Wage distortion: why America's top female college graduates aren't teaching

Education Next, Spring, 2005 by Caroline M. Hoxby, Andrew Leigh

Though exceptions undoubtedly exist, women with higher aptitudes can ordinarily be expected to be more effective classroom teachers than those with lower aptitudes. It is therefore troubling to think that in the United States those entering the teaching profession in recent years have, on average, lower measured aptitudes than their predecessors.

That able women are no longer entering the teaching profession at anywhere near the same rate as in the past is of special concern, since women compose approximately 75 percent of all elementary and secondary school teachers, almost the same percentage as 40 years ago.

Yet a decline in female teacher quality is just what the evidence--most notably a recent study by three University of Maryland economists--indisputably shows (see Figure 1). According to their findings, the likelihood that a highly talented female (one ranked among the top 10 percent of all high schoolers) will become a teacher fell from roughly 20 percent in 1964 to just over 11 percent in 2000.

The study gives weight to other signs that the teaching profession no longer attracts exceptional teachers. Dr. Leo Klagholz, a commissioner of education in New Jersey in the 1990s, surveyed his state's teacher colleges in the 1980s and found that, for prospective teachers, the verbal and math SAT scores, when combined, were lower than 800 out of a possible score of 1,600. Similarly, the Educational Testing Service in 1990 found that those expressing an intention to become a teacher scored near the bottom among those taking the test. In 1998, Eugene Hickok, then Pennsylvania's secretary of education, revealed that his state's teacher preparation system provided "limited assurances of competence and quality," leaving "the doors ... open for C-plus students (or worse) to become teachers."

The icing on the anecdotal cake came in the summer of 2003 with news that a Massachusetts superintendent of education, Wilfredo Laboy, had failed--for the third year in a row--a literacy test that the state's high school seniors needed to pass in order to graduate. The exam Laboy failed has been part of a series of tests required of new Massachusetts teachers since 1998. It was also big news when aspiring teachers took the tests for the first time: almost 60 percent of them flunked. Paul Reville, director of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy at MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank in Boston, reviewed many of the written responses from those who failed and bemoaned the high number of the commonwealth's teachers "who were college graduates and yet couldn't string a sentence together."

What Accounts for the Decline in Teacher Quality?

The factors contributing to the reduced likelihood that women of high aptitude will enter the teaching profession appear to come from both within and outside the teaching profession. We focus on two that can be expected to be of critical significance.

First, within the teaching profession, the pay scale of public school teachers has become increasingly compressed since the 1960s. The salary distribution has narrowed so that those with the highest aptitude earn no more than those with the lowest. This may have pushed able women out of the field of education.

Second, outside of teaching, college educated women have achieved greater parity in their pay vis-a-vis male workers, luring more able women to alternative professions. High-aptitude women may have pulled away from education in order to take special advantage of the new opportunities.

While there could be other explanations outside our investigation, conventional wisdom has long pointed to new opportunities for college-educated women as the primary explanation for the change in teacher quality that many have sensed. We were inclined to accept the conventional wisdom when we began this project, but, after systematically comparing the relative importance of the two factors, we found, surprisingly enough, that pay compression within the teaching profession, induced by the introduction of collective bargaining, has had by far the greater effect.

On further reflection, we were not quite so surprised by the results. For one thing, the overall timing of the decline in teacher quality corresponds to the rise of collective bargaining within education. Teacher unions won collective bargaining rights in key cities and states during the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, collective bargaining spread from state to state across the country.

As a result of union action, the average salary for teachers increased modestly. But as the average was edging upward, the range of the scale narrowed sharply, so much so that able young women were bound to take notice. Moreover, collectively bargained contracts placed a premium on characteristics such as seniority and credentials rather than performance, further depressing the opportunities for the high-aptitude teacher.

Our Approach

Women may enter teaching for any number of reasons, some of which are obviously intangible. We began our study by making the standard economic assumption that a woman's decision to teach is influenced in part by her expected pay within teaching and her expected pay in other occupations. We then subdivided each of these expectations, developing four components that affect the occupational choices of female college graduates: