TEACHERS
This portfolio studies various aspects of the market for teachers. A functioning teacher market can generate a virtuous educational and learning cycle. Recruiting, training, and retaining the best teachers ensures that children have access to the key teaching inputs that increase learning. Further educational demand from schools and parents can support blossoming and widespread teacher markets and grow the share of employment opportunities that the educational sector presents – especially for women.
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The Impact of Performance Pay
Image: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Many students in developing countries experience low-quality teaching and schools face a challenge in identifying who will be a good teacher. This study explores whether paying teachers based on their past performance allows schools to attract and retain better teachers.
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Does the introduction of performance pay increase the quality of teachers attracted to and retained by schools?
Does performance pay also attract teachers who are less socially-minded?
Who is better at identifying a teachers' quality — the teacher themselves or their principal?
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Schools which offer performance pay attract and retain higher performing teachers.
Teachers who prefer performance pay have similar levels of pro-sociality as those who wanted flat pay.
Teachers appear to know more about their own teaching quality than their principal does.
Subjective vs. Objective Evaluations
Image: Evidence for Policy Design
Building on our work about performance pay, this study explores whether changing how teachers’ performance is evaluated impacts teacher behavior and student learning.
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What is the effect of subjective versus objective incentives, relative to flat pay, on student outcomes and teacher behavior?
How do principals’ implement the subjective incentives — what do they place importance on and do all principals implement the scheme well?
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Subjective performance incentives are equally effective at increasing test scores as objective incentives, but they also produce better results on socio-emotional outcomes.
Most principals are able to implement the incentive system well, only the bottom 20% of principals struggle.
Understanding Gender Discrimination by Managers
Image: USAID
Pakistan ranks in the lowest decile in female labor force participation, and even in sectors where women are more prevalent, such as teaching, they earn 70 cents for each dollar men earn. While we have extensive evidence on the prevalence of gender bias in hiring, promotions and wages, we know less about the mechanisms underlying this bias and the extent to which certain personnel policies may mitigate or exacerbate these biases.
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Under what conditions to gender biases exist in teacher incentive schemes?
Do subjective or objective performance evaluations lead to exacerbated gender bias in schools?
What are the potential mechanisms for the findings?
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Principals do not have an overt bias against female teachers
Low-stakes evaluations have no gender differences in terms of teacher raises or promotions, but high-stakes evaluations do
Providing objective information about a teacher’s performance to principals decreases the gender evaluation gap
Teacher Value Added in a Low-Income Country
Image: Irina Werning, Oxfam
This study presents the first estimates of teacher value-added from low-income countries. It first establishes the feasibility and validity of teacher value-added estimates and shows that, like in other countries, good teachers dramatically improve child test scores. It then shows that wages are not correlated with teacher quality in the public sector (but are in the private sector). Finally, a large policy-change that led to the hiring of contract teachers in the public sector at significantly lower wages had no negative impact on child test scores or the quality of teachers that the public sector could hire.
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How important is teacher quality in explaining student learning?
What are the characteristics of a good teacher and are easily they observable by others?
How can we effectively evaluate educators and then recruit and reward the top performers?
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Student learning improves by an additional year of schooling when taught by an effective, high-quality teacher.
Observable teacher characteristics do not predict what makes an effective teacher.
In private schools teaching quality is correlated with wages, in public schools it is not.
Students Today Teachers Tomorrow
Image: Evidence for Policy Design
If you educate someone today, they can teach tomorrow. Our research shows that private schools are more likely to develop in areas with girls’ secondary schools because the student the secondary schools become the teachers in the private schools. One implication is that governments play a critical role in developing the teaching pipeline for tomorrow’s students.
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What explains the rise of private schools in rural Pakistan?
What are the implications of the fact that the students of today are the teachers of tomorrow?
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Villages with government girls’ secondary schools (GSS) are three-times more likely have private schools. A unique instrumental variables strategy establishes causality.
This is because the students in GSS become the teachers in the private schools.
A Teacher Unlike Me: Social Distance and Learning
Image: Evidence for Policy Design
Studies have found that same type matches between teachers and students (race, gender) produce higher learning outcomes. Caste in Pakistan, and it’s impact on education, is an understudied part of the education system with unique and important cultural dynamics.
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What role does caste (an understudied topic) play in learning outcomes in Pakistan?
How do student-teacher caste matches affect learning?
What are the potential mechanisms for the findings?
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Low caste students have higher test scores and girls have higher test scores than boys, however, low caste boys have the highest test scores of the four groups.
Children taught by a high-caste teacher have higher learning outcomes and low caste boys matched with a high caste teacher have higher test scores.
Learning gains for high caste boys taught by a high caste teacher are driven by higher aspirations (potential role model effects) and parents putting more resources into their education.