The Teaching Profession since the 1970s

 from Marshall Memo 1063 - Nov 25, 2024

The State of the K-12 Teaching Profession Since the 1970s

            In this American Educational Research Journal article, Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and Melissa Arnold Lyon (University at Albany) trace the ups and downs of the U.S. teaching profession over the last five decades, measuring prestige, interest among prospective teachers, the pipeline, and on-the-job satisfaction. “We find a consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure,” say Kraft and Lyon: “A rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s extending into the mid-1990s, relative stability, and then a sustained decline beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.” 

            Teachers play a central role in shaping young people’s academic, emotional, and career trajectories and “also collectively shape the democratic ideals, social cohesion, and economic competitiveness of the nation as a whole,” say Kraft and Lyon. “But despite the central role teachers play in our society, they have long struggled to gain and maintain the status of a prestigious profession… Teachers are at once heroes and villains, saints and scapegoats. Throughout the history of the common school in the United States, reforms have repeatedly characterized teachers as both the problem and the solution to the perceived shortcomings of public education.”

K-12 schools need to fill more than 200,000 positions a year, so the perceived status of the profession is of great importance. Here’s Kraft and Lyon’s analysis of four key factors in recruiting and retaining effective teachers:

            • Occupational prestige – The Harris and Phi Delta Kappa polls have traced public regard for the profession over time. One measure is whether parents want their children to pursue a teaching career. The percentage saying yes in the PDK poll went from 75 percent in 1969 to 46 percent in 1983, rose to over 65 percent by 2011, then fell to 37 percent in 2022.

            • Adolescents’ interest in becoming a teacher – High-school and college students’ inclinations are shaped by public perceptions of K-12 teaching, family and peer influences, their own interests, and career opportunities. The rise and fall of interest in a teaching career tracks public perceptions of the prestige of teaching, falling to only 3 percent among first-year college students in the mid-2000s.

            • Those preparing to become teachers – Not surprisingly, the number enrolling in and completing education degrees also mirrors public prestige and career interest. 

            • Job satisfaction – The pattern is similar, with a high of 52 percent of teachers reporting they are very satisfied with their work in 2001, a decline starting in 2011, falling to a low of 12 percent in 2022 after the pandemic, and then in 2023 a modest uptick to 20 percent. 

            Kraft and Lyon suggest a number of hypotheses for these trends – economic, sociopolitical, educational policy, and social environment, all of which have some validity:

-   Economic hypothesis #1: Declines in funding and subsequent contractions in the teacher labor market reduced interest in the profession.

-   Economic hypothesis #2: Stagnant teacher pay has made the profession less attractive.

-   Economic hypothesis #3: Rising college costs discourage students from pursuing teaching as a career.

-   Sociopolitical hypothesis #1: The women’s rights movement opened higher-paying career opportunities in other fields, while school desegregation in the South resulted in many African-American teachers losing their jobs, which discouraged entry to the profession for decades. 

-   Sociopolitical hypothesis #2: Unionization affected occupational prestige by associating teaching with blue-collar occupations, though it also improved working conditions and pay.

-   Educational hypothesis #1: More-rigorous barriers to entry (certification, licensure requirements, and teacher tests) raised prestige but lowered the supply of new teachers (except where alternative routes to the profession have been available).

-   Educational hypothesis #2: Teacher accountability, including high-stakes “competency based” teacher evaluation, undercut teacher prestige, interest, preparation, and satisfaction by reducing teacher autonomy and job security. 

-   School environment hypothesis #1: Unfavorable working conditions make the profession less attractive and enjoyable – among them unmanageable class sizes, weak school leadership, lack of collegiality, time constraints, inadequate resources, and disruptive student behavior. 

-   School environment hypothesis #2: Safety concerns have made the profession less attractive and enjoyable – perceptions of a “blackboard jungle” in the 1960s and 70s, zero tolerance policies since the 1990s, and school shootings, which spiked in 2017. 

Kraft and Lyon sum up what they believe are the most important reasons for the current low point for the teaching profession: stagnant teacher wages, the rising cost of college, the perceived loss of teacher authority and job security, new policies and rhetoric targeting teacher unions, changing cultural perceptions about the teaching profession (for example, cover articles in Time and Newsweek about “rotten apple” teachers and campaigns to ban books and restrict discussion of race and sexuality), and most recently, teacher stress and burnout during Covid-19 school closures and backlash against teachers for resisting the reopening of schools as the pandemic waned. 

What will turn around this crisis in the teaching profession? Kraft and Lyon believe teacher pay, benefits, job security, and career ladders are important, as well as increasing teacher autonomy, professionalism, and voice in their schools. “This is not to say that teachers should be left alone in their classroom or expected to develop curricular materials on their own,” say the authors. “Such practices can lead to inconsistent instruction, professional isolation, and burnout. Instead, efforts to support teachers through coaching, professional learning communities, and peer observation and review programs might create the conditions, and develop the skills, teachers need to feel successful with their students and ensure the profession maintains high standards.” 

The authors suggest “bottom-up” collective action so teachers and unions play a greater role in school policymaking, and point to the importance of recruiting a diverse and talented pool of teachers and the need to deal with school shootings and other forms of violence. 

“Elevating the teaching profession is a generational task,” conclude Kraft and Lyon, “but one that would produce considerable benefits for both individual students and the nation. As our exploratory analyses demonstrate, the status of the teaching profession is neither arbitrary nor preordained. It is also not a monolith. Rather, it is a constellation of different localized contexts and markets that are directly shaped by education leaders, policymakers, and our society as a whole. We have the agency to make different decisions from the local to the national level by building on newly emerging bright spots amidst the worrisome evidence.”

 

“The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction Over the Last Half Century” by Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon in American Educational Research Journal, December 2024 (Vol. 61, #6, pp. 1192-1236); Kraft can be reached at mkraft@brown.edu, Lyon at mlyon@albany.edu.