Works in Progress :
Effect of Teacher Transfers on Student Learning ( with Aparajita Dasgupta and Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay )
Abstract : In this paper, we study the impact of teacher transfers in government primary schools in India on student learning. In developing countries, teacher transfers, in general, occur due to deficit teachers in schools, teacher preferences for school location characteristics, political factors etc. We utilise a government policy implemented in an Indian state in 2016 providing us with variation in teacher transfers. Using variation in the intensity with which the policy impacts school and a four-year panel data between 2014-15 to 2017-18 with a rich set of variables on 6,394 primary schools, we find a significant negative impact on student learning. Since school reported data can be biased, we also use student learning from another data collected by an independent non-governmental organisation and find that student reading scores are significantly negatively impacted while math scores witness no change. Heterogeneity analysis shows results driven by schools with greater number of students, lower Pupil Teacher Ratio, lower proportion of girls and lower proportion of students belonging to socially backward classes in the baseline year. In terms of mechanisms, we find that schools with larger transfers lose greater number of teachers making pupil teacher ratio worse and also losing more qualified teachers. With low student learning an important issue in developing countries, our results hold relevance.
Best Paper Award (second prize), AEDE 2022, Portugal