Improving Teachers’ Professionalism On An Experimental Basis

While education economists have paid considerable attention to the performance of the education sectors, they have placed little emphasis on the management of the pedagogical process. In the context of developing countries, there are clear signs of weak management and too many school personnel neglect tasks deemed essential for student learning. Using data from a large-scale experiment conducted recently in Madagascar, the article analyzes the variations in impact of a set of management interventions designed to improve the engagement at work of public primary school teachers. While school-level interventions raise the teachers’ level of professionalism on average, the results show that there is considerable heterogeneity in the impacts of such interventions. By contrast, the results indicate that targeting district and subdistrict administrators have little effect, overall and no matter the teachers’ characteristics.