A hundred years ago teaching was dominated by women. Teaching was one of the few jobs open to women that did not involve menial labor. By 1940 about 55 percent of teachers were women.
According to the authors of the book Super Freakonomics. When the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed it caused a shift in the perception of women’s roles in the work place. Enabling more women with a chance for an education, they looked at professions that had previously been off limits to women: law, medicine, finance, and business.
These profession offered women higher wages and attracted the best and the brightest women. In the past many of these women would have taken up teaching in the past.
As a consequence, of these women choosing the higher paying jobs the teaching profession experienced a brain drain. In 1960 40 percent of women scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests. Within twenty years fewer than half as many women were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom. Falling wages for teachers in relation to other jobs is seen as at least partially to blame. The chancellor of New York City’s public school system said, “The quality of teachers has been declining for decades.”
Between 1967 and 1980 U.S. test scores fell about 1.25 grade-level equivalents. Education researcher John Bishop called this decline, “historically unprecedented,” arguing that it will put a serious drag on national productivity well into the twenty first century.
Levitt, S., & Dubner, S. (2009) Super Freakonomics. New York: HarperCollins.
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The question is though is that are women that become teachers simply more dumb because they don't choose a profession that requires higher aptitude? I don't think that's the case. It takes a lot of work to become a teacher for very low pay (especially in MT). Just because women decided to move up to higher professions doesn't mean that teachers are now more worse. I think the major shift is moving towards standardized testing especially under No Child Left Behind. We have shifted away from the arts and trades and have only focused on English and Math. I think the brain drain more has to do with students being uninterested in the subjects they have to study. If we moved away from standardized testing, we can focus on the students with their individual strengths and weaknesses instead of only testing for a standardized test.
ReplyDeleteAlso one could argue that since more women are leaving then that means more teachers are men? Would your argument suggest that men teaching has a worse affect than women?