Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition From Student Teaching to the Classroom

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers’ transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.

Teacher Unions, Political Machines, and the Thorny Politics of Education Reform in Latin America

Existing research on developing countries emphasizes the decisive power of teacher unions in education politics. Yet that power varies, and a full understanding of the roots of union power and the sources of cross-national variation requires deeper analysis of organizational dynamics within unions. This analysis supports four arguments. First, teachers have a range of advantages in overcoming obstacles to collective action. Second, unions are not all alike; they vary widely, from interest groups (in Chile, Brazil, and Peru) to powerful political machines (in Mexico and Ecuador). Third, the source of this variation lies in factors (e.g., influence over teacher hiring) that shift power within unions from members to leaders in political-machine unions. Fourth, analyzing the dimensions of variation helps explain the different outcomes of recent reforms to teacher careers in Latin America, especially in highlighting the staunch opposition from political-machine unions.

Teacher Hiring Instruments and Teacher Value Added: Evidence from Peru

In this article, we explore whether the evaluation instruments used to recruit teachers in the national teacher hiring process in Peru are good predictors of teacher effectiveness. To this end, we estimate teacher value-added (TVA) measures for public primary school teachers in 2018 and test for their correlation with the results of the 2015 and 2017 national evaluations. Our findings indicate that among the three sub-tests that comprise the first, centralized stage of the process, the curricular and pedagogical knowledge component has the strongest (and significant) correlation with the TVA measure, while the weakest correlation is found with the reading comprehension component. At the second, decentralized stage, we find no significant correlation with our measures of TVA for math, as well as non-robust correlations for the professional experience and classroom observation evaluation instruments. A positive and significant correlation is found between the classroom observation component and TVA for reading. Moreover, we find correlations between our measure of TVA and several teacher characteristics: TVA is higher for female teachers and for those at higher salary levels while it is lower for teachers with temporary contracts (compared to those with permanent positions).