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The role and impact of school boards vary considerably across contexts. Whereas school boards in some communities provide schools with extra resources, others mandate instructional approaches. Despite the potential importance of school boards for school resources and student achievement, related single-country research is limited, and cross-national evidence is even more scarce. Using data from the 2012 PISA and 2013 TALIS, we examine cross-national differences in school board presence, composition, and responsibilities, and their relationship with school resources and student achievement. We find that schools in countries with a higher proportion of school boards have less shortage of school-based human resources and higher levels of academic achievement. We also find that students in countries where a higher proportion of local community members participate in school boards have lower levels of achievement; in contrast, school board participation by parents is positively related to student achievement.

In 1997, a cross-national assessment of educational achievement in Latin America and the Caribbean found that rural schools in Colombia outperformed urban schools in tests of reading and mathematics, except in very large cities. Given a long history of urban/rural inequality in the region, Colombia's rural school advantage attracted substantial attention. Yet by 2006, a follow-up to the 1997 assessment found that Colombia's rural school advantage had vanished. This study's objective is to determine whether, after adjusting for relevant background factors, Colombia's rural school advantage persisted in 2006. We find that rural schools in Colombia retained their advantage in a limited way: all else equal, rural schools in Colombia outperformed marginally urban schools in mathematics, when comparing each type of school to urban schools. Analysis of the 2006 data finds that rural schools in several countries outperformed urban schools in tests of math and reading, after adjusting for student background.

This study uses longitudinal data from Mexico's Carrera Magisterial teacher incentive program to identify teacher attributes that are positively associated with student test scores and to describe how teachers with these attributes are distributed across schools in two diverse Mexican states, Aguascalientes and Sonora. I find that teachers' scores on tests or training evaluations are significantly and positively related to student achievement in both states, while education levels and experience are not. In both states, teachers with higher scores on tests and training evaluations are more concentrated in urban schools and lower-poverty municipalities. These results have important implications for education systems attempting to professionalize their teacher workforces, as well as those seeking to ameliorate urban/rural disparities in educational quality. (Contains 1 figure, 6 tables, and 8 footnotes.)