TEACHER QUALITY: LITERATURE REVIEW AND POLICY DIRECTIONS

Research indicates the importance of teachers in impacting their pupils’ achievements. However, the specific teacher characteristics that affect achievements are not known. Thus, it is unclear how to improve the quality of teachers. Some suggest changes in the selection criteria of teachers; others believe that pay incentives would motivate skilled teachers to enter and remain in the profession. Studies of the effectiveness of economic incentives on teacher efficacy yield mixed results. Israeli studies indicate the positive influence of individual and group economic incentives on student achievement in the matriculation exams. In contrast, studies in other countries have found that economic incentives do not have a significant influence on pupil achievement. In the past decade the education system in Israel has undergone two reforms – Ofek Hadash and Oz LeTemurah. The reforms include, amongst other things, incentives by way of a salary rise, performance-based bonuses and new career ladders. These reforms included promising components as well as possible pitfalls that are discussed in the paper. Finally, there is a call for an evaluation of these programs in an attempt to assess the impact of their components on pupil achievement and on teacher motivation, morale and performance. * Yael Navon, doctoral student, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, TelAviv University. Prof. Yossi Shavit, Chair, Taub Center Education Policy Program; Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University. 304 State of the Nation Report 2011-2012 he main determinant of the educational success of young people is family background, in particular parental education and economic status. Since policymakers’ ability to influence family background is complex and often very limited, education policies tend to focus on systemic variables that affect educational achievement. Understanding the effects of systemic features, among them teacher quality, is thus highly valuable. 1. The Importance of Good Teachers Researchers generally agree that teachers are an important, and perhaps the most important, systemic factor in education. The 2007 McKinsey Report identified three variables common to education systems with high-achieving pupils, two of which – teacher recruitment and training – are related to teacher quality (Barber and Mourshed 2007). Studies using the currently accepted method of fixed effects models also indicate that teachers are an important variable in pupil achievement. Studies of this type examine the variance in achievement among otherwise comparable pupil groups taught by different teachers (e.g., different classes at the same school). These studies assess the extent to which particular teachers can affect pupil achievement, controlling for a variety of other factors relevant to achievement. Input, in the form of teacher quality, is usually measured in terms of achievement units, enabling researchers to assess teacher effectiveness in improving pupil achievement. These studies have consistently found a significant effect of the teacher on pupil achievement (or on changes in achievement over time) 1 as well as a great deal of variance in teacher quality. 2 In other words, these studies indicate that particular 1 Models that examine incremental achievement or control for past achievement are termed value-added models. 2 It should be noted that these studies face significant methodological challenges in inferring causality. One of the major challenges is the non-random assignment of teachers and pupils to classes and schools by geographical area, school type, etc. When placement is not random, the models must distinguish the influence of teachers (i.e., the causal relationship between teacher quality and pupil T Teacher Quality: Literature Review and Policy Directions 305 teachers could have a major influence on pupil achievement. 3 Some of the studies have compared the effect of the teacher to the effects of the school or class size and have found the influence of the former to be more important (Luyten 2003; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005; Buddin and Zamarro 2009; Sanders, Wright, and Horn 1997; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005; Hanushek 2011). 5 The implication suggested by these findings is that pupil achievement can be enhanced by improving teacher quality, and this might be more significant than the improvement found by making other systemic improvements. It is worth noting that improved pupil achievements have both social and economic value. Hanushek (2011) has studied the hidden economic value of teacher quality, both in terms of the financial reward for education in the labor market and in terms of the relationship between improved cognitive skills in the population and national economic growth. achievement) and the influence of other differences between pupils. The most common method of dealing with this challenge is by means of adding fixedeffects coefficients for the pupils or the school to the model. Inferring causality is further complicated by omitted environmental effects, biases due to the achievement indices used, and more (Koedel and Betts 2010; Papay 2011). 3 The educational outcome examined by most studies is grades, both because grades are easy to measure and because improving them is considered one of the education system’s primary objectives. Other educational outcomes have been examined, however. For example, Jennings and DiPrete (2010) have found evidence that teachers’ influence on social and behavioral development is comparable in magnitude to their influence on academic achievement, while Kodel (2008) has found teachers to have a significant effect on drop-out rates. 4 Luyten’s (2003) review shows opposite cases as well, where the strength of the influence of the school was found to be greater than that of the teacher, especially when teacher influence was measured by the difference between parallel classes (same school, same grade, same course of study). Levitan therefore concludes that the teacher is not necessarily a more important determinant of pupil achievement than other school factors. 5 The comparison is generally to reducing the class size to a certain number of pupils; the studies that are cited compare when class size is reduced by a significant number of approximately ten pupils. 306 State of the Nation Report 2011-2012 His calculations show that bringing United States pupil achievement on international tests up to Finnish levels by improving teacher quality would have increased United States GDP by no less than $112 trillion. Findings also indicate that to the extent that there is a correlation between teacher quality (in terms of effectiveness) and pupils’ socioeconomic background, this is likely to exacerbate class inequality in education. In order to decrease the inequality caused by family background, education policymakers can direct teachers identified as effective to schools and classes with a high concentration of pupils from socioeconomically underprivileged backgrounds. 6 2. Can Good Teachers Be Identified? In light of these findings, one would expect education systems to devote a great deal of attention to improving teacher quality. Achieving such an improvement is far from simple, however. The main difficulty is that although it is clear ex post facto that good teachers can improve their pupils’ achievements, identifying such teachers in advance proves to be a difficult task. Moreover, although many researchers have aimed to identify the characteristics of good, achievement-improving teachers, these factors have yet to be identified with any precision. Numerous researchers have looked for statistical relations between pupil achievement and observed teacher characteristics, such as education, seniority and gender. Others have searched for relations between various teacher characteristics and teacher 6 It is important to note, however, that the success of teacher quality in decreasing inequality depends on the degree to which improved achievements persist over time, i.e., on the extent to which teachers’ influence is longrather than shortterm, though the findings about this latter aspect are inconclusive (Sander and Rivers 1996; Kane and Staiger 2008; Rothstein 2010). Likewise, the possibility of narrowing gaps also depends on the effectiveness of teachers being similar for pupils of different social standing. Here, too, the findings are not conclusive (Sanders and Rivers 1996; Sander, Wright, and Horn 1997; Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander 2007; Slater, Davies, and Burgess 2009). Teacher Quality: Literature Review and Policy Directions 307 effectiveness as defined by fixed effects models. Despite these efforts, findings have been scant, pointing to no strong and consistent correlations between observed teacher characteristics and pupil achievement. Moreover, more researchers agree that the characteristics identified so far explain a very small part of the variance in teacher quality (Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges 2004; Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander 2007; Buddin and Zamarro 2009; Leigh 2010). 7 Interestingly, only a few studies have systematically explored teacher personality traits in the context of pupil achievement (Blass 2008). 8 One of the only teacher characteristics with a consistent correlation to pupil achievement is teacher experience (Greenwald, Hedges, and Laine 1996; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005; Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2006; Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2007; Croninger et al. 2007; Buddin and Zamarro 2009; Harris and Sass 2009; Leigh 2010; Hanushek 2011). Nevertheless, numerous findings indicate that the correlation is weak and nonlinear, and sometimes disappears after the first few years of teaching (Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2006; Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2007; Buddin and Zamarro 2009; Slater, Davies, and Burgess 2009; Le