Does socioeconomic sorting of teacher qualifications exacerbate mathematics achievement inequity? Panel data estimates from 20 years of TIMSS

Abstract

Recent and older studies have reported either a persistence or a widening of the socioeconomic achievement gap—the difference in performance between students in top and bottom socioeconomic groups. Using a panel data technique with country fixed effects for 32 education systems and six waves of data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, we examine whether the sorting of teachers by specialization level in mathematics education and novice status across students of different socioeconomic backgrounds exacerbates mathematics achievement inequity despite the presence of a time-varying control for socioeconomic school segregation. We find modest evidence that sorting by mathematics education is associated with achievement inequity, but no evidence supporting the importance of sorting based on teacher experience. Socioeconomic school segregation, on the other hand, clearly and persistently exacerbates achievement inequity. The results have policy implications regarding the effective distribution of educational resources. Availability of data and materialsThe data are freely available via the TIMSS data repository.