Teachers’ satisfaction as indicator of education system performance

We investigate the potential trade-off between some teacher characteristics, particularly teachers’ satisfaction, and different measures of pupils’ performance, in order to optimize the outputs of the Spanish education system. Our contribution to the existing literature is twofold: on the one hand, we provide estimates on the balance between teachers’ effectiveness and 4th grade students’ performance in Spain, by using recent survey data (TIMSS, 2011); on the other hand we implement a novel methodology which allows optimizing simultaneously a set of indicators on the outputs of the educational system. These analyses provide empirical evidence of the importance of investing in teacher satisfaction as a motivation mechanism for improving national educational achievement.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This research has been partially supported by the Andalusian Regional Ministry of Innovation, Science and Enterprise (PAI group SEJ-532). We also acknowledge the research funding provided by Andalucía-Tech (Universidad de Malaga),the Research Plan of the University of Malaga (Capacity Building Programme I+D+i of Universities 2014-2015, FEDER Funds) and by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain (Research Project ECO2014-56397-P). Luis Alejandro Lopez-Agudo also acknowledges the research training provided by the “Programa de Doctorado en Economía y Empresa de la Universidad de Malaga”