Preferences and skills of Indian public sector teachers

Fagernäs, Sonja; Pelkonen, Panu

doi:10.1186/2193-9020-1-3

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Thus, it appears that the mechanism for finding heterogeneous impacts of the extra contract teacher by school proximity is not just that the marginal reduction in school-level PTR induced by the extra contract teacher is larger in smaller schools (this would be picked up in the interaction with school enrollment) but that locally-hired contract teachers may be especially effective in remote areas where the social distance between civil-service teachers and the community would be larger, and where civil-service teachers try to avoid getting posted (Fagernas and Pelkonen 2012).…”

Section: Heterogeneous Treatment Effects By Other School/student Charmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India

2013

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The large-scale expansion of primary schooling in developing countries has led to the increasing use of non-civil-service contract teachers who are hired locally by the school, are not professionally trained, have fixed-term renewable contracts, and are paid much lower salaries than regular civil-service teachers. This has been a controversial policy, but there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of contract teachers in improving student learning. We present experimental evidence on the impact of contract teachers using data from an 'as is' expansion of contract-teacher hiring across a representative sample of 100 randomly-selected government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. At the end of two years, students in schools with an extra contract teacher performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.16 and 0.15 , in math and language tests respectively. Contract teachers were also much less likely to be absent from school than civil-service teachers (18% vs. 27%).Combining the experimental reduction in school-level pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) induced by the provision of an extra contract teacher, with high-quality panel data estimates of the impact of reducing PTR with a regular civil-service teacher, we show that contract teachers are not only effective at improving student learning outcomes, but that they are no less effective at doing so than regular civil-service teachers who are more qualified, better trained, and paid five times higher salaries.1 See Duthilleul (2005) for a discussion of how the lack of qualified teachers has been a key challenge in expanding access to schooling in several countries. Teacher salaries comprise ~70-90% of education spending in most developing countries, and the cost of salaries is typically the main fiscal constraint to education expansion (see http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education for country-level salary data). Fagernas and Pelkonen (2012) study teacher location preferences and show that more qualified teachers are less likely to desire rural postings. 2 Contract teacher schemes have been used in several developing countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Nicaragua, Niger, Senegal, and Togo, (see Duthilleul 2005 andBourdon et al. 2010 for reviews of contract teacher programs). They have also been widely employed in several states of India, under different titles (see Govinda and Josephine 2004 for a descriptive review).

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Section: Heterogeneous Treatment Effects By Other School/student Charmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India

2013

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“…A special feature of teacher labor markets in India is that female teachers are disproportionately concentrated in urban and semi-urban areas. This can be driven by both cultural norms and the preferences of the teachers themselves (Fagernäs and Pelkonen, 2012).…”

Section: Segregation By Remotenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research shows that teachers and public sector workers are often averse to remote areas in developing countries (see e.g. Serneels et al, 2010, Fagernäs and Pelkonen, 2012and Lemière et al, 2013. 3 As the pay of teachers is inflexible in India, the location of employment is considered to be an important non-pecuniary aspect of work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where's the Teacher? How Teacher Workplace Segregation Impedes Teacher Allocation in India

Fagernäs

Pelkonen

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…The inequity in access to teachers in the public schooling system can be addressed by recruitment of teachers, by consolidation of multiple schools into one big school and by teacher transfers. 3 Mass recruitment requires larger public funds 4 where as consolidation increases distances students may have to travel. Hence we focus on the third mechanism, teacher transfers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In principle, teacher transfers can also take place due to other reasons: preference of teachers or administrative concerns. When we refer to teacher transfers in this paper, we are referring to rationalization 4. Moreover such appointments are intertwined with a debate on what form of hiring is optimal: contractual or permanent(Muralidharan and Sundararaman, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

Redistributing teachers using local transfers

et al. 2018

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In this paper we show that local redistribution of educational resources via teacher transfers between neighboring public schools can improve equity in access to teachers. Transfers from teacher surplus schools to deficit schools within a 10 km radius in Haryana, a state of India for which we have geo-coded location of schools in 2013, enables 19 percent of deficit schools to meet the minimum requirement. Using estimates from other studies, we posit that the impact of this redistribution on girl's primary completion rates (PCR) could be as high as 1.2 percentage points for those from poor households: roughly the annual growth of the PCR in the state. We also show that the donor and recipient schools are, on an average, matched in characteristics: in terms of the development of the region, its rural/urban location, connectivity and school characteristics. A comparison of transfers that follow our redistribution rule to transfers resulting from an actual transfer policy shows that while our rule removes deficits in rural areas, the actual transfers favored more developed regions.

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Preferences and skills of Indian public sector teachers

Cited by 8 publications

References 32 publications

Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India

Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India

Where's the Teacher? How Teacher Workplace Segregation Impedes Teacher Allocation in India

Redistributing teachers using local transfers

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