Closing the Teacher Quality Gap? An Empirical Analysis of Teacher-to-Classroom Assignment Problems

Disadvantaged students are frequently matched with low-quality teachers, even within schools. It is however unclear whether alternative teacher assignment schemes would lead to better average education outcomes or to more equal education outcomes.  To investigate potential gains from alternative teacher assignment schemes we consider an education production function in which the returns to teacher quality can differ across students with different ability levels. Our data comes from a field experiment where teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within schools. We derive and test the assumptions under which the complementarity between teacher quality and student ability can be identified, also taking peer effects into account; based on the model we find empirical evidence for complementarity between teacher quality and student ability in the field experiment.