Closing Gaps: The Impact of Teaching Quality in the Early Schooling 2

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This Technical Cooperation (TC) has two main specific objectives: (i) to identify which characteristics and classroom practices of teachers allow disadvantaged children, who enter school already with profound deficits in cognitive development, to close their skills gaps and catch up to their peers as they advance through primary school; and (ii) to continue the efforts to set up a mentoring pilot for in-service teachers aimed at directly improving their pedagogical practices. Therefore, the TC is aligned with the Bank¿s GCI-9 priority of ¿social policy for equity and productivity¿, in the strategic area of ¿raising the quality and equity of education.¿ Additionally, this TC contributes to the Bank¿s GCI-9 goal of programs for "small and vulnerable countries.¿ The goal of this TC is also strongly linked to specific goals mentioned in the Country Strategy for Ecuador 2012-2017, which identifies social development as one of the main areas for Bank intervention. The general objective of this TC is to continue the longitudinal project, ¿Closing Gaps¿ (the project), which evaluates different dimensions of teacher quality, to provide evidence for the design of more effective educational policies. The project has significant and direct policy implications for Ecuador and other countries in the region, by providing rigorous evidence for the design of effective teacher selection and evaluation systems, targeted in-service teacher training programs, and for compensatory educational programs for disadvantaged children, among others. For these reasons, and taking into account the feedback received from leading international experts in the field, the Ministry of Education in Ecuador (MinEduc) and the Bank have decided to make the project a multi-year one that will follow a cohort of approximately 17,000 students and their different teachers as they advance through primary school.