To Teach or Not to Teach

New report (pdf) released by NCES that describes which college grads decide to teach, which don't, and why. It's a statistical report, using data from the 1993-2003 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, "B&B 93/03", so it can be long and boring unless you like that kind of thing. Here's the quick and easy if you don't:

1. Teachers stay put more than we think. Teachers have relatively low attrition rates and are actually leaving the profession at lower rates than their peers in other professions. So caution the characterization of teachers as a bunch of fickle ship-jumpers. Or at least no more so than the rest of us.

2. When they leave, it's mostly for family reasons or to go into an entirely different field. Not surprisingly, it's the ladies who leave for family and the men who leave for business and engineering, often for pay reasons. See #s 4 & 5.

3. Teachers don't test well (but probably raise their hands a lot in class). College entrance exam scores are lower for those who go into teaching. Sadly, there's actually an inverse relationship between these exam scores and the likelihood for teaching (16 percent of grads with the lowest scores went on to teach vs. 6 percent of those with the highest scores). That said, the same pattern is not true for grades. As college grade point average increases, grads are more likely to go on to become teachers. So, are they smarter or not? Depends on how you use testing and GPA to measure smarts.

4. Teachers like teaching. Ninety-three percent said they were satisfied overall with their profession and 90 percent said they'd choose it all over again. But they do have complaints- the richest ones are heard in the teacher's lounge but the report summarizes more politely: Nearly half (48 percent for each) said they're dissatisfied w/pay, parent support, and student motivation.

5. Still more women in teaching- and don't expect this to change. Women earned most of the bachelor degrees in education (79 percent vs. 21 percent for men) so of course more female grads ended up as teachers. Women may have more options now in the workforce than ever before, but the work-life balance issue is going to ensure that we keep coming in droves to teaching. More on the gender differences in the NCES report but also in this AAUW report on the pay gap for college grads from a few months ago *.

Education Week's got more easy to read info about the NCES report here.

* Disc: I was the dir of research at aauw when we designed the study. It can't escape its advocacy but it's good research, conducted by some of the same folks who did the NCES report.