Teachers , Incentives , and Student Performance

What kinds of policies can governments adopt to attract, retain, motivate and develop qualified teachers in elementary and secondary schools? The project will pursue two avenues to address this question. The first component will study the effect of recent reforms on the teaching profession in four countries. Some of these reforms involve increases in compensation linked to specific teacher behaviors that are believed to affect educational quality and/or equity. In some countries, reforms have linked teacher pay increases to student outcomes. In these cases, we plan to use econometric methods to identify the effect of the reforms ex post on teacher quality and, where possible, on student outcomes. The second component is designed to understand teaching careers and the compensation structures used in a particular country in order to help the government develop new and more effective incentive systems to attract, retain, develop and motivate qualified teachers. We expect that some of the reforms will have an experimental design, including the random assignment of groups of schools or school districts to participate in the incentive innovation. We plan to collect and analyze data after adequate time has passed to observe an effect of the reforms on teacher quality and/or student outcomes.