Are teachers more proficient?

A new article in Education Next analyzes trends in teacher academic proficiency over the last two decades, and finds that in contrast to earlier cohorts in the study, graduates entering teaching in 2008-09 had average SAT scores slightly exceeding those entering other occupations -- perhaps a response to the economic downturn. An uptick in teachers who are women, from 71 percent in 1987-88 to 76 percent in 2007-08, reflects growth in female science and math teachers. The average age of teachers changed little, but the percentage over age 55 increased from 9 to 16 percent. A bump in retirement-eligible teachers in the mid-2000s has made the teaching force largely under 30 and over 55. Prospective teachers are graduating from less-selective colleges, and in the last 20 years the gap in selectivity has widened. One explanation is that selective colleges and universities have fewer undergraduate programs offering teacher certification in four years. The percentage of bachelor's degrees in education dropped from 10 percent in 1990 to 6 in 2010, while the percentage of master's stayed at 27 percent. STEM majors are 4 to 8 percentage points less likely to become teachers than non-STEM majors. New teachers in high-stakes classrooms tend to have higher SAT scores than those in other classrooms, and that differential grew by 6 SAT percentile points between 1993 and 2008. More

Not in math, apparently

New research from Michigan State University finds that the worst-performing teacher-preparation programs are producing more than 60 percent of the nation's future middle school math teachers. Researchers analyzed data from the Teacher Education and Development Study: Mathematics, which included 23,000 future teachers in 900 programs across 17 countries; they conducted surveys with over 2,000 U.S. participants. The team found nine "core" courses were consistently taken by high-achieving prospective middle school teachers in the top 10 percent of training programs worldwide. A similar set of coursework in mathematics and math-teaching methods exists for elementary teachers. In the United States, only one in seven future middle school teachers and just over half of future elementary teachers had taken all of these courses. Once teachers begin teaching, the least-prepared graduates are more likely to teach in schools serving a high percentage of students in poverty. The best-prepared teachers were significantly less likely to work in high-poverty schools, and reported feeling more confident to teach math topics. The overall results of the study point to a possible remedy: the international benchmark for secondary teacher course-taking suggests that improvements in course requirements for teacher-preparation programs might improve the performance of both U.S. middle school mathematics teachers and their students. More

Source:  Public Education News Blast

Published by LEAP

Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) is an education support organization that works as a collaborative partner in high-poverty communities.