High School Students Who Want to Be Teachers: The Role of Teacher Pay and Working Conditions in a Comparative Perspective

• In Event: Understanding How to Improve Teacher Quality and Equity Through International Comparative Research

Abstract

High school students’ expectations for a career in teaching are important determinants to understanding how teacher quality could be improved because the quality of the teaching workforce depends on the availability of a suitably large pool of qualified individuals wishing to have a career in the profession. In the United States, both policymakers and educational researchers have expressed concerns about the quality of the teaching workforce compared to top-performing education systems such as Finland, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore. Despite a widespread interest in understanding how top-performing students can be drawn to enter the teaching profession, not enough is known about how such a goal can be achieved, except for some empirical evidence on students who have already enrolled in teacher education programmes or from studies of investigating the effect of salary incentives among college graduates. The aim of the present study was to advance our understanding of which levers education policymakers can use to attract high school graduates into teaching, with a particular focus on whether salary incentives or better working conditions can encourage academically high-achieving high school students to consider becoming K-12 teachers.

This study examines between-country differences in the degree to which teachers’ working conditions and salaries are associated with students’ expectations to enter the teaching profession. The study focused on students who plan to work as primary, lower secondary or upper secondary teachers. The study draws on human capital theory, which emphasizes the importance of economic incentives in explaining the development of occupational preference among students. Three-level Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models are employed to analyse data from the large-scale Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006, the latest available wave that contains data on students’ career expectations and achievement in mathematics, reading, and science.

Our descriptive analyse revealed large between-country differences in the extent to which 15-year-old students in general, and high-achieving students in particular, expect to work as teachers. For example, in Finland, Korea, and Luxembourg, many high-achieving students expect to become teachers. Conversely, in countries like Hungary and Italy, few students expect to become teachers.

Results from HLM analyses revealed that teacher salaries are positively associated with students’ expectations to enter the teaching profession. On the other hand, teacher working conditions, such as class size and working hours, were not associated with students’ expectations to enter the teaching profession. The analyses further reveal that the association between teacher salaries and career expectations in teaching differs across the student performance distribution. The positive association between teacher salaries and career expectations is strong and statistically significant among low- and middle-achieving students in reading and math, while it is small in size and not significant among high-achievers. The study contributes to advancing our understanding of the ways in which policy initiatives can encourage academically strong students to consider a career in the teaching profession.

Authors

• Seong Won Han, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Francesca Borgonovi

• Sonia Guerriero, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development