Person:
Béteille, Tara

Education Global Practice, East Asia and Pacific Region, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Teacher labor markets, Political economy, Higher education, Economics of education

ORCID

0000-0001-7013-5515

Departments

Education Global Practice, East Asia and Pacific Region, The World Bank

Last updated: September 20, 2023

Biography

Tara Béteille is a Senior Economist in the East Asia Pacific region and leads the World Bank’s Teacher Careers and Professional Development Thematic Group. Tara was part of the core team of the World Development Report 2018, Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, and led South Asia’s regional report, Ready to Learn. Ready to Thrive. In addition to the East Asia Pacific team, Tara has also worked in the World Bank’s South Asia education team, the Independent Evaluation Group, the Chief Economist’s Office for South Asia, and the Caribbean education team. Tara’s research focuses on the political economy of teacher labor markets and higher education. She also manages projects in early childhood education, school education and higher education. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2010, she was a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy and Analysis. Tara served as a manager at ICICI Bank (India) where she led their non-profit initiatives in education from 2000 till 2004. Tara obtained her PhD from Stanford University, specializing in the economics of education. She also holds Masters degrees in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics and Stanford University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-20) Afkar, Rythia; Béteille, Tara; Breeding, Mary E.; Linden, Toby; Mason, Andrew D.; Mattoo, Aaditya; Pfutze, Tobias; Sondergaard, Lars M.; Yarrow, Noah
Countries in middle-income East Asia and the Pacific were already experiencing serious learning deficits prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-related school disruptions have only made things worse. Learning poverty -- defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text -- is as high as 90 percent in several countries. Several large Southeast Asian countries consistently perform well below expectations on adolescent learning assessments. This report examines key factors affecting student learning in the region, with emphasis on the central role of teachers and teaching quality. It also analyzes the role education technologies, which came into widespread use during the pandemic, and examines the political economy of education reform. The report presents recommendations on how countries can strengthen teaching to improve learning and, in doing so, can enhance productivity, growth, and future development in the region.
Successful Teachers, Successful Students: Recruiting and Supporting Society’s Most Crucial Profession
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Evans, David K; Béteille, Tara
Successful teachers are likely to be the first role models that young people encounter outside the home. They teach content, make learning fun, shape students’ attitudes, exemplify empathy, teach teamwork and respect, and build student confidence in several ways. Effective teachers prepare students for a world where they must interact with others, adapt quickly to change, and where success will hinge on knowledge as well as attitudes and behavior. Helping young people develop these skills is a complex task, especially when many come from deprived backgrounds. It requires routine human interface with people who combine deep knowledge, a conviction that all students can succeed, and empathy. Successful teachers are irreplaceable in this task and will remain irreplaceable in the future. Coronavirus (COVID-19)-related school closures changed the nature of interactions between students and teachers around the world. While students in some school systems remained in regular contact with their teachers through technology-enabled classes and continued to learn, many did not. School closures will take place in the future, if not worldwide, then in individual countries for a variety of reasons. To be effective, teachers must also be able to use technology effectively to ensure learning beyond school walls, navigate unpredictable circumstances, and be flexible based on student needs. Teachers are successful when teacher policies are designed and implemented in a manner that attracts high-ability individuals, and prepares, supports and motivates them to become high performing teachers. This paper describes the vision and key principles guiding the world bank’s support to countries on teachers.
Three Principles to Support Teacher Effectiveness During COVID-19
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05) Ding, Elaine; Beteille, Tara; Molina, Ezequiel; Pushparatnam, Adelle; Wilichowski, Tracy
Effective teachers are irreplaceable in helping students succeed. They facilitate two-way teaching and learning processes, helping students learn content through real time responses to questions, making learning fun, shaping students' attitudes, exemplifying empathy, modeling teamwork and respect, and building student resilience in several ways. Successful teachers work with school management teams and parents to ensure consistent support for students as they transition through school. The sudden closure of schools during COVID-19 has left many teachers across several countries uncertain about their role, unable to use technology effectively to communicate and teach, and unprepared for classroom challenges when schools reopen. The pandemic has brought the need to bridge digital divides into sharp focus, with countries and schools adept at using such technologies facing fewer challenges in meeting learning goals. There can be little doubt that high-quality education is a social experience, requiring routine human interface. Successful teachers are irreplaceable in this task—and will remain so in the foreseeable future—but they need to be supported in multiple ways to be effective in unpredictable circumstances. Given the central role teachers play in student learning, this note outlines three key principles to help governments and their development partners in supporting teacher effectiveness during and in the aftermath of COVID-19. It discusses these principles in relation to the three phases of the World Bank’s COVID-19 education policy response: coping, managing continuity, and improvement and acceleration.1 The three principles are basic and apply regardless of country context.
Ready to Learn: Before School, In School, and Beyond School in South Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-02-19) Beteille, Tara; Tognatta, Namrata; Riboud, Michelle; Nomura, Shinsaku; Ghorpade, Yashodhan
Countries that have sustained rapid growth over decades have typically had a strong public commitment to expanding education as well as to improving learning outcomes. South Asian countries have made considerable progress in expanding access to primary and secondary schooling, with countries having achieved near-universal enrollment of the primary-school-age cohort (ages 6–11), except for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Secondary enrollment shows an upward trend as well. Beyond school, many more people have access to skill-improving opportunities and higher education today. Although governments have consistently pursued policies to expand access, a prominent feature of the region has been the role played by non-state actors—private nonprofit and for-profit entities—in expanding access at every level of education. Though learning levels remain low, countries in the region have shown a strong commitment to improving learning. All countries in South Asia have taken the first step, which is to assess learning outcomes regularly. Since 2010, there has been a rapid increase in the number of large-scale student learning assessments conducted in the region. But to use the findings of these assessments to improve schooling, countries must build their capacity to design assessments and analyze and use findings to inform policy.
Getting the Right Teachers into the Right Schools: Managing India's Teacher Workforce
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018) Ramachandran, Vimala; Béteille, Tara; Linden, Toby; Dey, Sangeeta; Goyal, Sangeeta; Goel Chatterjee, Prerna
India's landmark Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009) guarantees education to all children aged 6-14 years. The Act mandates specific student-teacher ratios and emphasizes teacher quality. Writing this into legislation took seven years, but the seven years since has proven that ensuring effective teachers are recruited and placed in all schools in a time-bound manner is considerably more challenging. This report takes a detailed look at the complexity of the teacher management landscape in elementary and secondary schools in nine Indian states. On a daily basis, the administrative machinery of these states has to manage between 19,000 to nearly a million teachers in different types of schools and employment contracts, and cope with recruiting thousands more and distributing them equitably across schools. This report examines the following issues: official requirements for becoming a schoolteacher in India; policies and processes for teacher recruitment, deployment and transfers; salaries and benefits of teachers; professional growth of teachers; and grievance redress mechanisms for teachers. For the first time in India, this report compares and contrasts stated policy with actual practice in teacher management in the country, using a combination of primary and secondary data. In so doing, the report reveals the hidden challenges and the nature of problems faced by administrators in attempting to build an effective teacher workforce which serves the needs of all of India's 200 million school children. The report examines states with varying characteristics, thus generating knowledge and evidence likely to be of interest to policy makers and practitioners in a wide range of contexts.
Addressing Inequality in South Asia
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015) Rama, Martin; Béteille, Tara; Li, Yue
Inequality in South Asia appears to be moderate when looking at standard indicators such as the Gini index, which are based on consumption expenditures per capita. But other pieces of evidence reveal enormous gaps, from extravagant wealth at one end to lack of access to the most basic services at the other. Which prompts the question: How bad is inequality in South Asia? And why would that matter? This book takes a comprehensive look at the extent, nature, and drivers of inequality in this very dynamic region of the world. It discusses how some dimensions of inequality, such as high returns to investments in human capital, contribute to economic growth while others, such as high payoffs to rent-seeking or broken aspirations, undermine it. Drawing upon a variety of data sources, it disentangles the contribution that opportunity in young age, mobility in adult years, and support throughout life make to inequality at any point in time. Equally important, the book sheds light on the prospects of escaping disadvantage over time. The analysis shows that South Asia performs poorly in terms of opportunity. Access to basic services is partial at best, and can be traced to characteristics at birth, including gender, location, and caste. Conversely, the region has had a robust performance in terms of geographical and occupational mobility despite its cluttered urbanization and widespread informality. Migration and jobs have served disadvantaged groups better than the rest, highlighting the importance of the urbanization and private sector development agendas. Support falls somewhere in between. Poverty alleviation programs are pervasive. But the mobilization of public resources is limited and much of it is wasted in regressive subsidies, while inter-government transfers do not do enough to mitigate spatial inequalities.
Student Learning in South Asia : Challenges, Opportunities, and Policy Priorities
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-05-21) Dundar, Halil; Beteille, Tara; Riboud, Michelle; Deolalikar, Anil
For the past decade, South Asian governments have been investing heavily to achieve the education millennium development goals (MDGs). The region has also made great progress in enrolling girls in both primary and secondary school. The rapid gains in enrollment have not been accompanied by commensurate improvements in learning levels, with the average level of skill acquisition in South Asia being low by both national and international standards. A major reason for this is that throughout the 2000s, most South Asian countries focused on: (a) achieving universal access to primary education, and (b) sustained investment in better-quality school inputs to improve the quality of primary and secondary education. This report covers education from primary through upper secondary school. Given its importance for school readiness, this report also reviews early childhood development even though that is outside formal education systems in the region. To examine what types of policies hold promise for improving student learning, it reviews data from large-scale national learning assessments and the findings of a small but increasing number of impact evaluations being conducted in the region. Finally, based on evidence from South Asia and other regions, it identifies strategic options and priorities to improve learning outcomes in South Asia. The findings make it clear that to be successful, policies to ensure lasting improvements in student learning outcomes need to be integrated into a larger agenda of inclusive economic growth and governance reform. This report makes an important contribution to ones understanding of the performance of education systems in South Asia and the causes and correlates of student learning outcomes. Further, drawing on successful initiatives both in the region and elsewhere in the world, it offers an insightful approach to setting priorities for enhancing the quality of school education despite growing competition for public resources.
Effective Schools : Teacher Hiring, Assignment, Development, and Retention
(MIT Press, 2012-07) Loeb, Susanna; Kalogrides, Demetra; Beteille, Tara
The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this article we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development, and retention of its teachers. Our results reveal four key findings. First, we find that more effective schools are able to attract and hire more effective teachers from other schools when vacancies arise. Second, more effective schools assign novice teachers to students in a more equitable fashion. Third, teachers who work in schools that were more effective at raising achievement in a prior period improve more rapidly in a subsequent period than do those in less effective schools. Finally, we find that more effective schools are better able to retain higher-quality teachers. The results point to the importance of personnel and, perhaps, school personnel practices for improving student outcomes.