Teacher Effectiveness and Educational Equity

Abstract

Inequalities in teacher quality may be examined using several different lenses. To better investigate the relationships between student equity and teacher quality and instructional metrics, educational inequality in student performance across countries and time was explored as (1) variation in student mathematics scores, and (2) differences in socioeconomic status using descriptive, regression, and fixed-effects techniques. Measures of teacher quality (as measured by experience, education, preparedness, time spent on teaching mathematics, and instructional alignment) appeared to have only a limited effect on aggregate or within-classroom variation in student outcomes. The results also suggest that teacher quality may be more equitable at grade four than at grade eight, as measured by differences between higher and lower socioeconomic status classrooms. Keywords Educational inequality • Teacher quality • Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 7.1 Inequality in Teacher Quality: The Conceptual Terrain Our study has focused on the relationship between teacher factors and mean student achievement. However, average performance can conceal massive differences among different groups of students. Hypothetically two countries can have very similar mean achievement but dramatically different distributions in achievement. This is the issue of educational equity, which has become a major focus of policymakers and researchers since at least the 1960s. In fact, a persuasive argument can be made that educational equity is as important as mean achievement. Concerns about equity are grounded in two issues, one practical and the other normative. First, despite the argument that there is an equity-efficiency trade-off (that overall increases in student learning come at the cost of more uneven distribution of equity in education) recent evidence suggests that no such trade-off exists, and, in reality, that greater educational equity is associated with higher average student performance (Parker et al. 2018) As a consequence, educational systems that generate

Remote Co-teaching in Rural Classroom: Current Practices, Impacts, and Challenges

“…Urban students' scores in primary subjects (e.g., Mathematics and English) are significantly higher than the scores of rural students [65]. One important aspect of educational inequalities is the uneven distribution of teacher resources-underdeveloped areas are more likely to lack high-quality teachers than privileged areas [9,63]. Gaps in teacher quality could lead to achievement differences between advantaged and disadvantaged students [9,65].…”

“…One important aspect of educational inequalities is the uneven distribution of teacher resources-underdeveloped areas are more likely to lack high-quality teachers than privileged areas [9,63]. Gaps in teacher quality could lead to achievement differences between advantaged and disadvantaged students [9,65]. In China, urban teachers have attained higher levels of education and have higher professional ranks in urban schools [60].…”

“…Educational inequality has been a matter of significant concern globally [1,9]. The irrational distribution of teacher quality across advantaged and disadvantaged students has been revealed as a typical example of educational inequality.…”

“…The irrational distribution of teacher quality across advantaged and disadvantaged students has been revealed as a typical example of educational inequality. Research has demonstrated that disadvantaged students, indicated by most disadvantage factors (e.g., low socioeconomic status and underrepresented minority), usually have low-quality teachers, measured by nearly every measure of teacher quality (e.g., experience, degree, and even value added) [9,13,20,32,40,48].…”

Do disadvantaged schools have poorer teachers? Rethinking assumptions about the relationship between teaching quality and school-level advantage

“…However, such measures are relatively static and weak proxies for teaching; they provide no direct information about classroom practice (Hill et al, 2015 ; Ingvarson & Rowe, 2008 ). Indeed, the relationship between teacher characteristics and student outcomes is typically mixed, small, or non-existent (Burroughs et al, 2019 ; Rockoff et al, 2011 ), suggesting that these measures often tell us little about what teachers do .…”