Performance-Based School Grants Program
In 2014, the Jakarta city government introduced a performance-based component to its existing school grants program to incentivize improved learning outcomes. Under this new system, all government schools continued to receive a basic per-student grant, but top-performing schools received an additional bonus equivalent to 20% of the basic grant. School performance was judged based on average national exam scores over two years and improvement in those scores. The top 25% of schools in each district received the performance bonus the following year.
The program aimed to improve student learning through three main channels:
1. Motivating teachers and school staff to increase effort,
2. Encouraging schools to align spending more closely with learning objectives
3. Providing additional resources to high-performing schools to support further improvements. The initiative covered all 1,629 government primary schools and 291 government junior secondary schools in Jakarta.
Early results after two years were mixed. At the junior secondary level, test scores improved significantly, with gains of 2.6 percentage points in 2015 and 4.6 percentage points in 2016. However, the largest gains were seen in schools that were already high-performing. At the primary level, there was a slight overall decrease in test scores, though the lowest-performing schools saw modest improvements.
Pros
Significant improvements in test scores at junior secondary level
Modest gains for lowest-performing primary schools
Implemented at scale across entire school system
Used existing administrative data, allowing low-cost evaluation
Cons
Widened performance gap between high and low-performing schools
Slight negative impact on primary school test scores overall
Reliance solely on test scores may not capture full picture of school quality
Partners
Jakarta city government
World Bank