Clifford Adelman, Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education April 2004
Tireless data miner Clifford Adelman has written, and the Education Department has finally placed on its website (albeit in a hard to find location), this whopping companion to his "Principal Indicators of Student Academic Histories in Postsecondary Education, 1972-2000." (For a note on the earlier report, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=139#1718.) The executive summary terms it "a descriptive account of the major features of change in student course-taking in postsecondary contexts between 1972 and 2000, with an emphasis on the period 1992-2000." Sounds dull, yet K-12 reformers with an interest in teachers may want at least to check out part 4, which summarizes courses taken by those members of the high-school class of 1992 who were teaching school eight years later. Fifty-three percent of them majored in education and 80 percent earned their bachelor's degrees from non-selective colleges. The "course" they were most apt to take was "student teaching," which accounted for 5 percent of all credits earned - and an average 11 credits per person. There's much more here, not a lot of it encouraging at a time when "highly qualified" teachers are what we're supposed to be employing in U.S. schools. Check it out at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/empircurric/index.html.
