Dear Commons Community,

Harvard University’s Education Next journal released a paper this morning that investigated the academic qualifications of new teachers.  Authored by the University of Washington’s Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch,  it found that the average SAT scores have increased  over the last decade.

Goldhaber and Walch looked at teacher SAT scores in 1993,  2001  and 2008, and found that the average SAT scores of first-year teachers in 2008 was 8 percentile rank points higher than those of new teachers in 2001 and five points higher than those i 1993.  That increase makes first-year teachers in 2008 more likely to come from the top-scoring half of SAT takers.  The significance of an increase of 8 percentile points can be debated but surely can be considered a step in the right direction.

The paper commented:

“Over the past 20 years, there has been a strong policy push toward getting smarter people into the teacher workforce. Enacted in 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), for instance, emphasized academic competence by requiring that prospective teachers either graduate with a major in the subject they are teaching, have credits equivalent to a major, or pass a qualifying test showing competence in the subject. Newly created alternative pathways to certification have sought to bring more academically accomplished individuals into the profession. More recently, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) released new standards for teacher training programs: among them, each cohort of entrants should have a collective grade-point average (GPA) of 3.0 and college admission test scores above the national average by 2017 and in the top one-third by 2020.”

The paper also provides interesting findings on SAT scores for STEM and non-STEM majors:

“It is not surprising that the academic caliber of teachers varies a good deal by subject area, given that STEM majors tend to have higher SAT scores than non-STEM majors. For all three cohorts, STEM majors’ SAT score average is about 100 points higher in each year than that of non-STEM majors, and a far higher proportion come from the top 20 percent of the distribution. For both the 1993 and 2000 cohorts, teachers score lower on average than non-teachers among both STEM majors and non-STEM majors, in some cases by as much as 7 SAT percentile rank points. However, in the case of the 2008 cohort, scores for teachers were slightly higher for both STEM majors (by about 3 percentile rank points) and non-STEM majors (by about 2 percentile rank points) than for non-teachers. In other words, we find that high-scoring STEM majors are relatively more likely to become teachers in 2008 than they were in earlier cohorts.”

For those interesting in teacher education issues, the paper is well worth a read!

Tony