Occupational Choices and the Academic Proficiency of the Teacher Workforce
Developments in School Finance 2001-02. William Fowler, Ed. Washington, DC: NCES, pp.53-75.
April 2003
Dan Goldhaber, Albert Yung-Hsu Liu
This paper explores how compensation structures influence the career path decisions of prospective teachers. Recent research continues to support assertions by policymakers and professional educators that teacher quality is of paramount importance in promoting higher levels of student achievement. Among schooling characteristics, teacher effectiveness has been shown to explain the largest share of the variation in student achievement. Differences in teacher quality have been found to explain more than one grade level equivalent of performance on standardized tests by their students. Moreover, the impact of having particular teachers appears to explain students’ achievement growth for several years.
There is broad agreement on the critical importance of teachers. However, there are also longstanding concerns about the quality of the current K–12 teacher workforce. Dating back to the early and mid-1980s, commissions such as the National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983), the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy (1986), and more recently, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996) have all stressed the importance of teachers and the need to upgrade the skills of the teacher workforce. Today, teachers are better qualified, by some measures, than other college graduates. We find that teachers are more likely to hold advanced degrees and tend to have higher undergraduate grade point averages. But teachers also tend to be less academically proficient as measured by college entrance exam scores, the number of remedial courses 1 Unless otherwise noted, we limit our discussion of teachers to those employed by public sector local education agencies. they take in college, and the selectivity of the undergraduate colleges from which they graduate.
Some have suggested large across-the-board salary increases as a means of addressing concerns about the academic proficiency of the teacher workforce (as well as perceived teacher shortages). Others, however, point out that across-the-board increases may not be a particularly effective means of drawing more skilled personnel into teaching. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that observed differences in demonstrated academic proficiency may be due to the dissimilarity between teaching and other occupations in the structure of compensation. That is, we explore how compensation structures influence the career path decisions of prospective teachers.
We use data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) to estimate the probability of progress through the teacher pipeline of a cohort of academic year (AY) 1992–93 college graduates. We find that, among other factors, college selectivity and college entrance exam scores predict progress through the teacher pipeline. We then estimate the returns to various attributes in the teacher and non-teacher labor markets and find that, while the public sector teacher labor market primarily rewards experience and advanced degree, the non-teacher labor market rewards these two attributes as well as college selectivity and technical major. These differential returns imply opportunity costs to enter the teaching profession that vary systematically based on an individual’s college and undergraduate major.
