The Lost Human Capital : Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Africa
In many low-income countries, teachers do not master the subject they are teaching, and children learn little while attending school. Using unique data from nationally representative surveys of schools in seven Sub-Saharan African countries, this p...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/149531557254443590/The-Lost-Human-Capital-Teacher-Knowledge-and-Student-Achievement-in-Africa http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31673 |
| Summary: | In many low-income countries, teachers
do not master the subject they are teaching, and children
learn little while attending school. Using unique data from
nationally representative surveys of schools in seven
Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper proposes a
methodology to assess the effect of teacher subject content
knowledge on student learning when panel data on students
are not available. The paper shows that data on test scores
of the student's current and the previous year's
teachers, and knowledge of the correlation structure of
teacher knowledge across time and grades, allow estimating
two structural parameters of interest: the contemporaneous
effect of teacher content knowledge, and the extent of fade
out of teacher impacts in earlier grades. The paper uses
these structural estimates to understand the magnitude of
teacher effects and simulate the impacts of various policy
reforms. Shortfalls in teachers' content knowledge
account for 30 percent of the shortfall in learning relative
to the curriculum, and about 20 percent of the cross-country
difference in learning in the sample. Assigning more
students to better teachers would potentially lead to
substantial cost-savings, even if there are negative
class-size effects. Ensuring that all incoming teachers have
the officially mandated effective years of education, along
with increasing the time spent on teaching to the officially
mandated schedule, could almost double student learning
within the next 30 years. |
|---|