Teachers' Preferences for Proximity and the Implications for Staffing Schools: Evidence from Peru

Abstract

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Altruism or Money? Reducing Teacher Sorting using Behavioral Strategies in Peru

“…This may be due to different levels of labor flexibility for these groups. Such patterns, which have already been documented in the literature (see Bertoni et al 2019), are confirmed in our sample. 20 Given how remote the disadvantaged schools are (approximately four times farther away from the province capital than the rest of the schools), it is plausible that the treatments were not effective among individuals with lower mobility (e.g., those for whom commuting longer distances is more costly), who are more often women.…”

“…In this regard, Table 1 shows that out of the 12,300 public schools that had vacancies in the 24 regions of Peru in 2019, 6,424 (52%) were not selected by any candidate at the national stage. The difference in terms of observable characteristics between these two groups of schools is striking and illustrates teacher preferences for more advantaged institutions: those not selected are notably more rural, farther from the province capital, with less access to basic services, and with a greater proportion of low-performing students (these preferences are consistent with the findings in other papers; see, for instance, Bertoni et al 2019).…”

“…See for instance Bertoni et al 2019. Our paper relates to several strands of the literature in behavioral economics and education. First, it builds on research on teacher sorting and inequality.…”

“…According to the literature, teachers have stronger preferences for specific school characteristics. In general, they prefer to work close to where they live or to where they grew up, as well as prefer to teach in urban schools (Boyd et al 2005, Reininger 2012, Rosa 2017, Bertoni et al 2019. Moreover, teachers tend to avoid schools with higher concentrations of low-income and low-performing students (Carroll et al 2000, Engel et al 2014, Bertoni et al 2019.…”

Teacher Compensation and Structural Inequality: Evidence from Centralized Teacher School Choice in Perú

“…Subject competency test have shown to correlate with teacher value added and other dimensions of teacher quality in several contexts (Bold et al, 2017;Estrada, 2019;Gallegos et al, 2019;Araujo et al, 2020). In Perú in particular, Bertoni et al (2021) document strong correlations between various measures of teaching effectiveness and the score in the curricular and pedagogical knowledge module of the evaluation test. Competent teachers are defined in Figure 1 as those who attain a score of at least 60% in that module of the test.…”