Teacher Presence

The quality of teaching is a function of both a teacher’s skills and the teacher’s efforts to use those skills to help students. To measure teacher effort, the GEPD collects and reports observational data on teacher presence. Being present in the classroom is necessary (though not enough) for teaching and learning to happen, and presence is therefore one (admittedly coarse) measure of the effort that a teacher puts into teaching. High levels of teacher absence severely impair students’ ability to learn and result in significant losses of class time during the school year (Chaudhury et al. 2006; Bruns & Luque 2015; Lavy 2015). A recent study in seven Sub-Saharan African countries found that 44 percent of teachers were absent from class, either because they were absent from school, or because they were in the school but not in the classroom (Bold et al. 2017). And absence matters:  experimental research in India has found that reducing teacher absence by 21 percent increased students’ learning by 0.17 standard deviations (Duflo et al. 2012). Note that this indicator is meant to capture how well the system succeeds in getting teachers into the classroom—not to focus attention on the teachers themselves, but on the strengths or failings of the system that manages them.