In contrast, mean years of teaching is negatively correlated with physical health and communication and general knowledge—although the effect sizes are relatively small, ranging from -0.056 to -0.117 standard deviations. In addition, experience in early childhood education and receiving teacher training yielded null results. For the case of teacher training, follow-up assessments of the training experience suggest that the intent of the model was inconsistently and infrequently followed. Often, in practice, training was didactic or overly theoretical. Followup on-site supervision has been expected but very rarely occurred.

It is also important to note, that teacher characteristics used in this study are averaged at the center-level, which means we cannot attribute student outcomes directly to their teachers. As a result, we interpret the small but negative coefficient on years of teaching as well as the null results of ECED experience and teacher training as follows: policies focused solely on hiring teachers with more experience and training will not be sufficient to improve children’s development in rural Indonesia. Rather, policies must address the quality of professional development activities for teachers in order to ensure the effectiveness of early childhood education programs. Training, in particular, should be multifaceted: including not just group training but coaching, observations of quality programs, and regular teacher cluster meetings on meaningful topics.

The mixed results on teacher characteristics in our study is not surprising given that prior studies on teacher qualification have also shown mixed evidence in relation to children’s developmental outcomes. The few studies that have successfully produced statistically significant results often employ a value-added model (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006). A limitation of our teacher level data is that we cannot match the teacher observations with the student EDI. As a result, the measure of teacher characteristics used in this study is averaged at the center-level, which is a less precise measure of teacher quality than those derived from matched teacher-student datasets. Future studies of early childhood quality in developing countries could benefit from matched teacher-student data to improve the estimates of teacher quality and better understand what kinds of qualification of ECD teachers are particularly successful in producing high-level student outcomes.

Another explanation for the mixed results may be due to collinearity between measures of teacher qualifications and items on the ECERS-R that focus on teacher behavior in the classroom (e.g., Item 16 - Encouraging children to communicate). Although none of the ECERS-R items directly measure teacher’s education, experience, and training, it is likely that those with higher levels of education, more experience, and better training tend to provide higher quality care as measured by the items on the ECERS-R, making it difficult to tease apart classroom quality and teacher qualifications. It is also plausible that some selection bias is taking place, whereby teachers with more education and/or experience choose to work in higher quality settings.

Finally, our analysis suggests that the quantity of exposure to early childhood education also matters. On average, children enrolled in more hours of early childhood programs in rural Indonesia scored higher on the EDI, when controlling for various child, teacher, and structural characteristics. Although previous studies examining the relationship between duration of preschool and child development outcomes have been mixed (Vandell, 2004), we find a positive association despite the fact that children are exposed to a low dose of early childhood education in rural Indonesia. On average, children in our sample were between the ages of 4 to 5, attending kindergartens for 2 to 3 hours a day for 6 days a week or in playgroups for 2 to 3 hours a day for 4 to 5 days per week. The maximum number of hours in a week was 24 hours, which was only found in 3 kindergartens in the sample. In contrast, studies that have found negative effects of 16