The Teacher Workforce

We start utilizing the Universities and Staffing Review (SASS) data (see sidebar for a explanation of the datasets which we count) to offer an summary of demographic changes to the professor workforce because the late 1980s. Teaching positions have traditionally been held mostly by white females, and despite some slight shifts as time passes, today that remains overwhelmingly true. A recently available uptick in the proportion of teachers who are female, from about 71 percent in 1987-88 to about 76 percent in 2007-08, reflects development in the real quantity of feminine research and mathematics educators. In 1987-88 no more than 38 percent of science teachers and 48 percent of math teachers were female, while in 2007-08 these figures rose to about 61 percent in science and 64 percent in math. We also realize that the trained educators in the labor force in 2007-08 experienced completed slightly more schooling than their predecessors; approximately 51 percent held a master's degree or more in comparison to 47 percent in 1987-88. But, as much studies show, possessing a master's degree is normally not correlated with procedures of teacher success, based on university student test scores.

The maturity of the instructor labor force and the opportunity of any impending teacher pension "crisis" are continuing issues in the multimedia. A 2009 NY Times article, for example, mentioned that "Over another four years, greater than a third of the country's 3.2 million educators could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced teachers and straining taxpayer-financed pension systems." The SASS data do show that the amount of teachers qualified to receive full or incomplete pension has increased greatly. As the average get older of educators transformed relatively little during this time period, the ratio over age group 55 increased from 9 to 16 percent. The rate of which the labor force is maturing into pension eligibility is also quickening: almost all of the upsurge in the percentage of retirement-eligible professors happened in the middle-2000s, now the country's classrooms are staffed mostly by relatively junior (under time 30) and mature teachers (over time 55). Even though the demand for professors also will depend on guidelines such as category size and the utilization of technology, this upsurge in retirement-eligible educators may portend the necessity to work with more instructors in future years.