Today's teachers more inexperienced, more likely to leave, researcher says

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Today's teachers more inexperienced, more likely to leave, researcher says

The number of U.S. teachers has grown dramatically in the past three decades.

But they’re a lot more inexperienced due to a growing number leaving the profession, according to researcher Richard Ingersoll.

The University of Pennsylvania professor and graduate student Lisa Merrill tracked the numbers of teachers and students back to 1987 in a recent research project. They also tracked other numbers, such as teachers’ years of experience.

They found the number of teachers grew by 48 percent from 1987 to 2008 compared to a 19-percent increase in the number of students.

Most of the growth in teacher numbers was in three areas, they found: special education; elementary education, because of expanded curricula; and math and science teachers because of tougher graduation requirements.

The teacher workforce has also become more diverse in one way, but less diverse in another.

The number of minority teachers more than doubled between 1987 and 2011, Ingersoll said during his keynote address at the University of Georgia College of Education’s day-long “State of Education” conference this week.

But men have been leaving the profession, he said.

In 1980, one in three teachers was a man. But by 2012, fewer than one in four teachers was male.

“This is a puzzling one,” he said. “We don’t know why this is.”

Many in the predominately female audience of about 140 people at the Georgia Center thought the gender shift might reflect a lessened respect for teachers.

One in the audience wondered if the profession had been “infantilized” by waves of prescriptive regulations that dictate what teachers must do.

The question of respect may be a big part of the reason why so many teachers are leaving the profession.

“People are coming into teaching at faster rates, but it turns out they’re also leaving at faster rates,” Ingersoll said.

Teachers cite a lack of autonomy and influence often as a reason for leaving. However, Ingersoll said low wags is the main reason dissatisfied teachers cite when they leave a teaching job.

After the 1988-89 school year, about 9.8 percent of first-year teachers left teaching. But in 2008-09, the attrition rate was 13.1 percent, he said.

About 23 percent of first-year teachers are gone in two years, and 41 percent within five years, he said.

Back in 1987, if you divided teachers up into groups based on their years of experience, the largest group would be those with 15 years of experience, he said. In 2008, the largest group was first-year, beginning teachers..

All that inexperience translates in one way into money saved for schools; new teachers make less than veteran teachers..

But there’s a cost to school systems, too.

“It’s not cost-free. In a sense, that investment (in training teachers in college) is going out the door, too,” he said.

And research shows, said Ingersoll, that teachers become better at their jobs with experience, at least up through their first decade of teaching.

Follow education reporter Lee Shearer at www.facebook.com/LeeShearerABH or https://twitter.com/LeeShearer.