Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force

Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill (PDF):

Has the elementary and secondary teaching force changed in recent years? And, if so, how? Have the types and kinds of individuals going into teaching changed? Have the demographic characteristics of those working in classrooms altered? To answer these questions we embarked on an exploratory research project to try to discover what trends and changes have, or have not, occurred in the teaching force over the past few decades. We were surprised by what we found. We discovered that the teaching force has been, and is, greatly changing; yet, even the most dramatic trends appear to have been little noticed by researchers, policy makers, and the public.

To explore these questions, we used the largest and most comprehensive source of data on teachers available--the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its supplement, the Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS). These data are collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education. NCES has administered six cycles of SASS over a 20-year period--1987-88, 1990-91, 1993-94, 1999-2000,
2003-04 and 2007-08 (for information on SASS, see NCES, 2005). In each cycle, NCES administers questionnaires to a nationally representative sample of about 50,000 teachers, 11,000 school-level administrators and 5,000 district-level officials, collecting an unusually rich array of information on teachers, their students, and their schools. We decided to take advantage of both the depth and duration of these data to explore what changes have taken place in the teaching force and teaching occupation over the two decades from 1987 to 2008. Below, we summarize seven of the most prominent trends and changes; we found the teaching force to be:

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 24, 2013 1:47 AM
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