A new report from Education Next demonstrates the academic differences between those entering the teaching profession in recent years and those entering in decades past. The numbers suggest that the teaching profession is benefiting from higher numbers of academic high achievers than has been the case in the past.
Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch, writing for the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR) at the University of Washington, provide a detailed analysis of the data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study and the Schools and Staffing Survey. The authors admit that they do not have enough information to answer definitively why more academically proficient teachers are entering the profession than in the past or whether or not the standards movement initiated by No Child Left Behind has driven quality prospective teaching candidates away from the profession. The authors are, however, able to shed light on several interesting changes in who makes up the work force of teachers today, and these results seem to be a positive turn for the profession as a whole.
SAT Scores:
Focusing on the start of the teacher pipeline, i.e., on those who report applying for a teaching job or teachers who begin classroom positions in the year immediately after receiving an undergraduate degree, we find that teacher applicants and new teachers in recent years have significantly higher SAT scores than their counterparts in the mid-1990s. Contrary to earlier cohorts of college graduates from the mid-1990s and early 2000s, graduates entering the teaching profession in the 2008–09 school year had average SAT scores that slightly exceeded average scores of their peers entering other occupations. What is less clear is whether this improvement reflects a temporary response to the economic downturn or a more permanent shift.
There is a small drop in average SAT percentile rankings for teachers between 1993 and 2000, from 45 to 42 (the raw SAT scores are similar for teachers in the 1993 and 2000 cohorts, but scores for nonteachers were higher for the 2000 cohort, resulting in a decrease in the average percentile rank for teachers). There is a sizable jump up in teachers’ average percentile rank to 50 for the 2008 cohort, driven mainly by the proportion of teachers with SAT scores that fall in the top quartile of the distribution.
Gender makeup of teachers:
A recent uptick in the proportion of teachers who are female, from about 71 percent in 1987–88 to about 76 percent in 2007–08, reflects growth in the number of female science and math teachers. In 1987-88 only about 38 percent of science teachers and 48 percent of math teachers were female, while in 2007-08 these figures rose to about 61 percent in science and 64 percent in math.
Teachers and Masters Degrees:
We also find that the teachers in the workforce in 2007–08 had completed somewhat more schooling than their predecessors; approximately 51 percent held a master’s degree or higher compared to 47 percent in 1987–88.
The percentage of all bachelor’s degrees that are in education dropped from about 10 percent in 1990 to about 6 percent in 2010, while the percentage of master’s degrees that are in education stayed around 27 percent. Not surprisingly, given these figures, the share of prospective teachers gaining formal teacher preparation (i.e., a degree in education) through a graduate rather than undergraduate program has risen sharply over time, from about 45 percent in 1990 to about 63 percent in 2010. The SASS data confirm that there has been an increase in the number of master’s credentials among newly hired teachers. Of teachers who report having one year or less of teaching experience, approximately 26 percent entered teaching with a master’s degree in 2007–08 compared to 17 percent in 1987–88.
STEM Teachers:
For all three cohorts, STEM majors’ SAT score average is about 100 points higher in each year than that of non-STEM majors, and a far higher proportion come from the top 20 percent of the distribution. For both the 1993 and 2000 cohorts, teachers score lower on average than nonteachers among both STEM majors and non-STEM majors, in some cases by as much as 7 SAT percentile rank points. However, in the case of the 2008 cohort, scores for teachers were slightly higher for both STEM majors (by about 3 percentile rank points) and non-STEM majors (by about 2 percentile rank points) than for nonteachers. In other words, we find that high-scoring STEM majors are relatively more likely to become teachers in 2008 than they were in earlier cohorts.
Conclusions:
In summary, although teachers in the U.S. are more likely to be drawn from the lower end of the academic achievement distribution than are teachers in selected high-performing countries, the picture is a bit more nuanced than the rhetoric suggests, and as we illustrate, it has in fact changed over time in an encouraging direction. There was an upward shift in achievement for 2008 college graduates entering the teacher workforce the following school year. In fact, 2008 graduates both with and without STEM majors who entered the teacher workforce had higher average SAT scores than their peers who entered other occupations.
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