teachers: not what they used to be

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Sun Apr 29 11:15:50 PDT 2001


How much of this is the outward expression of the fact that teachers still get paid much as they were a generation ago when they were women who couldn't get into better paying professions? How much of this "decline" in the quality of teachers is the result of feminism's having opened those door? Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

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.



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