| Amita Chudgar
Michigan State University
National income, income inequality, and the importance of schools and teachers: A hierarchical cross-national comparison
FINAL REPORT
Amita Chudgar (Michigan State University) and Thomas Luschei (Florida State University)
We use data from the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to examine two distinct but related issues. First, we explore the degree to which the impact of schools on student achievement varies across 25 diverse countries participating in the fourth-grade application of the 2003 TIMSS. We are particularly interested in whether the degree to which schools ’Äúmatter’Äù varies according to national income or income inequality, and whether schools can play a role in dampening SES-based achievement gaps. We find that, in most cases, family background is more important than schools in understanding variations in student performance. Yet schools are nonetheless a significant source of variation in student performance, especially in poor and unequal countries. In some cases, schools may also bridge the achievement gap between high and low socioeconomic status children. However, schools’Äô ability to do so is not systematically related to a country’Äôs economic or inequality status. Our findings argue for international attention not only on national or personal income but also on income inequality. At the school level, significant differences across schools indicate that contrary to many earlier studies, schools do matter. At the country level, our findings argue for a consistent government role in ensuring equitable and adequate schools, especially in poor and unequal regions. Focusing on low-income students in unequal regions may be a particularly high-yield strategy for directing scarce educational resources. Finally, the international aid community must take note of the importance of income inequality and consider the development of aid targets based on levels of inequality.
The second issue we examine is whether we can identify teacher characteristics that are consistently related to fourth grade students’Äô mathematics achievement both across and within a diverse set of countries participating in the 2003 fourth grade TIMSS. Despite costly global efforts to improve and reward teacher characteristics like education and experience, there is little international evidence regarding the relationship between these attributes and student achievement. It is also unclear whether these attributes are more important among less advantaged children or in lower-income countries. We examine relationships among teacher characteristics (experience, education, readiness to teach, and gender), student background, and fourth grade students’Äô mathematics achievement across 25 diverse countries participating in the 2003 TIMSS. Within these diverse settings, we find limited evidence that teacher characteristics deemed important in teacher upgrading and compensation are systematically related to student learning. Additionally, we find little consistency across countries in teacher characteristics that are positively related to student achievement, and little evidence that any of these teacher characteristics is more important for lower-income students. We also do not find a relationship between national income and the importance of the teacher characteristics we study. Our study aims to inform global policies aimed at teacher compensation and upgrading efforts, and to encourage country-specific research to pursue these questions further. We also recommend the development of more sophisticated measures of teacher capacity, such as knowledge of the subject matter, in future cross-national studies of achievement.
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