This paper uses machine learning methods to identify key predictors of teacher effectiveness, proxied by student learning gains linked to a teacher over an academic year. Conditional inference forests and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator are applied to matched student-teacher...

School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading,...

In many low-income countries, teachers do not master the subject they are teaching, and children learn little while attending school. Using unique data from nationally representative surveys of schools in seven Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper proposes a methodology to assess the effect...

This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of two teacher incentive programs, which were conducted in a nationally representative sample of 420 public primary schools in Guinea. In 140 schools, high-performing teachers were rewarded in-kind, with the value of goods increasing with level of...

School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading,...

This study evaluates the impacts of low-cost, performance-based incentives in Tanzanian secondary schools. Results from a two-phase randomized trial show that incentives for teachers led to modest average improvements in student achievement across different subjects. Further, withdrawing...

Four different classroom observation instruments - from the Service Delivery Indicators, the Stallings Observation System, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, and the Teach classroom observation instrument - were implemented in about 100 schools across four regions of Tanzania. The research...

Pay levels for public sector workers-and especially teachers-are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while simple comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high. This study presents...