Tackling inequality? Teacher effects and the socioeconomic gap in educational achievement

Author(s):

Rodrigo Torres(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

11. Educational Improvement and Quality Assurance

Format:

Paper

Session Information

11 SES 11 B, Paper Session

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-25

17:15-18:45

Room:

OB-E0.32

Chair:

Manuels Fernandezs

Contribution

Although teacher quality is usually signalled to be the most relevant school-level factor impacting students' learning, little is known about the relevance of teacher effects explaining educational inequality. By using a value-added model for a cohort of 10th graders, in this work we assess how important teacher effects are in Chilean schools; an educational system showing high social segregation, important educational inequality, and an increasing proportion of voucher schools. Specifically, we examine the socioeconomic gap in teacher quality across schools, as well as its importance explaining differences in students' achievement by school socioeconomic status in math and language. We also identify some other school and class characteristics associated to higher teacher effectiveness.

Method

Our estimation approach is based on four main steps. First, we estimate teacher effects by means of teacher value-added models for 6 different specifications. Second, and through regression techniques, we use such measures to estimate the existing average socioeconomic gap on teacher value-added across schools, according to their socioeconomic status (SES) classification. By doing such analysis we also find some class and school level characteristics associated with higher teacher effects in schools. Third, we estimate a quantile regression using the same model, in order to assess for any relevant differences in this gap at different parts of the teacher effects estimated distribution, specifically for high and low-performing teachers. Finally, and to check for some of our models assumptions, we re-ran the same models utilizing different student and teacher samples, as well as different estimation methods.

Expected Outcomes

Our results indicate that there is important variation in teacher effects in the Chilean context. We found an important proportion of highly effective teachers in low socioeconomic status (SES) schools, but also much bigger variation in teacher effects across those schools. Interestingly, on average, teacher effects in math are larger in both low and high SES schools, and below average in middle SES schools. When looking at differences in teacher effects distributions in schools from different SES, we found mean differences could be as big as 0.08 standard deviations over students' test scores after two years of schooling. Variation in teacher effects tends to decrease when moving towards higher SES schools, where there is also a smaller proportion of low-performing teachers. We find no differences on teacher effects according to school property after controlling by school socioeconomic status. Those teachers in classes presenting more homogeneity on their students´ prior academic results and fewer pupils, also showed to be more effective. All in all, teacher effects have a levelling impact for students in low SES schools when compared to those in middle SES schools, but no significant impact when compared to students in high SES schools.

References

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Author Information

Rodrigo Torres (presenting / submitting)

UCL Institute of Education

Department of Social Science

Santiago de Chile

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