Abstract

Teachers at primary and secondary schools constitute a key factor in the educative process and learning results of their students. Given the constitutional mandate that defines the state's responsibility to provide high-quality public education, it must attract, retain and motivate "good" teachers through diverse mechanisms and incentives, and in the Chilean case it must generate efficient mechanisms to evaluate their teaching performance. The Program to Reward Pedagogical Excellence (AEP from its Spanish acronym) came about in this framework as a mechanism for evaluation and incentives, because it aims to evaluate significant aspects of the quality of teachers, awarding bonuses to the most outstanding. Given the importance of educational quality in establishments subsidized by the state (both municipal and private) for the development of the country and society, this work aims to determine the characteristics of teachers who have obtained AEP quality accreditation, through a conditional probit model using data from a Longitudinal Teaching Survey (ELD from its Spanish acronym), while also calculating the probability of participating in this program. We conclude that the factors that explain the probability of being accredited are: experience, the family's socioeconomic condition, the mother's educational level, the teacher's educational level, training and internships, quality of health conditions, vocation and quality of the AEP program, which have significant but reduced effects.