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Grade-School Teachers Are Largely Satisfied With Their Jobs, Federal Survey Finds

This is clearly a rigged survey, rigged by the way they ask the question and by the way they limit the answers. Take the results with a heavy dose of salt.

By Paul Basken

Washington

More than 90 percent of long-term teachers at American grade schools are satisfied with their job, and their profession has below-average rates of career transfer, a U.S. Education Department survey has concluded.

The survey, involving about 9,000 college graduates who received their bachelor's degrees in the 1992-93 academic year, found 93 percent of those who became teachers were "satisfied with teaching over all" a decade later, according to a report released on Tuesday by the department's National Center for Education Statistics.

The survey also found that 18 percent of teachers among the 1992-93 graduates had changed jobs within the first four years. That level, while widely seen in other surveys as an indicator of teacher unhappiness, is actually on the low end of the job-change range by occupation of 17 percent to 75 percent seen among all 1992-93 college graduates, the report says.

"Teachers were among the least likely to change occupations in this time period," the statistics center said in its report, "To Teach or Not to Teach?"

The findings are potentially "explosive" politically, given the widespread public perception of teachers as perpetually dissatisfied, said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group.

"It paints a picture of a fairly satisfied profession," Ms. Walsh said of the 93-percent finding. "That's not what unions want you to believe," she said. "They want us to believe that all teachers are miserable."

Spokesmen for the nation's two leading teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, said they had no immediate comment on the report.

An author of the report, Martha Naomi Alt, cautioned that the 93-percent satisfaction figure involves only teachers who were still working in the profession a decade after graduation from college.

"That would be really misleading" to interpret the figure as representing all American teachers, said Ms. Alt, a researcher with MPR Associates, in Berkeley, Calif., which produced the report under a contract with the Education Department.

The survey question allowed only a "yes" or "no" answer, meaning teachers who might be "even 52 percent happy" with their jobs would be recorded as satisfied over all, she said.

The apparently high job satisfaction rates also may be hiding other warnings in the survey, said Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College of Columbia University who is now president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, N.J.

While 67 percent of teachers in the survey said they planned to teach for the rest of their careers, that figure dropped to 37 percent among blacks. That's an alarming trend that demands attention, he said.

The survey also contains several statistics indicating low interest in teaching in the upper grades, and in mathematics and science, which are areas in greatest need, Mr. Levine said. States need to deal with those shortages by creating incentives, including scholarships, for teachers in more demanding fields, he said.

Among all college graduates in 1992-93, those with the lowest college-entrance-examination scores were those most likely to be working as teachers in 2003, the report says. Yet those with higher college grade-point averages were more likely than those with lower grades to be teaching a decade later, it says.

That doesn't necessarily mean long-term teachers were better college students, given the tendency among schools of education to award higher grades, Ms. Walsh said.

The factor contributing most significantly to teachers' job satisfaction over all was the learning environment at their school, according to the survey. Teachers were less satisfied with levels of parental support, pay rates, and student motivation to learn, it found.

Among teachers who were not teaching in 2003, women most often left for family-related reasons (29 percent), while men more often left for a job outside of education (32 percent).



— Paul Basken
Chronicle of Higher Education
2007-08-01


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