"The Declining Quality of Teachers"
BY: DARIUS LAKDAWALLA
RAND, Santa Monica
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
University of Chicago
Department of Economics
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=268344
Paper ID: NBER Working Paper No. W8263
Date: April 2001
Contact: DARIUS LAKDAWALLA
Email: Mailto:Darius_Lakdwalla at rand.org
Postal: RAND, Santa Monica
1700 Main Street
P.O. Box 2138
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 USA
Paper Requests:
Full-Text downloads are available from SSRN Online for $5.
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.