Social Stratification, Welfare, and Social Policy Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI)

Said Hassan from Oxford University present “Better teachers, smarter kids? The impact of teacher qualifications on students’ academic performance”

This is an in-person only event.

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Abstract

Teachers play a formative role in shaping children’s school experiences, and ultimately, their educational outcomes. Yet, access to effective and qualified teachers is far from random, but rather tied to other inequalities, such as children’s socioeconomic background and race. In this study, I use full population Danish administrative data to explore the consequences of unequal access to qualified teachers in three steps. First, I document strong patterns of teacher-student sorting in Denmark, one of the world’s most equal societies and generous welfare states. In short, teachers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and with higher prior academic achievements tend to select into schools serving high-achieving children from privileged background. Second, I investigate the effect of teacher qualifications on students’ test score performance. To facilitate causal estimates, I exploit plausibly exogenous shocks to teacher changes induced by parental leave spells—which, I show, are unrelated to an extensive set of observed classroom characteristics, including student well-being and measures of classroom climate. Finally, I explore differentials in the impact of teacher qualifications, by students’ socioeconomic background. Consistent with compound disadvantage theory, I find that low-SES students benefit more from qualified teachers but are also less likely to be exposed to them in the first place.