An educated workforce is necessary for a high national standard of living and increasing the human capital of the poor is likely one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty and increase upward economic mobility. Recent estimates also suggest that differences in (the quality of) human capital can explain a dominant share of world income differences.

Over the last 25 years, school enrollment, at all levels, has increased universally, and most children in low- and middle-income countries now complete primary school. Enrolling in school, however, does not guarantee that children acquire the competencies set out in the official curriculum. In fact, a large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills.

A growing body of evidence, from both the teacher value-added literature and the experimental literature in development economics, shows that teacher quality is a key determinant of student learning, although other factors also play an important role. Little is known, however, about what specific dimensions of teacher quality matter and even less about how teachers perform along these dimensions—information that is crucial in order to guide both research and policy design.

These facts are the starting point for an ongoing research program that I and co-authors initiated in 2010. So far the program has collected informative and standardized measures of what primary teachers know, what they do, and what they have to work with using data collected through direct observations, unannounced visits, and tests, from primary schools in seven Sub-Saharan African countries which together represent close to 40 percent of the region’s total population.

The financial support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond have enabled me to visit the World Bank’s research department (DECRG) and complete two research articles jointly with researchers at DECRG and Tessa Bold (IIES). The visit at the World Bank’s research department was very productive and intellectually stimulating. Not only did we manage to complete two articles, of which one recently was published in a top general interest economics journal, but we also managed to start new promising projects we plan to continue to work on.

The first article (”Enrollment without Learning: Teacher Effort, Knowledge, and Skill in Primary Schools in Africa”) draws on the data that to date has been collected from a total of seven countries (eight surveys): Kenya (2012), Mozambique (2014), Nigeria (2013), Senegal (2010), Tanzania (2010, 2014), Togo (2013), and Uganda (2013). Our main focus here is on teacher quality. Specifically, we provide answers to three questions: How much do teachers teach? What do teachers know? How well do teachers teach? We also provide some explanation for the results by discussing what the pipeline to a teaching position looks like, what kind of teachers emerge from it, and what incentives these teachers face to teach well when deployed in schools. Finally, we conclude the article with a brief discussion of the core implications of the findings, both for education systems and education policy reform and for the experimental and quasi-experimental research agenda on ways to improve education quality. The last revisions of the articles were completed in September 2017 and the article is now published in the Journal of Economic Perceptives.

The evidence we discuss in the article paints a bleak picture of teacher quality. For example, teachers, on average, are absent from class 44% of the time and about half of that classroom absence is due to teachers not at all being at the school during regular teaching ours. As a result, while the scheduled teaching time for fourth graders is relatively long—5 hours and 25 minutes—the actual time students are taught is about half that time (2 hours and 46 minutes). Pedagogical knowledge is low, with one in ten teachers deemed to have minimum pedagogy knowledge, and even fewer teachers are judged to properly manage to assess students learning progression and shortcoming. Maybe most concerning we find that few teachers master the content of the subject they are teaching. In fact, many teachers struggle with tasks that their students should master in lower primary.

The second research article (”The Lost Human Capital: Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Africa”) focuses the (causal) relationship between teacher content knowledge and student learning. The article starts by documenting how far along the official curriculum children have progressed after almost four years of schooling; i.e., how many years of curriculum based, or effective years of education, they have acquired. We then present a simple statistical model of cumulative knowledge acquisition, accounting for imperfect persistence in learning between grades and unobserved teacher effects, and exploit within-student within-teacher variation to estimate both the contemporaneous effect of teacher content knowledge on student achievement as well as the extent of fade out of the teachers’ impact in earlier grades.

We show that after four years of schooling, the majority of students fail to master tasks covered in the second year curriculum; i.e. their effective years of education after four years is less than two. We further show that this result can partly be explained by the fact that many teachers struggle with tasks that their students should master in lower primary. To reach this conclusion we calculate the learning achievements in a series of counterfactual policy experiments. Specifically we show that had all students been taught by teachers deemed to master the lower secondary curriculum—a minimum official criterion in the countries in the sample—our estimates show that students would have acquired on average one more year of curriculum adjusted human capital. This in turn implies that raising teacher content knowledge to the lower bar for primary teachers in Africa would in itself, holding teacher effort and pedagogical skills constant (and at a low level), close the observed human capital cap after four years by more than a third. The study highlights the huge shortcomings in teacher quality in Africa and the lost human capital as a consequence.

The support from the Riksbankens jubileumsfond and the time spent visiting the research department of the World Bank have also resulted in additional ongoing projects, including one with close connection to the research discussed above. More specifically, we have continued working on trying to quantify and analyze school and teacher quality, with specific focus on the teachers’ pedagogical skills and the management structure in the school. The starting point for this work is recent research, primarily focused on private firms, showing a strong connection between management structure and firm productivity. The question we are trying to answer here is whether a similar pattern can be observed within primary schools. This project, just as the research program discussed above, will involve both the development of new measurement tools and attempts to estimate causal effects, using quasi-experimental methods, to determine whether these effects are quantitatively important.