Setting the Study Context: India, Mexico, and Tanzania

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide background information related to India, Mexico, and Tanzania and we describe our research approach to examining teacher distribution in these countries. We first describe levels of economic development and social inequality, which determine the resources available to employ teachers and the degree to which disadvantaged populations have access to these resources. We then describe each country's geography, as the difficulties of living and teaching in remote rural areas with few amenities constrain education officials' efforts to recruit and deploy teachers to these areas. This is followed by a discussion of relevant aspects of these education systems and key issues related to teacher deployment and distribution. To further set the stage for the subsequent analysis, we describe the methodology of our study, including our comparative approach and our data collection and analysis strategies. Keywords India • Mexico • Tanzania • Comparative education research • Cross-national case study research methods In Chapter 2, we identified national context as a key determinant of the distribution of teachers. In this chapter we provide background information related to our three case study countries. We first describe levels of economic development and social inequality, which determine the resources available to employ teachers and the degree to which disadvantaged