Does Test-Based Teacher Recruitment Work in the Developing World? Experimental Evidence from Ecuador

María Daniela Araujo P., Guido Heineck and Yyannú Cruz-Aguayo

VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Since 2007, the Ecuadorian government has required teacher candidates to pass national skill and content knowledge tests before they are allowed to participate in merit-based selection competitions for tenured positions at public schools in an attempt to raise teacher quality. We evaluate the impact of this policy using linked administrative teacher information to data from a unique experimental study where almost 15,000 kindergarten children were randomly assigned to their teachers in the 2012-2013 school year in Ecuador. We find positive and significant effects of test-screened tenured teachers of at least a 0.105 standard deviation for language and a 0.085 standard deviation for math, which persist even after controlling for teacher education, experience, cognitive ability, personality traits and classroom practices.

Keywords: teacher quality; education policy evaluation; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 I25 I28 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/242448/1/vfs-2021-pid-50503.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Test-Based Teacher Recruitment Work in the Developing World? Experimental Evidence from Ecuador (2020)
Working Paper: Does test-based teacher recruitment work in the developing world? Experimental evidence from Ecuador (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc21:242448

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().