Improving teaching and learning through effective incentives What Can We Learn from Education Reforms in Latin America?

1. Improving teaching and learning through effective incentives What Can We Learn from Education Reforms in Latin America? Emiliana Vegas and Ilana Umansky The World Bank

2. Motivation • Teacher costs represent the largest share of educational expenditure • Teachers play a key role in school quality and student learning • Attracting and retaining qualified teachers, and motivating them to do the best work they can, is arguably the most important education challenge

3. Components of the study • Theoretical and empirical review of literature on teacher incentives • Empirical analysis/update of relative teacher salaries in 17 Latin American countries • 7 case studies/evaluations of education reforms affecting teachers • Qualitative case studies in Chile and Peru of the political economy of teacher incentive reforms

4. Research team

5. Defining teaching quality • What makes a teacher effective? • In this study, we take the view that effective teachers are those whose students are learning, as measured by assessments of student achievement.

6. Two cases of performance-based teacher incentive reforms • Chile’s Sistema Nacional de Evaluación de Desempeño de los Establecimientos Educacionales (SNED) • Mexico’s Carrera Magisterial (CM)

7. Characteristics of teacher incentive programs: SNED in Chile • Introduced in 1996 • Group-based incentive, awarded to highest-performing schools serving 25 percent of enrollment in each region • School performance is measured by student test scores, taking into account absolute scores and learning progress, as well as characteristics of the student population in each school • 90% of the SNED bonus is divided among all teachers in the winning school • It represents between 5 and 7% of an annual salary

8. Characteristics of teacher incentive programs: CM in Mexico • Introduced in 1996 • Group-based incentive, awarded to highest-performing schools serving 25 percent of enrollment in each region • School performance is measured by student test scores, taking into account absolute scores and learning progress, as well as characteristics of the student population in each school • 90% of the SNED bonus is divided among all teachers in the winning school • It represents between 5 and 7% of an annual salary

9. Chile: Analysis of teacher pay

10. Mexico: Carrera Magisterial

11. Teacher salary structure v. salary structure of other workers Salary Other workers Teachers Experience or education

12. Decomposition of teacher pay Sources: Cox (2003) and Urquiola and Vegas (2005)

13. Estimated impact on student achievement of SNED and CM Chile: SNED • Preliminary evidence of a cumulative positive impact on the student achievement in schools with relatively high probabilities of winning the award. México: Carrera Magisterial • No program impact on teaching quality. • Teachers who face the greatest incentives (who would earn salary increases if their students have high test scores) do not tend to have students with higher achievement.

14. What factors may explain the relatively weak impact of performance-based pay teacher incentive programs? • In CM, few teachers face a real possibility of winning • The magnitude of the SNED bonus may be too small to merit the extra effort • The incentive may only be weakly related to teaching quality and effort • The political context and especially teachers unions play an important role in the design and implementation of teacher incentive reforms

15. Improving teaching and learning through effective incentives What Can We Learn from Education Reforms in Latin America? Emiliana Vegas and Ilana Umansky The World Bank