Across six Sub-Saharan African countries, grade 4 students of teachers who were hired after a free primary education reform perform worse, on average, on language and math tests--statistically significantly so in language--than students of teachers who were hired before the reform. Teachers who were hired just after the reform also perform worse,…

Since the early 1990s, there has been an uptick in the recruitment of international teachers to U.S. public schools to teach subject areas that experience perennial teacher shortages, including mathematics, science, special education, and languages, in hard-to-staff, high needs urban or rural K-12 schools. Such recruitment is predicated on…