Value-Added Estimates of Class and Teacher Quality for Primary Schools in Vietnam

In this paper we study teacher effectiveness in Vietnam. Vietnam is an outlier among Lower-Middle Income countries with respect to the very high levels of learning achieved for its income level (Dang et al., 2021). However, there is very little prior evidence on the role that teachers play in this system. This is a particularly interesting question as in addition to being high performing, Vietnam's education system is highly centralised with respect to teacher recruitment, training and curriculum. It is not clear, a-priori, therefore, how much variation there is in teacher effectiveness and whether having a higher or lower quality teacher matters as much as has been found in other LMIC contexts, such as Pakistan, India and Ecuador (Bau and Das, 2020; Singh, 2015; Araujo et al., 2016).