Stability of Teachers and Public Schools Education Quality

Abstract

This paper is aimed at analyzing the effect of teachers’ stability on education quality in Brazilian public elementary schools, considering that the decision to become a teacher also involves non-pecuniary factors. The latest database of the Prova Brazil Examination (2011) was applied to the methodology of propensity score matching in order to overcome the possible selection bias of schools due to the correlation between the teachers’ stability benefit factors associated with salaries and the students’ admission rules. In addition, sensitivity analysis was performed according to Ichino et al. (2006) to verify the robustness of results over the possibility of the presence of an unobserved variable to invalidate the conditional independence assumption needed to identify the causal relationship. The results indicate, for all regions in the country, that the larger the lack of teachers holding tenure positions the lower the students’ performance, vis-à-vis the ambiguous effect found in the research of wages on students’ performance. This suggests that schools keeping greater proportion of teacher with tenure tend to provide a better students’ scholar achievement.