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The Supply Side of Teacher Labor Markets in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Mon, February 20, 9:30 to 11:00am EST (9:30 to 11:00am EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Constitution Level (3B), Roosevelt

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Scholars of comparative education have given a lot of attention to the demand side of teacher labor markets. We have asked how do policies attract teachers into the profession and then retain and motivate them once there. Given the importance of teachers in learning, attracting and retaining the best teachers is of critical importance. The effects of these policies, however, are influenced by a prior question: who becomes a teacher?

There is still a limited understanding of supply side factors that lead teachers to enter, stay in, or leave the profession. This broadly includes factors that explain why someone becomes and remains a teacher such as their personal background, demographics, education, attitudes, values, and professional motivations. Understanding the supply side factors is important not just in their own right but also because of the implications they may have for other teacher related practices and outcomes of interest to policy. For example, will a teacher education and training program yield expected results? If we wish to increase incentive for teachers, what would be the best way to do so given who enters the teaching profession?

This panel brings together a series of papers that engage in these questions across a number of country contexts including Burkina Faso, Colombia, India, South Africa, and Vietnam. We begin to provide tentative answers to questions about teacher selection through the analysis of large scale quantitative data. We hope that conversations sparked by these papers can begin to establish a research agenda that asks not only how can we attract the best teachers, but who becomes a teacher and why?

Davies's paper explores the evolution of education policies in India through the lens of the changing composition of the teacher labor force. He constructs a district-level panel dataset using administrative data from India to shed light on who becomes a teacher across various education policy reform episodes. He explores these changing demographics across the government and private sectors and provides a novel long-run explanation for why teacher incentive policies in India have had inconclusive effects on learning.

Chugdar, Kim, and Bizhanova’s paper leverages cross-national data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) to investigate who becomes a teacher and why they stay in the profession. Then, the paper asks how these motivations for becoming a teacher and staying in the profession influence their performance on the job as measured by professional development and classroom management practices.

Finally, Dembélé, Kyélem, Diatta, Perlaza, and Sirois’s paper explores a recent reform in Burkina Faso that required all new entrants into the teaching profession to hold a high school diploma to be admitted to teach K through 6. This raised the years of schooling from 10 to 13, the first such policy change since Burkina Faso’s independence in 1960. The paper combines qualitative analysis that traces the reforms processes and institutional changes with an original survey of prospective teachers in their first year of a two-year program. Findings suggest that the new teacher entrants are male dominated, with many university educated, and low levels of stated interest in staying in the teaching profession over 10 years.

Together, the three papers bring evidence to bear from a wide geographic scope around the central question of who becomes a teacher. The panel looks to generate discussion around how we can further understand teacher selection and retention, and draw cross-national comparative lessons for this emerging research agenda.

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