Page 5 - IDEA Studie 05 2019 Dopady kvality prace ucitelu

Study 5/2019 Teaching quality, education, economic growth and prosperity in the Czech Republic2 May 2019 Daniel Münich, Jana KraJčová, ToMáš ProTivínsKý Summary of key issues • This study reports in detail on how Czech society will suffer financially in the future if it is unable, or unwilling, to invest greater resources and systemic efforts into improving teaching quality. Our simulated estimates demonstrate that the financial impact of foregoing potential improvement would be huge. The paradox of this high level of unrealized societal gain can be explained in various ways. Either Czech society is still insufficiently aware of the extent of the societal advantages that they forgo by failing to improve teaching quality, or a substantial part of the society is currently failing to consider the long-term impact. It may also be that the Czech political-educational system is currently unable to translate a realization of the extent of this loss into concrete measures and investments. • Good quality schooling is a fundamental precondition for any country’s future economic and social development, its prosperity and its inhabitants’ quality of life. That is the case despite the fact that this connection is not immediately obvious to us as we go about our daily lives. The time period over which causes and effects in education are measured is not a few months or years but several decades, by which time it is too late to change the observed effects. This study sets out those potential effects. • By far the most important determiner of the quality of education is, and will long continue to be, the quality of teachers’ work. That, in turn, is dependent on the quality of teachers’ initial and further training and on the teaching profession’s ability to attract the very best and most talented candidates into teaching, to retain them and to keep them motivated. It is thus a question both of the financial attractiveness of the teaching profession and of the way in which initial teaching qualifications and further training for teachers are organized. 2 The authors would like to thank Ctirad Slavík, Karel Gargulák, Filip Pertold and other colleagues for their useful comments on the draft version of this study and calculations. Special thanks belongs to Jan Libich, who helped to make the originally very technical text make more intelligible. Any inaccuracies or errors and opinions are however down to the authors. The study received support from the research programme Strategy AV21 of the Czech Academy of Sciences and is based on research supported by the Czech Science foundation grant project (GA ČR P402/12/G130), the project Teach Live, and Česká spořitelna Foundation. 3