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NewsFlash: May 23, 2007

Critics Wrong About Teacher Quality

Some have tried to blame lagging student performance on poor teacher quality, but numbers on new educators and their academic backgrounds just don’t bear that out. A new EPI Snapshot shows a large majority of new female teachers come from the upper 40% of high school graduates.

EPI economist Joydeep Roy examines data on how new female teachers ranked on their high school test scores (more than 75% of educators are women). He finds that in 2000, almost a third of all new female entrants into teaching from the high school class of 1992 ranked among the top fifth of high school test scorers. An additional 26% came from the next fifth.

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