The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance

Abstract

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique international assessment data to investigate the role of teacher cognitive skills as one main dimension of teacher quality in explaining student outcomes. Our main identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in teacher cognitive skills attributable to international differences in relative wages of nonteacher public sector employees. Using student-level test score data, we find that teacher cognitive skills are an important determinant of international differences in student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation that uses within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills. Keywords OverviewNumerous international assessment tests have shown that the cognitive skills of students differ greatly across countries, including across developed economies. These differences take on considerable significance because the cognitive skills of the population have been shown to be an important driver of a country's long-run economic growth (e.g., Hanushek and Woessmann (2012)).But less considered is how the overall skills of a nation feed back into the skills of teachers. This paper investigates whether differences in cognitive skills of teachers across developed countries can help explain international differences in student performance.Public discussions have emphasized the importance of teacher skills for improving student achievement. For example, a widely-cited McKinsey report on international achievement concludes that "the quality of an educational system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers" and then goes on to assert that "the top-performing systems we studied recruit their teachers from the top third of each cohort graduate from their school system." (Barber and Mourshed (2007), p. 16) In a follow-on report, Auguste, Kihn, and Miller (2010) note that the school systems in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea "recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort," which stands in stark contrast to the U.S. where "23% of new teachers come from the top third." (p. 5) Notwithstanding any evidence that these differences explain differences in student outcomes, they recommend a "top third+ strategy" for the U.S. educational system. We investigate the implications for student achievement of focusing policy attention on the cognitive skills of potential teachers.Our analysis exploits unique data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which allow for the first time to quantify differences in teacher skills in numeracy and literacy across countries. These differences in teacher cognitive skills reflect, as we discuss below, both where teachers are drawn from in each country's skill distribution and the overall level...

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