Teaching attracting better-qualified, report finds

Teaching is attracting better-qualified people than it did just a few years ago, according to a report released December 11, 2007, by the Educational Testing Service. Prospective teachers who took state teacher licensing exams from 2002 to 2005 scored higher on SATs in high school and earned higher grades in college than their counterparts who took the exams in the mid-1990s, the report said.

On the other hand, the report found that those attracted to the profession continued to make up a strikingly homogeneous group—prospective teachers were overwhelmingly white and female—at a time when the proportion of public school students nationwide who are black, Hispanic or other minorities was nearly half and rising.

The finding that the academic qualifications of teachers had risen significantly was encouraging news for federal and state education policymakers after a period of hand-wringing over teacher quality in the nation’s 90,000 public schools. The most successful educational systems in the world, like those in Singapore and Finland, recruit teachers from among the top third of their college graduates. By contrast, some studies over the years have found that the United States recruits from the bottom third. Read the article in The New York Times online.