| Karen DeAngelis
Stanford University
The relationship between teachers' salaries and the quality of the supply of recent college graduates to teaching
FINAL REPORT:
The main thrust of early studies of the labor market for public school teachers is that it draws low quality college graduates into teaching. During the 1980s, policy makers sought to remedy this situation by advocating increases in teacher salaries, based on the assuption that higher salaries would attract higher quality individuals into teaching. Yet, the empirical evidence concerning this salary-quality relationship is mixed. While the earliest study offers some support for this assumption, the implication of the most recent study is that higher salaries do not make for higher quality teachers because there is something inherently unattractive about public school teaching, and this unattractiveness has little to do with wages. This study provides a more thorough understanding of how public schooling teacher markets work, and therefore whether salary policies can be effective in raising the quality (at least in terms of their academic performance) of young people drawn into teaching.
The results of this study indicate that teachers' relative salaries do have an impact on the quality of the supply of recent college graduates to teaching, at least among females. My results indicate that salary policies for teachers can be used to narrow the gap between the quality-as measured by academic test scores-of female non-teacher recent college graduates and female recent college graduates attracted to teaching. Given that more than 2 million new teachers must be hired for the nation's schools over the next decade (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996) and over seventy percent of teachers are female (U.S. Department of Education, 1995), the results of my study suggest that salary policies will have a substantial impact on the quality of the teaching force in the coming years. The impact, however, will be highly dependent on the hiring processes used in the individual school districts. The salary effects reported herein pertain to the supply of recent college graduates who were certified or were eligible to teach, not solely to those college graduates who were teaching. Thus, the results highlight the effects of salaries on the quality of potential teacher supply. Given that salaries have an impact on the quality of this group of recent college graduates ultimately will only make a difference in the classroom if the higher quality individuals from this group are hired by the schools.
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