Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Existing research on dropout in developing countries has focused primarily on out-of-school factors such as poverty, child labor, and early pregnancy to explain why adverse social conditions in impoverished nations are pulling students out of school. However, according to theories of dropout, in-school processes play an important role in students’ engagement and motivation to continue with their studies. In this paper, I argue that the contract status of teachers is a crucial school factor and influences their opportunities for establishing instrumental relationships with students. Such instrumental ties with teachers can provide students at-risk of dropping out with the social and institutional support they need to stay in school. This study considers two aspects of teachers’ contract status that may generate higher levels of social capital at a school: teachers’ job stability—whether they have tenure or a temporary contract—and the number of contracts held by them—whether they work in a single or multiple schools per week. These two factors determine the amount of time teachers spend at a particular school and, therefore, influence their ability to identify and intervene with dropout behavior more effectively. To study the impact of teachers’ contract status on dropout, I will examine data from high schools in Brazil. According to the 2013 OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), this country has the highest percentage of teachers working at more than one school per week and has one of the lowest rates of teachers with tenure. Using administrative data from the Brazilian Census of Basic Education, I investigate the effects of single-school and tenured teachers on dropout rates using two empirical strategies. First I examine the association between shares of single-school and tenured teachers and dropout rates across adjacent cohorts of 9^th graders in the same school, controlling for a number of time varying student and school characteristics. In the second strategy, I compare students who were in the same classroom in middle school and went to the same high school, but attended different classrooms with different composition of single-school and tenured teachers. Evidence from both strategies provides mixed evidence about the impact of tenured teachers on dropout rates. According to results from the second strategy, students are more likely to stay in school if they attend a classroom with a larger proportion of single school teachers. Finally, there is not strong evidence that the relationship between teachers’ contract status and dropout vary by the school’s socioeconomic level.