Who Enters Teaching? Encouraging Evidence that the Status of Teaching is Improving

November 2014 Hamilton Lankford

University of Albany

Susanna Loeb

Stanford University

Andrew McEachin

North Carolina State University

Luke C. Miller (corresponding author)

University of Virginia

James Wyckoff

University of Virginia

Corresponding author contact information:
Curry School of Education
Center for Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness 405 Emmet Street, P.O. Box 400277, Charlottesville, VA 22904 lcm7t@virginia.edu, (434) 924-0774, Fax (434) 924-1384

Abstract

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, a number of federal, state, and local teacher accountability policies have been implemented toward improving teacher quality over the objections of some who argue the policies will decrease quality. In this paper we analyze 25 years of data on the academic ability of teachers in New York State and document that since 1999 the academic ability of both individuals certified and those entering teaching has steadily increased. These gains are widespread and have resulted in a substantial narrowing of the differences in teacher academic ability between high and low poverty schools and between white and minority teachers. We interpret these gains as evidence that the status of teaching is improving.

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