Download Research Area: Teachers and Teaching Guntars Catlaks, Education

Research Area: Teachers and Teaching
Guntars Catlaks, Education International,
Amita Chudgar, Michigan State University,
With support from
Catherine Jere, UNESCO
We ask that the assigned partners correspond with one another and prepare a short (<2000 word)
memo, which addresses the following four elements:
1. measures of inequality that are more or less conventionally used in a particular research area;
2. critiques of these measures and consideration of their usefulness in future cross-national
measurement exercises;
The report by Post-2015 Education Indicators Technical Advisory Group of the EFA Steering
Committee (2014) puts forward a set of global education indicators. EFA SC Target 6 states the
ultimate goal: By 2030, all governments ensure that all learners are taught by qualified,
professionally-trained, motivated and well supported teachers. OWG Target 4.c stipulates progress
measurement: By 2030, increase by x% the supply of qualified teachers, including through
international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially LDCs and SIDS.
Both versions of this target are based on the assumption that quality teachers are the key resource in
providing quality education to learners. Indeed, teachers matter because they have a significant
impact on student achievement and school quality (OECD, 2005; Scheopner, 2010). Equity dimension
here is understood in terms of equal access of all groups of students (desegregated by gender,
income, location etc.) to such teachers.
Inequality in teacher distribution is established broadly in two ways; Lack of teachers (or quantity)
and, lack of quality teachers.
o
o
Lack of teachers
The first measure, lack of teachers involves generating counts of teachers necessary to meet
various enrollment targets. Generating these counts is complex as it requires several pieces of
information and assumption about student enrollment, appropriate class size, teacher attrition
due to retirement and resignation to name a few. The best and most extensive efforts in this
regard are from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. They regularly present and update this
information. For example; http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/fs27-2013-teachersprojections.pdf
This information about teacher shortage is crucial for understanding teacher equity situation.
Lack of access to teachers or teaching of any kind is a first-order problem, before we consider
the nuances of teacher quality.
The main limitation of this information is that it is based on a series of projections, and
ultimately still fairly crude in terms of understanding what nuanced steps a country might take to
address teacher shortage. If we know that country X needs so many thousand teachers, that is
useful, but it is still not necessarily fine-grained information in terms of knowing how to plan
training, recruiting, retaining these teachers. It may also not be adequate to know what
geographic regions to focus, what demographic to target etc.
Lack of quality teachers
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In terms of the qualitative aspects, things get more complicated. On the one hand, there is a fair
bit of agreement in the literature that teacher quality is hard to measure, on the other hand a
range of imperfect measures are widely used to measure this concept.
The literature often resorts to the standard indicators of teacher “qualification” to measure
teacher “quality”. These include;
o Level of education
o Pre-service teacher training
o In-service teacher training
o Teacher experience
is also often added to this list, as there is some argument that teacher experience is indicative of
their expertise. (Though, literature shows that this may be a non-linear relationship, i.e., beyond
a certain point experience is not associated with higher levels of learning)
The main problem with the qualification measures is that they may or may not be cross-nationally
comparable, and just the indicator for teacher training yes/no may ultimately contain very little
information about the true skills of a given teacher. This is especially true in systems where
teacher training can be low-quality to begin with and thus not indicative of what the teacher may
actually know.
Conventionally, several indicators are suggested by the TAG paper: % of teachers in basic
education (should cover all levels) qualified according to national standards desegregated by
gender; - % of teachers in basic and secondary education and with pedagogical training by
gender; -Student/qualified teacher ratio in basic and secondary education which all are
reasonable indicators and can be used in the post-2015 monitoring.
Methodologically, as argued in the Equity Matters report (Wood, 2011), the principles of equity
suggest that any differences in educational outcomes should not be dependent on factors such
as student background, or quality of educational input (including teachers quality), over which
students have no control. Given the wide diversity of children needs globally even if equity of
access is achieved the issue of whether educational equity is about ensuring that everyone has
access to the same curriculum, knowledge and provision, or ensuring that the educational needs
of all are met through differentiation remains (Lloyd, 2000; Perry, 2009).
Chudgar and Luschei in 2013 work for UNICEF identified another dimension to understand the
gaps between teachers of more and less marginalized children. We called this the “demographic
gap”. While not commonly used as a measure of teacher quality, we note in the data that the
teachers of marginalized children tend to be disproportionately more male, and younger. Thus
o Gender and
o Age
are two additional dimensions that may be considered more closely to understand teacher
distribution. Younger teachers in rural and remote location reflect typically the fact that these
are new teachers who have been sent to take the hard postings, and as they gain seniority they
will move up towards urban and more privileged locations. The greater presence of male
teachers likely speaks to the lack of availability of locally trained females in difficult locations.
Female teachers are less likely to locate in, or commute to challenging circumstances for a whole
host of reasons. From the gender equity perspective student gender data could be linked with
teachers’ gender data e.g. % of girls compared with % of female teachers by level of education.
For example, the positive impact of female teachers on girls’ enrolment and their success in
education is well-documented (Kirk, 2005). Potential global indicator could also measure %
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increase by 2030 in number of women teachers in leadership and managerial roles at the school
level and within school governing boards.
When discussing the measurement of inequalities in post-2015 education targets teacher’s labour
rights perspective should also be taken into account. These rights are fundamental and there is
emerging research evidence (Kruijer, 2010, Wood, 2011, Wintour, 2013) that such professional
rights are intrinsically linked with teachers’ self-efficiency, professionalism and motivation and
consequently their advancement is contributing to students learning.
There are some indicators of teacher status that are also sometimes used to indicate teacher
quality. A key factor is;
o Contract status
While in the literature there may be some disagreement if it is a positive or a negative indicator
of teacher quality, contract status is a valuable indicator. The debate here focuses on the fact
that contract teachers are typically undertrained and underpaid compared to regular teachers.
The claims that they however seem to produce higher learning outcomes and exhibit more effort
in the classroom are strongly contested. Private providers of education in particular often do not
want to be hampered by the constraints of national pay agreements and restrictions on
employment related to teachers’ qualifications. There is pressure to substitute cheaper workers
or introduce short term contracts or systems of performance-related pay. (Ball and Youdell,
2009: 14-15) Teacher turnover and retention rates desegregated by school types and/or
employment status could serve as one statistical indication showing motivation and job
satisfaction – proxies of quality teaching alongside qualification, employment status and pay.
Teachers pay levels and structures are another key indicator in this area, therefore following
indicators could be considered: average teacher salaries relative to poverty levels; Percentage of
teachers’ paid below the average pay; Percentage of teachers reporting that they live under
poverty line/have to have a second paid job; percentage of teachers working in hazardous
environments who receive additional incentives.
Teachers’ self-reporting is critical albeit difficult to measure. Such aspects as their beliefs and
attitudes, education attainment and professional development, school climate, appraisal and
evaluation and job motivation are best assessed by OECD TALIS surveys which provide rich and
robust evidence for teachers’ policy however they are limited to mostly OECD countries. In the
next PISA cycle (2015) there will be teachers background questionnaire added to other
contextual questionnaires which could expand this information.
Curricular scope could be another critical proxy indicator for quality of teaching process. In
addition it should be matched by teachers’ education indicator such as: Incidence of regular
continuous professional development / percentage of teachers with received job training (ILO);
Percentage of professional development that is offered to teachers for free would be important
to match curricular scope.
3. key sources of data which could be employed to measure a particular equity dimension;

IEA’s TEDS-M is a valuable cross-national resource that focuses on pre-service math teachers,
or future teachers. So this dataset provides valuable information on mathematics teacher
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training, but TEDS-M does not link these teachers to their students. Thus with these data we
cannot conduct an analysis of “who teaches whom”.

OECD’s TALIS is the key cross-national dataset that measures a range of teacher attributes at
the school level. The key limitation is that TALIS does not link the teachers within a school to
their students. So while you can observe the teacher and her colleagues in a given school, and
you may have some sense of the school they are working in, you don’t get to see her students.
Thus with these data we may not be able to conduct a very fine grained analysis of “who teaches
whom”.

A range of cross-national assessment data such as TIMSS and PIRLS (IEA), PISA (OECD),
SACMEQ (from Southern and Eastern Africa), PASEC (from Francophone Africa), SERCE (from
Latin America) are all also useful sources to learn a bit about teachers in a given country. The key
limitation of most of these datasets is that we usually observe no more than one or two teachers
per school and usually the data are not representative of teachers nationally, but rather they
represent teachers of a “representative group of students”. These data thus allow an analysis of
“who teaches whom”, but the range of teacher variables available may be limited, and the
sample may not be nationally representative of all teachers in a country.

ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of the ILO/UNESCO Recommendations 1966
and 1997 (CEART) periodically monitors the status of teachers against benchmarks set in these
Recommendations in both compulsory and higher education based on surveys to governments
and contribution from civil society. Indicators such as: Job tenure (ILO); Precarious employment
rate (ILO); Working poor rate (ILO); Real earnings of casual workers (teachers) (ILO); Trade
union density rate in education (ILO); Collective bargaining rate (ILO); Availability of
institutionalized social dialogue
4. A list of no more than 10 recommended bibliographic references for equity measurement in the
research literature you surveyed.
Ball, S.J. and Youdell, D. (2008) Hidden Privatisation of Public Education, Report to Education
International.
Chudgar, Amita, and T.F. Luschei. 2013 “Final report: Study of teachers for children marginalized by
social origin, economic status, or location” submitted to United Nations Children’s Fund, New York
Kirk, J. (2005) The Impact of Women Teachers on Girls’ Education. UNESCO Bangkok.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2005) Teachers Matter:
Attracting, developing and retaining effective teacher. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Publishing.
Perry, L. (2009) Characteristics of equitable systems of education: a cross-national analysis. European
Education, 41 (1), 79-100.
Sahlberg, P. (2007) Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach. Journal of
Education Policy, 22(2), 147-171.
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UNESCO (2014) EFA Global Monitoring Report. Teaching and Learning: Achieving quality for all.
UNESCO Publishing.
Wood, E. at al (2011) Equity Matters. Report commissioned by Education International Research
Institute. Education International.
Wintour, N. (2013) Study on trends in freedom of association and collective bargaining in the
education sector since the financial crisis. Education International.
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