Doug Henwood wrote:
> [News for all you teachers out there - you're just a bunch of losers!]
>
> <http://papers.nber.org/papers/W8263>
>
> The Declining Quality of Teachers
> Darius Lakdawalla
>
> NBER Working Paper No. W8263
> Issued in April 2001
>
> ---- Abstract -----
>
> Concern is often voiced about the declining quality of American
> schoolteachers. This paper shows that, while the relative quality of
> teachers is declining, this decline is a result of technical change,
> which improves the specialized knowledge of skilled workers outside
> teaching, but not the general knowledge of schoolteachers. This
> raises the price of skilled teachers, but not their productivity.
> Schools respond by lowering the relative skill of teachers and
> raising teacher quantity. On the other hand, college professors, who
> teach specialized knowledge, are predicted to experience increases in
> skill relative to schoolteachers. Finally, the lagging productivity
> of primary schools is predicted to raise the unit cost of primary
> education. These predictions appear consistent with the data.
> Analysis of US Census microdata suggests that, from the 1900 birth
> cohort to the 1950 birth cohort, the relative schooling of teachers
> has declined by about three years, and the human capital of teachers
> may have declined in value relative to that of college graduates by
> as much as thirty percent, but the teacher-student ratio has more
> than doubled over the last half century in a wide array of developed
> countries. Moreover, the per student cost of primary school education
> in the US has also risen dramatically over the past 50 years.
> Finally, the human capital of college professors has risen by nearly
> thirty percent relative to schoolteachers.