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Education spending has increased significantly in Latin America, but less is known about how resources are distributed. Using original data, this study measures the inequality in per-pupil spending between regions with different levels of socioeconomic status within Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. We find that Brazil has the widest funding gap due to inequalities in local revenues between high- and low-socioeconomic-status regions. However, the country's funding gap has narrowed over time. School funding in Colombia has become more regressive, but its gap is half the size of the gap in Brazil. The distribution of school funding in Peru has changed from being regressive to progressive. Education spending in Chile and in Ecuador is consistently progressive. However, while the progressiveness of funding in Ecuador is driven by transfers targeted at disadvantaged rural areas, the funding formulas in Chile address socioeconomic inequalities beyond the rural-urban gap.

This paper uses the 2015 Peruvian national teacher selection process to explore candidates' rank-ordered preferences for public schools. We show that, in seeking a permanent position, candidates prefer schools that are closer to where they attended their Teacher Education Program and that are located in urban areas. These preferences vary by candidates' attributes: urban location seems to be particularly important for women and higher-performing candidates. Preferences for proximity to previous workplace are weaker for younger candidates and stronger for high performers. Candidates also prefer larger schools located in low-poverty districts, with one teacher per classroom (versus non-single-teacher/multigrade), Spanish language instruction (versus non-bilingual), and access to basic services. A greater understanding of which school characteristics are most valued by teachers can help to design effective policies for attracting candidates to hard-to-staff schools.

Extensive sorting of high-performing teachers into the most advantaged schools contributes to the wide socioeconomic achievement gaps in many countries. The Chilean Pedagogical Excellence Assignment (AEP) pays bonuses to high-performing teachers that are larger if they work at a disadvantaged school. Using a sharp regression discontinuity based on the program's eligibility rules, we estimate how the award affects where high-performing teachers choose to work. The bonus, equivalent to 16 percent of an average annual salary, increased retention of high-performing teachers in disadvantaged schools by 17 to 21 percentage points. In contrast, those teachers in more advantaged schools seem to use the award as a quality signal to stay or move to relatively high-achieving schools. While the program accomplished its goal of retaining high-performing teachers already working at disadvantaged schools, it did not achieve the objective of attracting better teachers from more advantaged schools.

To contribute to the debate about the reorganization of public-school supply, we analyze a reform introduced in Colombia in 2001 that merged independent schools into a single institution. Specifically, we estimate differences in achievement, dropout rates, teacher characteristics, and technological infrastructure between sites belonging to multi-site schools and single-site schools. Our results suggest that there are no differences in test scores, but lower dropout rates in multi-site schools. Also, we found that sites belonging to multi-site schools, especially in larger networks (more than six sites) and far away from the main site of the school, have younger teachers with lower salaries who are more likely to have a temporary contract. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that more isolated sites from large-sized schools have less access to the internet and a computer room than single-site schools. These results provide evidence for reforms to increase cooperation between sites.

Inequality in access to high-quality teachers is an important driver of socioeconomic student achievement gaps. We experimentally evaluate a novel nationwide low-cost government program that deployed two behavioral strategies to motivate teachers to apply to job vacancies in disadvantaged schools. These strategies consisted of an "altruistic identity" treatment, which primed teachers' altruistic identity by making it more salient, and an "extrinsic incentives" treatment, which simplified the presentation and increased the salience of an existing government monetary incentive scheme that rewards teachers who work in underprivileged institutions. Both strategies successfully encouraged teaching candidates to apply to disadvantaged schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the effects of a school accountability policy on year-to-year teacher mobility in publicly and privately managed low-performing schools in Chile. As school ranking depends on the institution's relative position according to a set of variables and their corresponding thresholds, we use a multivariate regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of the policy on teacher mobility. Our findings reveal that teachers are generally more likely to leave low-performing schools, although this result varies by type of management. Teachers in public schools tend to transfer to other schools within the system, and those who do so are more likely to be working in two or more schools. Meanwhile, teachers in private schools are comparatively more likely to exit the system altogether, with mobility concentrated among low-productivity teachers. Despite these differences, the introduction of accountability did not induce new hires at either type of school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore whether the evaluation instruments used in the teacher selection process in Peru are good predictors of teacher effectiveness. To this end, we estimate teacher value-added (TVA) measures for public primary school teachers and test their relationship with Peru's results of two rounds of the teacher evaluation (i.e., a centralized national stage and a decentralized stage performed at the school level). Our findings indicate that among the instruments that comprise the national stage of the process, the logical reasoning and curricular and pedagogical knowledge subtests have the strongest relationship with the TVA measure, while the weakest relationship is found with the reading comprehension component. Also, we find that the weighted aggregate score has a higher relationship with estimated TVA than the specific subtests. At the school-level stage, we find no significant relationships with our measures of TVA for math, as well as a nonrobust relationship for the classroom observation and interview evaluation instruments for reading. Moreover, we find relationships between our TVA measure and several teacher characteristics: TVA is higher for female teachers and for those at higher salary levels while it is lower for teachers with temporary contracts. These results provide lessons for the design and implementation of evaluation instruments in teacher hiring processes around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyzes the impact of the Adjusted Voucher Law´s school rankings on low-performing schools in Santiago, Chile, and provides evidence on the effects of the pressures of accountability systems on teacher policies and practices. The empirical strategy is based on the fact that schools are ranked according to their position on a set of thresholds. We used a generalization of the traditional regression discontinuity design for the case where treatment assignment is determined by variables. To gather information on teacher policies and practices, we conducted a survey of 4th-grade teachers in the Greater Santiago area. The results indicate that low-performing schools responded to the treatment by implementing policies that seek to improve their results in the short term. We also found no significant effects on teaching practices, suggesting that many of these changes are implemented top down from the school administrators, without involving teachers in the process.