachers is one of the factors to make education system better and equitable.To make SMC more effective and accountable, the members should be qualified and trained enough so that these members in the committee can make it more functional.Further, the members of SMCs should also be bound to attend the meetings and organize meetings on regular basis.Community involvement is another factor for the effectiveness of schools management and governance.However, in Pakistan, SMCs are mostly non-functional and inefficient.To make education system more transparent and accountable, the policymakers should take new initiatives by increasing local community participation in schools management.
Finally, the inefficient allocation of SMC funds is one of the factors which has not ensured the improve quality of education except the school facilities consisting of boundary wall, toilet and water facilities etc.The efficient allocation of these funds is very important to improve the overall quality of education.The models used in the study control for a number of school-level key variables such as pupil-class ratio, status of school, and gender of school but model does not capture the parental socio-economic background which could also affect the quality of education.Thus, this factor of parental socio-economic characteristics will be evaluated in future research.

Figure 5
Figure 5 presents the trends in students dropout rate by class.The figure depicts small decline in dropout rate of students from class 1 to 2 and a sharp decline from class 5 to 6 in 2016-17.As compared to other provinces of Pakistan, the literacy rate of Sindh is much lower that is 55%.However, for education, the provincial governments budget was 13.4 % of total allocated budget in 2011 and grown to 18.5% in 2017 (GoS, 2019).There are 12 million children in Sindh between the age of 5 Heckman J (1997) Instrumental variables: A study of implicit behavioral assumptions used in making program evaluations.Journal of human resources pp 441-462 Ismail S (2020) School management committees-a policy failure in pakistan King E, Ozler B (1998) Whats decentralization got to do with learning?the case of nicaraguas school autonomy reform.Development Economics Research Group, Working Paper Series on Impact Evaluation of Education Reforms 9:278,200-1099079877,269 Nasar MR, Kakar B (2017) Community participation in schooling and its impact on increasing enrollment and dropout retention Pellini A (2005) Decentralisation of education in cambodia: Searching for spaces of participation between traditions and modernity.Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 35(2):205-216 SATI A (2019) Community participation and empowerment in educational governance: A study of performance of school management committee in uttarakhand state Sawada Y, Ragatz A (2005) Decentralization of education, teacher behavior, and outcomes.Incentives to improve teaching 255 Sayeed Y (2016) Effect of girls' secondary school stipend on completed schooling, age at marriage, and age at first birth: Evidence from bangladesh.Tech.rep., WIDER Working Paper Skoufias E, Shapiro J (2006) Evaluating the impact of mexico's quality schools program: the pitfalls of using nonexperimental data.World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (4036) Wing C, Simon K, Bello-Gomez RA (2018) Designing difference in difference studies: best practices for public health policy research.Annual review of public health 39

Table 1 :
Pre & Post Effects of SMC on School Environment Index

Table 2 :
Pre & Post Effects of SMC on Student-Flow Rates

Table 3 :
Pre & Post Effects of SMC on Teacher Quality Index

Table A1 :
Summary Statistics

Table B2 :
Regression Results of SMC on Student-Flow Rates