Where you might see a regrettable (but unsystematic) lack of competent teachers, Steven Miller spies a conspiracy:
That teaching, by and large, no longer attracts exceptional applicants, is clear. A recent study by three University of Maryland economists found that the likelihood of highly talented females becoming teachers fell from roughly 20 percent in 1964 to just over 11 percent in 2000...the Educational Testing Service found that those indicating they intended to become teachers score near the bottom among those taking the ETS tests.Posted by kswygert at May 3, 2005 11:08 AMSo what accounts for the increasing flight of talented women from teaching?...Now, such an approach to the question has been produced by Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby and Australian economist Andrew Leigh. And their important new study strongly suggests that, on this question, the conventional wisdom has been quite wrong.
Economists call it pay “compression” when salary schedules require those with the highest aptitude to earn no more than those with the lowest. Since the 1960s the rise of collective bargaining within education has brought increasing compression to the pay scales of public school teachers.
Moreover, teachers under collective bargaining contracts—here in Nevada and around most of the U.S.—are not compensated according to how well they teach. Instead, school districts are required under their union contracts to compensate teachers according to years on the job and number of (often irrelevant) academic credits. In consequence, teaching in America is the one profession where pay has been essentially decoupled from performance.
And it is this decoupling, say Hoxby and Leigh, which has been the biggest factor, by far, in the flight of high-aptitude women from the field of public-school teaching.