of the program per student. (Appendix Table A26 provides details on the papers). In this context, the results for Ceará are extremely impressive. Only two evaluated programs show greater cost-effectiveness than our ITT results for Ceará. And _no_ program evaluated to date has had more cost-effective impact on student learning than the Ceará program had in schools with high fidelity implementation.

The Ceará program has important advantages over many other models of in-service teacher development. First, it has lower unit costs, as it avoids the logistics expenses of off-site programs and makes efficient use of IT (video analysis and Skype interactions) to connect schools with expert coaches. Second, it leverages skills already present in schools. Third, by building the expertise of pedagogical coordinators and stimulating interaction among teachers, the program creates a platform for gradual and continuous reinforcement of improved teaching techniques. Given the reality that changing adult behavior is difficult, this may prove to be a necessary condition for improving teacher practice.

# **7.  Conclusions**

Middle-income developing countries in Latin America such as Brazil are investing heavily in education and adopting major education reforms, particularly aimed at raising teacher quality. Results of the 2015 PISA exam show that several countries in the region, such as Chile, Colombia and Peru, are making steady progress, but, overall, the eight Latin American countries (plus the City of Buenos Aires) that participated in the test remain in the bottom half of the 72-country sample. Among LAC countries, Brazil faces particularly big challenges. Brazilian 15-year-olds performed third-to-last (ahead of only Peru and Dominican Republic) in reading and science and second to last (ahead of only the Dominican Republic) in math. The Brazilian math score, 113 points below the OECD average, implies a lag almost three full years in math skills vis-a-vis the OECD and more than four years behind the top performing East Asian countries, Singapore, China and Japan.

A compelling body of global evidence shows that teachers’ effectiveness is the key in-school determinant of student learning and Brazil, like other countries, is looking for strategies to raise teacher effectiveness. Documented issues in Brazil are the low academic caliber of entering teachers and the prevalence of ineffective classroom practice. On previous PISA tests, Brazilian 15-year-olds who described themselves as future teachers scored 50 points below the national average and 100 points below future engineers in math; on University of São Paulo entrance exams, the highest scoring teacher-education candidates perform below the lowest-scoring medical school entrants. (Bruns and Luque, 2014). Classroom observation research in several different states and municipalities in Brazil (Bruns and Luque, 2014) has evinced the same issues seen in Ceará: teachers’ failure to use class time effectively, heavy reliance on traditional “chalk and talk” teaching methods, and inability to keep students engaged. While deep weaknesses in teachers’ content mastery may be not be amenable to short-term improvement through in-service training, the Ceará experiment demonstrates that teachers’ classroom practice is malleable, with potentially important impacts on student learning.

The design of the program was inspired by the research evidence, both from classroom observations of teacher practice and research on teacher value-added, of large variations in teacher quality _within_ schools. Leveraging the teaching skills that exist within schools by promoting greater collaboration and exchange of practice among teachers offers a low-cost strategy for raising teachers’ effectiveness. The Ceará program had four elements: an “information shock”, giving teachers benchmarked feedback about their practice based on classroom observations using the Stallings method; three face-to-face orientation sessions for school directors and pedagogical coordinators with a high-skill team of trainers; ongoing Skype interactions throughout the 2015 school year with the training team; and self-help materials, notably the Portuguese language version ( _Aula Nota 10_ ) of the book by US educator Douglas Lemov, _Teach Like a Champion_ . The information shock was intended to show schools they had room for improvement as well as to identify some of the individual teachers (identified by the subject and hour of the class they taught rather than by name) who managed class time most effectively, used interactive (question and answer) teaching practices, and kept students engaged. The coaching program aimed at turning the pedagogical coordinator in each school into a stronger resource for school improvement, by developing her ability to observe teachers’ classroom practice and provide useful feedback, and to promote collaboration and exchange of practice among teachers.

To assess program impact rigorously, 175 treatment and 175 control schools were randomly drawn from a representative sample of 400 schools that was stratified by geographic region, school size, and quartile of learning results. A shortage of observers during the baseline data collection reduced the final number of schools observed to 156 treatment and 136 control schools, and one school from each group closed between 2014 and 2015. Despite the uneven attrition, school, student and teacher demographic and background characteristics, as well as baseline classroom observations showed that the final treatment and control groups 39