Teachers play a crucial role in student development, and low-quality teachers’ lack of skill and motivation can harm wider society. Recruitment policies to enhance teacher quality are promising yet challenging to implement. This column examines evidence from Chile, focusing on a reform aimed at improving teaching quality through changes to university programme access for prospective teachers. The policy introduced scholarships for high-performing high school graduates while limiting access for low performers. This improved the quality of mathematics teachers, especially in disadvantaged schools, but did not affect the average performance of Spanish teachers.
Teacher quality plays a critical role in improving student learning. It can also shape a child’s future career prospects. Developing and implementing policies to enhance teacher quality is a key challenge for education systems worldwide. Recently, attention has increasingly focused on recruitment strategies designed to attract talented and motivated individuals to become schoolteachers. How should policymakers design incentives to effectively induce the right people into the teaching profession? More importantly, who should the policy target?
Understanding who is potentially a good teacher is not an easy task, and policies that fail to use reliable information to predict it may backfire. With this in mind, in a recent study we investigate the impact of a higher education policy implemented in Chile in 2011.
The reform
The Chilean reform centered on teaching training recruitment. The Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) decided to reshape the composition of enrollees in teacher training programmes. MINEDUC focused on one dimension: the university college entrance exam.
Before deciding whether to enroll in a higher education programme, Chilean high school pupils take the Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU) test, an entry exam for a large set of university programmes. MINEDUC offered a scholarship, the Beca Vocación de Profesor (BVP), to the top 20% PSU takers, conditional on them enrolling in a teacher training course. MINEDUC imposed a requirement on programmes accepting entrants financing their studies with the BVP (i.e., scholarship winners only): they would have to restrict access to the worst 50% PSU takers. As well as this, MINEDUC decided to incentivise top performers to work in more disadvantaged schools: BVP recipients would have to work in a public or rural school for three or two years, respectively.
So, the aim of the reform was twofold: remove lower performing graduates from the pool of teacher training enrollees while incentivising top performing ones, then direct the latter towards the areas most in need of quality teachers.
Was the policy effective?
The scholarship programme worked. The policy reform led to a 33% increase in enrollment in teacher training programmes among high-achieving graduates (BVP winners), while also causing a 17% decrease in overall enrollment by discouraging lower-achieving ones (i.e., the worst 50% of PSU takers).
As these individuals progressed through their studies and into the workforce, the initial enrollment effects were reflected in a similar impact on graduation rates and on the likelihood of becoming a teacher, lasting up to six years after graduation. The scholarship also motivated high-achieving PSU takers to work in publicly funded schools, a trend that persisted beyond the policy’s requirements. The average PSU score of newly hired teachers increased. But did this translate into better performance as teachers? And what did this imply for their students (that is, the next generation of schoolchildren)?
Did these better high school graduates become better teachers?
The core question at the heart of the reform is whether it is possible to improve the quality of the teacher workforce by attracting the best high-school graduates into the profession. To test this theory, in our study we focus on primary school teachers specialising in mathematics and Spanish. We estimate teachers’ contributions to their students’ performance using standardised test scores. We show that mathematics teachers who studied after 2011(and were affected by the recruitment reform) were better at improving their students’ test scores. More precisely, having a post-reform mathematics teacher is comparable to having a teacher with roughly 1.5 additional years of experience. The effect is even more substantial when focusing on more disadvantaged schools. But we do not see the same effect for Spanish teachers. Contrary to mathematics teachers, their performance in the classroom is unrelated to their performance on the PSU.
Notwithstanding, the impact on mathematics teachers is sizeable. But is it entirely due to the higher PSU scores of new teachers? Our analysis reveals that only part of the effect can be attributed to this factor. So, where does the remaining impact come from?
The role of motivation
For teachers, intrinsic motivation is essential. Research has shown that it significantly predicts their performance (Han and Yin, 2016). Policymakers must be aware that (dis)incentives based on a single criterion, such as a college entry exam, may attract candidates that differ in their intrinsic motivation.
Using survey data from MINEDUC, we find that part of the impact we observe for mathematics teachers is due to new hires from the lower end of the PSU distribution being more intrinsically motivated to teach. Those who chose not to pursue a teaching career, limited by the narrower selection of university programmes, were less motivated to teach in the first place. Crucially for the policy design, BVP recipients do not show differences in measures of intrinsic motivation, indicating that the financial incentives provided through grants did not attract low-motivated individuals into the teaching profession.
So, part of the policy’s success, at least for mathematics, was the filtering out of less intrinsically motivated programme entrants.
Concluding remarks
Attracting and retaining better teachers is challenging from a policy perspective. Predicting who will be better at improving students’ learning is not straightforward and appears to vary from subject to subject. Our results show that good high school graduates become good mathematics teachers, but this is not generalisable across the board.
We also stress the importance of other dimensions when designing recruitment policies. For example, the incentive scheme in place must be carefully constructed to select the more skilled as well as the more motivated teachers. It is this balance between technical ability and passion for education that can make a difference in teaching standards and for children’s future, both in Chile and further afield.
Authors: Adriano De Falco, Benjamin Hattemer, Sofía Sierra Vásquez