A new study in Educational Researcher explores changes in New York’s teacher workforce since the Empire State implemented a number of policies to improve the quality of its new teachers. Beginning in 1998, the state increased the general and content-specific coursework requirements needed for certification and raised the number of hours of required field experience. It also eliminated ad hoc alternative certification pathways like “transcript review” in favor of programs with formal requirements and discontinued emergency and temporary licenses. The authors examine whether these policy changes had an impact on who entered the teaching workforce. Their dataset, comprising SAT scores, administrative data, and licensure and personnel files, looked at two groups between 1985 and 2010: 220,332 individuals who received their entry-level certification; and from within that group, a subset of 151,747 who received certification and were hired in their first teaching positions. They found that, prior to 1999 and the new policies, the average academic abilities of new teachers were low and consistently falling. Once the new policies were adopted, the SAT scores of both the certified group and those who were hired improved substantially, with the latter enjoying the largest gains. For example, between 1999 and 2010, the share of certified teachers drawn from the bottom third of SAT test-takers decreased by 7 percent, while the share from the top third increased by 13 percent. These gains occurred across the state, in all subjects, at both rich and poor schools, and for teachers of all ethnicities. But the improvements were driven by particularly large increases in SAT scores in certain areas and for certain teachers. New York City’s gains were larger, and occurred earlier, than those of the rest of the state. In 1999, 43 percent of new teachers in the nation’s largest school district came from the bottom third of the SAT distribution; by 2010, that number dropped to 24 percent. Improvements were also more pronounced in hard-to-staff subjects (math, science, special education, and bilingual education) than in elementary and other secondary subjects. Schools that enroll more poor students also showed more prominent effects, as did minority teachers compared to white and Asian teachers. The authors rule out hypotheses that the trends are the result of changes in the labor market, concluding that they really are most likely due to the collection of state policies enacted in the late ‘90s to improve the new teaching workforce. While researchers are still determining just how strongly SAT scores are related to student achievement, as a proxy for the changing qualifications of the workforce, they show a very marked improvement in the past fifteen years.
SOURCE: Hamilton Lankford, et al., "Who Enters Teaching? Encouraging Evidence That the Status of Teaching Is Improving," Educational Researcher, Vol. 43 No. 9 (December 2014).
