TY - JOUR AU - Corcoran,Sean P. AU - Evans,William N. AU - Schwab,Robert S. TI - Changing Labor Market Opportunities for Women and the Quality of Teachers 1957-1992 JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 9180 PY - 2002 Y2 - September 2002 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9180 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9180.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Sean Corcoran New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy, Suite 805 665 Broadway New York, NY 10012 E-Mail: sean.corcoran@nyu.edu William N. Evans Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics Department of Economics and Econometrics 447 Flanner Hall University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 Tel: 574-631-7039 E-Mail: wevans1@nd.edu Robert Schwab Department of Economics University of Maryland 4106B Tydings Hall College Park, MD 20742-7211 Tel: 301-405-3478 E-Mail: schwab@umd.edu AB - School officials and policy makers have grown increasingly concerned about their ability to attract and retain talented teachers. A number of authors have shown that in recent years the brightest students at least those with the highest verbal and math scores on standardized tests are less likely to enter teaching. In addition, it is frequently claimed that the ability of schools to attract these top students has been steadily declining for years. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence measuring the extent to which this popular proposition is true. We have good reason to suspect that the quality of those entering teaching has fallen over time. Teaching has remained a predominately female profession for years; at the same time, the employment opportunities for talented women outside of teaching have soared. In this paper, we combine data from four longitudinal surveys of high school graduates spanning the years 1957-1992 to examine how the propensity for talented women to enter teaching has changed over time. We find that while the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen dramatically from 1964 to 1992 by our estimation, from almost 20% to under 4%. ER -