The Research Alliance’s Lisa Merrill, along with Richard Ingersoll of Penn Graduate School of Education, Dan Stuckey of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, and Greg Collins of the Learning Policy Institute, examined various trends in CPRE’s landmark 30-year study of the American teaching force. In the new report, researchers provide an update, exploring what trends and changes have, or have not, occurred in the profession over the past three decades. The report highlights several key findings, including:

• Over the past three decades, the teaching force has grown dramatically and much faster than the student population;
• The teaching force has become less diverse in terms of gender, yet more diverse in terms of race/ethnicity;
• The number of new teacher hires that come from top-ranked universities has increased; and
• The inflow and outflow of teachers has increased, meaning the field continues to be a highly unstable line of work compared to many other occupations and professions.

The report highlights several other changes over time, and examines the overarching implications of those changes.

Read Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force – Updated October 2018 on the Consortium for Policy Research in Education website.