How to manage teacher careers: Considering complexity and capacity constraints throughout the career cycle

• In Event: Underlying assumptions and competing perspectives: Examining challenges in teacher policy and practice

Proposal

Among the many challenges of managing teacher careers at the system level, two stand out. First, teacher careers are complex, involving many policy areas and decisions that mutually interact. A policy change in one area of teacher management can have side effects, whether helpful or harmful, in other areas. Second, teacher career policy is a realm of capacity constraints and trade-offs. Raising teacher salaries may come at the expense of the in-service training budget. This is particularly true in many low- and middle-income countries, where education authorities may have relatively little implementation capacity, and the average teacher may have not benefitted from high-quality education in the knowledge and competencies that they are expected to cultivate in their students.

To adequately encapsulate the twin challenges of complexity and capacity, we propose a fully hedonic, fully dynamic model of teacher careers. By ‘fully hedonic’, we mean that the model accounts for the full range of factors that can influence teachers’ motivations. These factors go far beyond financial incentives. Additionally, the model also accounts for the heterogeneity of motivation across the pool of teachers, such that some teachers may be more motivated than others, and teachers with similar levels of motivation may prioritise different goals in their classrooms. By ‘fully dynamic’, we mean that the model allows for different phases of teachers’ careers to have different hedonic features. Additionally, the model allows for the fact that prospective teachers, in deciding whether or not to enter the profession, may look beyond their starting salaries to weigh expected benefits and costs over the full span of their careers.

This model emerges from an extensive review of relevant literature from educational research, economics, psychology, and public management, across a wide range of countries with different levels of development. As a result, we propose a model with five rows and four columns. The rows represent five hedonic factors: Delegation (who does what, where?), Information (how well are they doing it?), Support (what would help them do to it better?), Finance (how are they paid), and Motivation (what else shapes their motivation, e.g. social and professional norms?). These five hedonic factors draw on the five design elements of accountability in Pritchett (2015). In turn, the columns represent four phases of the teacher career cycle: pre-service, novice, experienced, and veteran. Thus, the model allows policymakers and researchers to map different features of teacher careers, across career phases, onto a single framework, in order to better understand the current landscape and more effectively plan for reform.

One key insight from this model is the fundamental importance of coherence in teacher career policy, across hedonic factors and career phases. Additionally, teacher career management also needs to be coherent with the context of the specific education system in question. We illustrate such coherence with a hypothetical example of a coherent approach to teacher careers, focusing on differentiated responsibilities between teachers. This hypothetical example is discussed alongside empirical examples, both positive and negative, from both developed and developing countries.

Authors

• Yue-Yi Hwa, RISE Programme

• Lant Pritchett, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford