The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance

Abstract

International differences in teacher quality are commonly hypothesized to be a key determinant of the large international student performance gaps, but lack of consistent quality measures has precluded testing this. We construct country-level measures of teacher cognitive skills using unique assessment data for 31 countries. We find substantial differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries that are strongly related to student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation exploiting within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills. A series of robustness and placebo tests indicate a systematic influence of teacher skills as distinct from overall differences among countries in the level of cognitive skills. Moreover, observed country variations in teacher cognitive skills are significantly related to differences in women's access to high-skill occupations outside teaching and to salary premiums for teachers.Keywords: teacher cognitive skills, student performance, international comparison, PIAAC, PISA JEL classification: I20, H40, J20 OverviewNumerous international assessments have shown that student achievement differs widely across developed countries, but the source of these differences is not well-understood. While prior analysis has identified the impact of overall institutional structures (Hanushek and Woessmann (2011)), the research has been much less successful at identifying systematic features of schools and teachers that enter into explaining these achievement differences -leaving many policy discussions open to anecdotal and ad hoc explanations. This paper investigates whether differences in cognitive skills of teachers -which arise both from overall country skill differences and from policy decisions -can help explain international differences in student performance across developed countries.Policy discussions, building largely on within-country analyses of the importance of teachers, have emphasized the role of teacher skills in improving student achievement. For example, a widely-cited McKinsey report on international achievement concludes that "the quality of an educational system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers" and then goes on to assert that "the top-performing systems we studied recruit their teachers from the top third of each cohort graduate from their school system." (Barber and Mourshed (2007), p. 16) In a follow-on report, Auguste, Kihn, and Miller (2010) note that the school systems in Singapore, Finland, and Korea "recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort," which stands in stark contrast to the U.S. where "23% of new teachers come from the top third." (p. 5) They then recommend a "top third+ strategy" for the U.S. educational system. We investigate the implications for student achievement of focusing policy attention on the cognitive skills of potential teachers.Our analysis exploits unique data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) that for the first ...

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