• References

Such concern with the quality and qualifications of teachers is not surprising. Elementary and secondary schooling are mandatory, and it is into the custody of teachers that children--our children--are legally placed for a significant portion of their lives. The quality of teachers is undoubtedly among the most important factors shaping the learning and growth of students. Moreover, the largest single component of the cost of education in any country is teacher compensation. But despite a longstanding recognition of the importance of teacher quality, it is, surprisingly, among the least understood issues in education.

This recent upsurge of concern with teacher quality has, in turn, led to a rapidly expanding demand for data on the caliber of the nation's teaching force. However, it is very difficult to empirically assess, especially with large-scale data, the actual degree of quality teaching provided to students in classrooms (e.g., Haney, Madaus, and Kreitzer 1987; Haertel 1991). As with employees in many other service occupations, there is little consensus concerning both how to define and how to measure quality teacher performance (Ingersoll in press). Invariably, data collection efforts primarily focus on what can more readily be measured--teachers' qualifications. Although data on the qualifications of teachers, such as their coursework and degrees, are only indirect measures of the actual caliber of teaching, they are vital information because there is almost universal consensus concerning the importance of teacher education and training.¹

In order to provide these kinds of data on the nation's teaching force, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released, beginning in the early 1990s, a major new data source--the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).

Unlike most major large-scale education surveys, SASS does not focus on students, nor feature measures of student achievement. Instead, SASS focuses on teachers. Perhaps for this reason, SASS has been somewhat underutilized and underappreciated. This is unfortunate because SASS is the largest and most comprehensive source of information on teachers available. For instance, it dwarfs the widely cited and used National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education (NSSME).²NSSME focuses solely on math and science teachers and has a relatively limited sample--about 6,000 teachers from 1,200 public schools. SASS, in contrast, samples about 55,000 teachers of all types from 11,000 schools, both public and private.³

Accordingly, since the release of SASS, NCES has sponsored a number of projects profiling the quality and qualifications of the nation's elementary and secondary teachers (e.g., Choy et al. 1993; Henke et al. 1997), of which Teacher Quality: A Report on the Preparation and Qualifications of Public School Teachers is the latest effort and a highlight of this issue of the Quarterly. Like earlier reports, Teacher Quality takes advantage of the strengths of SASS by presenting a wide range of indicators of teachers' qualifications, preparation, and job conditions. It also nicely supplements 1993-94 SASS data with data from a more recent, but less comprehensive, source--the 1998 NCES Teacher Survey on Professional Development and Training.

One of the most important contributions of SASS has been to provide accurate nationally representative data on the phenomenon known as out-of-field teaching. Out-of-field teaching is one of the most important but least understood sources of underqualified teaching in schools. Assessing the prevalence of out-of-field teaching is crucial because highly qualified teachers may, in actuality, become highly unqualified if they are assigned to teach subjects for which they have little training or education. Educators, of course, have long been aware of the existence of out-of-field teaching, but an absence of accurate statistics has kept this problem largely unknown to the public. With the publication of the SASS data on out-of-field teaching beginning in 1995, this situation has dramatically changed.⁴

Empirical measurement of the extent of out-of-field teaching faces a methodological obstacle--there is surprisingly little consensus on how to define a "qualified teacher." While most agree that teachers ought to undergo some kind of training and preparation, there is little agreement concerning how many and which kinds of courses and credentials teachers ought to have to be considered adequately qualified (Haertel 1991).

Typically, those of us who use SASS data to assess out-of-field teaching skirt this debate by adopting a "conservative" and "minimalist" approach. The primary focus of most of our analyses is to show how many secondary school teachers do not have even minimal academic credentials--usually defined as neither a major nor a minor--in their teaching fields. A college minor certainly does not guarantee quality teaching, nor even a qualified teacher. Our operating assumption is that adequately qualified teachers, especially at the secondary school level and especially in the core academic fields, ought to have, as a minimum prerequisite, at least a college minor in the subjects they teach. In short, our assumption is that few parents would expect their teenagers to be taught, for example, 11th-grade trigonometry by a teacher who did not have at least a minor in math, no matter how bright the teacher. The data show, however, that this situation is all too commonly the case.

In the Teacher Quality report, for example, data from SASS and from the 1998 Teacher Survey on Professional Development and Training tell us that about one-fifth of secondary (7th- through 12th-grade) teachers whose main teaching field is math have neither a major nor a minor in math or related fields, such as math education or engineering. SASS data that I have presented elsewhere (Ingersoll 1999) show similarly high numbers of teachers without teaching certificates in their assigned fields. Moreover, less conservative measures than those used in this report reveal an even bleaker picture. For instance, if we broaden the focus to include all those who teach math in secondary schools, regardless of whether it is their main field or not, the amount of out-of-field teaching jumps to one-third without at least a minor in the field. Likewise, if we upgrade the definition of a "qualified" teacher to include only those who hold both a college major and a teaching certificate in math, the amount of out-of-field teaching again substantially increases--only 55 percent of all public secondary math teachers have both a major and a certificate in math (Ingersoll 1999).

The negative implications of such high levels of out-of-field teaching are obvious. Is it any surprise, for example, that science achievement is so low given that, even at the 12th-grade level, 41 percent of public school students in physical science classes are not taught by someone with either a major or a minor in chemistry, physics, or earth science (Ingersoll 1999)?

Not surprisingly, our findings on out-of-field teaching have captured widespread interest. Over the past couple of years they have been widely reported in the national media and have been featured in numerous major education reports.⁵As a result, the problem of out-of-field teaching has suddenly become a real and major issue in the realm of education policy. Despite this attention, however, out-of-field teaching has also been largely misunderstood. The source of the misunderstanding relates to the crucial question of why so many teachers are teaching subjects for which they have so little background.⁶

Many people assume that out-of-field teaching is a problem of poorly educated teachers and can be remedied by more rigorous standards for teacher education and training. Typically, those subscribing to this view assume that the source of the problem lies in a lack of academic coursework on the part of teachers that can be remedied by requiring prospective teachers to complete a "real" undergraduate major in an academic discipline or specialty.

There is some truth to this view, and the training of teachers does leave much to be desired. As the Teacher Quality report shows, teachers themselves tell us that, for a number of key skills and domains, they do not feel very well prepared. This deficit is being recognized and, indeed, over the past decade many districts and states have mandated more rigorous academic and certification requirements for prospective teachers.

However, the SASS data also show that, though very worthwhile, these kinds of reforms will not eliminate out-of-field teaching assignments and, hence, will not alone solve the problem of underqualified teaching. The source of out-of-field teaching lies not only in the amount of education or training teachers have but in the lack of fit between teachers' fields of preparation and their teaching assignments. In short, mandating more rigorous requirements for prospective teachers will help little if large numbers of such teachers continue to be assigned by their principals to teach classes that do not match the field of their degree, their certification, or both.

A second, and the most popular, explanation of the problem of out-of-field teaching blames teacher shortages. This view holds that shortfalls in the number of available teachers, caused by a combination of increasing student enrollments and a "graying" teaching force, have led many school systems to resort to lowering standards to fill teaching openings, the net effect of which is out-of-field teaching.

There is also some truth to this view. The SASS data show that since the late 1980s, some schools have had difficulty filling their teaching vacancies with qualified candidates. Most important, when faced with such difficulties, their administrators say they most commonly do three things: hire less qualified teachers; assign teachers trained in another field or grade level to teach in the understaffed area; and make extensive use of substitute teachers (Ingersoll 1999). Each of these coping strategies results in out-of-field teaching.

But there are several problems with the shortage explanation for out-of-field teaching. First, it cannot explain the high levels of out-of-field teaching that the data tell us exist in fields, such as English and social studies, that have long been known to have surpluses. Second, in recent years it is only a minority of schools that actually have had any trouble filling their teaching vacancies with qualified candidates. For instance, in 1993-94 only 16 percent of secondary schools reported any difficulty filling their openings for math teachers. These difficulties cannot account for the SASS data showing that in that same year, almost one-third of all public secondary school math teachers were uncertified in math (Ingersoll 1999).

Finally, a third problem with the teacher-shortage explanation of out-of-field teaching is the assumption that the hiring difficulties that exist are due to a lack of able candidates willing to enter teaching. The demand for new teachers, and the subsequent difficulties that some schools face filling their positions, come about primarily because of teachers choosing to move from or leave their jobs at rates higher than in many other occupations. And while it is true that teacher retirements are increasing, teacher turnover appears to have little to do with a graying workforce. In contrast, analyses I have done using data from the SASS Teacher Followup Survey show that the high rates of teacher turnover plaguing schools are far more often a result of two related causes: teachers dissatisfied with teaching and teachers seeking to pursue another career (Ingersoll 1995a, 1997).

The implications of these findings for reform are crucial. Initiatives and programs designed to recruit new candidates into teaching, though worthwhile in many ways, will not solve the problem of underqualified teachers in classrooms if they do not also address the problem of teacher retention. In short, recruiting more teachers will help little if large numbers of such teachers then leave.

If deficits in the qualifications and quantity of teachers do not adequately account for the high levels of out-of-field teaching in the United States, what then is the cause? My own hypothesis, drawn from the sociology of organizations, occupations, and work as well as from my own experiences as a former high school teacher, is that understanding underqualified teaching requires a close examination of the way schools and teachers are managed. Out-of-field teaching is common, I believe, because it is not only legal but also more convenient, less expensive, and less time consuming than the alternatives.

For example, rather than find and hire a new science teacher to teach a newly state-mandated science curriculum, a school principal may find it more convenient to assign a couple of English and social studies teachers to each "cover" a section or two in science. When faced with the choice between hiring a fully qualified candidate for an English position or hiring a lesser qualified candidate who is also willing to coach a major varsity sport, a principal may find it more convenient to do the latter. If a teacher suddenly leaves in the middle of a semester, a principal may find it faster and cheaper to hire a readily available, but not fully qualified, substitute teacher, rather than conduct a formal search for a new teacher.

The managerial choice to misassign teachers may save time and money for the school, and ultimately for taxpayers, but it is not cost free. As the best contemporary research has insightfully revealed, good teaching requires a great deal of expertise and skill, and good teachers are not like interchangeable blocks that can be placed in any empty slot regardless of their type of training (e.g., Shulman 1986).

Teachers do not operate in a vacuum. Ensuring quality teaching in classrooms requires more than recruiting and training able teachers. It also requires providing a well-managed workplace that treats teachers like professionals who have expertise in a specialty. The key issue for future research, then, is to begin to understand the social and organizational context surrounding teachers and to illuminate the ways it does or does not foster quality teaching.