A spate of analyses in recent years questioned the academic
qualifications of aspiring teachers. In 2007, the Educational Testing Service showed that the average special education and elementary teacher had lower SAT scores compared to other majors. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically
Adrift found that education majors fared poorly on the Collegiate Learning
Assessment. These points were further by our own Teacher Prep Review, which revealed
shockingly low academic expectations for prospective teachers.
New research from Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch
suggests that perhaps the tide is turning. Their recent report, Gains in Teacher Quality, confirms findings that prospective
teachers’ SAT/ACT scores lagged behind their classmates in the 1990s and early
2000s, but shows that the gap was entirely closed by 2008. Unfortunately, more
recent data, which could help us determine whether Goldhaber’s and Walch’s
finding is the beginning of a trend or an aberration, is not yet available.
While encouraging, this report should not leave us
complacent. An average score on the ACT doesn’t actually mean that someone is
college-ready.
What’s more, high-performing countries like Finland and Singapore routinely
attract their best and brightest into teaching; average isn’t good enough for
their kids, and nor should it be for ours.
A frequently cited concern about raising the academic
standards for prospective teachers is that doing so will hamper efforts to
diversify the teaching profession. Another recent report by the Illinois
Education Research Council on the academic qualifications of teachers in Illinois in 2002-03 suggests that
the issue is considerably more complicated. True enough, the racial achievement
gap means that fewer minority high school students go on to four-year colleges
and score well on the ACT. But the report also shows that relatively few
minority high school students aspire to go into teaching in the first place and
few minority college students become certified to teach. High-achieving
minority college graduates are the least
likely group to get certified.
Diversifying the teacher workforce will require efforts all
along the pipeline. But the IERC report suggests that making teaching more
enticing — perhaps by raising its status by raising admissions standards —
could have a salutary effect as well.
