Michael

Unfortunately not many people are looking at this issue. Please, find below some sources that may be of your interest. This refers specifically to teacher absenteeism:

Papers that highlight the problem:
Chaudhury, Nazmul, Jeffrey Hammer, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan, and F. Halsey Rogers. 2006. “Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 1: 91. https://dx.doi.org/10.1257/089533006776526058

Kremer, Michael, Karthik Muralidharan, Nazmul Chaudhury, Jeffrey Hammer, and F. Halsey Rogers. 2005. “Teacher absence in India: A snapshot.” Journal of the European Economic Association 3(2-3): 658-67. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1162/jeea.2005.3.2-3.658/abstract

Some of the best RCT impact evaluations that look at effects of interventions on teacher absence:
Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan 2010: https://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/duflo.pdf

Muralidharan, Karthik, and Venkatesh Sundararaman. Forthcoming. “Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India.” Journal of Political Economy. https://econ.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/papers/Published%20Articles/Teacher%20Performance%20Pay%20(Final%20Pre-Publication%20Version).pdf

Duflo, Esther, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer. 2012. “School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools.” NBER Working Paper 17939.
Papers discussing possible solutions/approaches:
Kremer, Michael, and Alaka Holla. 2009. “Improving Education in the Developing World: What Have We Learned from Randomized Evaluations?” Annual Review of Economics 1 1: 513-42.

Rogers, F. Halsey, and Emiliana Vegas. 2009. “No more cutting class ? reducing teacher absence and providing incentives for performance.” The World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper Series, 4847.

A guidance note we researchers from the World Bank wrote recently on carrying out teacher absence surveys: https://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTHDOFFICE/Resources/AbsenceBookletNoAnnex.pdf Note that the references section includes links to a lot of the relevant papers, including World Bank ESW that measures teacher absence using classroom observation.

Hope this will be useful.

Hazard pay is an interesting notion here. I am, however, less inclined to think of it as hazard pay as per soldiers in war zones (whose lives are at risk and are separated from loved ones), but rather as Increasing pay for hard to staff / hard to teach districts, which could be justified politically and economically if such teachers were willing to submit to evaluations that show they are actually adding value where it is most needed — not just staffing the classroom.

One could, of course, then have a healthy debate about the best way to make this evaluation… (school vs. classroom level standardized tests, value-added indices, peer or student reviews, etc.).

Also, I didn’t read the blog post to suggest that teachers making three times as much as the average (poverty-level) local wage to be causal — just ironic.

Soldiers in Afghanistan get hardship pay compared to their colleagues working in Pentagon offices. By Odell’s logic, maybe we should lower their salaries closer to the average income in Afghanistan.

I have lived in Mexico for 12 years now, even becoming a citizen. As your two posts on this matter point out, and I am only echoing, the education system here is abysmal.

But these tests, and other changes in the country, will improve things in time. But it’s going to take a long, long time, sadly. Teachers and their unions here are stunningly hidebound.