Mikel Berger

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April 21, 2005

Declining female teacher quality

An interesting article about the lower number of top quality females going into teaching. Interesting because my wife was valedictorian at our high school, graduated from what I would classify as a top tier college - Purdue, and is now a teacher. Guess she's pretty rare. Lots of other interesting quotes that don't just apply to female teachers though.

http://www.educationnext.org/20052/50.html

Yet a decline in female teacher quality is just what the evidence—most notably a recent study by three University of Maryland economists—indisputably shows (see Figure 1). According to their findings, the likelihood that a highly talented female (one ranked among the top 10 percent of all high schoolers) will become a teacher fell from roughly 20 percent in 1964 to just over 11 percent in 2000.

In 1998, Eugene Hickok, then Pennsylvania’s secretary of education, revealed that his state’s teacher preparation system provided “limited assurances of competence and quality,” leaving “the doors…open for C-plus students (or worse) to become teachers.”

While there could be other explanations outside our investigation, conventional wisdom has long pointed to new opportunities for college-educated women as the primary explanation for the change in teacher quality that many have sensed. We were inclined to accept the conventional wisdom when we began this project, but, after systematically comparing the relative importance of the two factors, we found, surprisingly enough, that pay compression within the teaching profession, induced by the introduction of collective bargaining, has had by far the greater effect.

On further reflection, we were not quite so surprised by the results. For one thing, the overall timing of the decline in teacher quality corresponds to the rise of collective bargaining within education. Teacher unions won collective bargaining rights in key cities and states during the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, collective bargaining spread from state to state across the country.

As a result of union action, the average salary for teachers increased modestly. But as the average was edging upward, the range of the scale narrowed sharply, so much so that able young women were bound to take notice. Moreover, collectively bargained contracts placed a premium on characteristics such as seniority and credentials rather than performance, further depressing the opportunities for the high-aptitude teacher.

These results are striking: union-driven pay compression alone accounts for more than three-quarters of the decline in teacher quality. ... Put another way, we cannot expect high-performing college graduates to continue to enter teaching if that is the one profession in which pay is decoupled from performance.

To attract high-aptitude women back into teaching, school districts need to reward teachers in the same way that college graduates are paid in other professions—that is, according to their performance. In all probability, such a strategy would attract male teachers of higher aptitude as well.

What a novel idea, pay someone based on the value they provide.

So basically my take is that women have better opportunities outside of education. The smartest women can take advantage of those opportunities but all that the not so smart women qualify to do is teach. And it looks like the number one reason that teaching doesn't provide better opportunities is because the unions bargain for the wrong things.

Posted by mikel at April 21, 2005 02:14 PM

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