- By 2207 our schools will enroll nearly three million more students than today, a total of 54 million youngsters.
- More than one quarter of all teachers are over 50, and teacher retirements are accelerating. Over the next decade, more than two million teachers will need to be hired to fill elementary and secondary teaching positions. Over half of these will be first-time teachers, who will need to pass new, more difficult certification requirements. (National Center for Educational Statistics)
- Thirty percent of new teachers leave teaching within three years; forty percent within five years. Attrition rates for new teachers in some urban districts reach 50 percent in the first five years of teaching. Urban eighth graders are twice as likely as their suburban or rural peers to attend schools where at least one teacher leaves before the end of the year. (Education Week’s report Quality Counts; 1996 Digest of Educational Statistics)
- Less than 75 percent of American teachers are fully qualified; more than 12 percent enter the classroom with no formal training, and another 14 percent without fully meeting state standards. One quarter are teaching outside their fields. Fewer than 30 percent of high school physics students have teachers who majored in physics in college; over 30 percent of math teachers have not even a college minor in that field. In virtually every subject area, more affluent students get better teachers. Urban schools are twice as likely to hire unlicensed or underqualified teachers. (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future; Education Week’s report Quality Counts)
- One third of American students belong to a minority group, but only 13 percent of teachers do; and the gap is growing. (National Center for Educational Statistics)
- Eight out of ten beginning teachers are female.
- It will cost nearly $5 billion a year for the next decade in new federal, state, and local money to successfully upgrade teacher education, subsidize people to teach in high-need fields and locations, reform the teacher licensing and induction process, and provide better professional development. (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future)
- Urban districts have a harder time filling teaching vacancies, especially in such sought-after fields as biology, mathematics, bilingual education, and special education. Finding enough minority teachers is also a challenge; in 1997, 92 percent of the largest urban districts reported an immediate need for teachers from minority races and ethnic groups. Minority students make up 75 percent of urban enrollments, but only 20 percent of undergraduates in teacher education are minorities. (Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.)
- Newly hired teachers in urban schools are more likely than their counterparts in suburban and rural districts to have no teaching license or an emergency or temporary one. Of the 2,966 K-12 teachers the Los Angeles Unified School District hired to fill its vacancies for the 1997-98 school year, roughly 60 percent had emergency teaching licenses. (Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.)
- Most elementary school teachers have only 8.3 minutes of preparation time for every hour they teach, while high school teachers have just 13 minutes of prep time per class hour. Teaching loads for high school teachers generally exceed 100 students per day and reach nearly 200 students per day. (Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.)
- School districts spend only 1 to 3 percent of their resources on teacher development, as compared to much higher expenditures in most corporations and in other countries’ schools. (Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.)
- Average salaries for teachers range between $20,354 in South Dakota to $43,326 in Connecticut, with salaries in affluent suburban districts much higher than those in cities or rural communities within the same area. (1996 Digest of Educational Statistics)