Does a Math Degree Matter? Teacher Quality, Teacher Distribution, and Student Achievement in Brazi

Access to free basic education has increased substantially in the past 25 years in Brazil. Nevertheless, the country is certainly lagging behind regarding quality of education: Brazil ranked 58 (out of 65 economies) in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012, only one year after it had reached its highest economic output (in terms of GDP) in history and ranked as the world's 8th largest economy. Drawing on the literature on teacher quality, this study uses data from Brazil's National System of Basic Education Assessment to observe 26,363 schools in both 2013 and 2015 in order to investigate the relationship between teacher credentials and the Math test scores of ninth graders. I estimate that a one percentage-point increase in the proportion of qualified instructors teaching sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth graders is associated with an average increase in test scores of low and middle socioeconomic status schools by 1.406 test score points on a scale that ranges from 0 to 100. This relationship increases to 2.455 for high socioeconomic status schools. Additionally, a one-percentage point increase in the proportion of Math teachers with a Math degree is associated with a test score increase by 0.569 points. Finally, using these factors as proxies for teacher quality, I show that high-performing teachers are not equally distributed across states, and that wealthier and urban schools tend to have a higher proportion of qualified teachers than poorer and rural schools.