New Evidence from the Early Teacher Pipeline

Few school-based factors matter more to student success than teacher quality. Because teachers are so important, the policies that shape the teacher workforce—teacher licensure, for example—are critical issues in education policy and research. But before prospective teachers can be licensed, they first need to choose to pursue teaching and complete an approved teacher education program. Largely because of data limitations, these early stages of the teacher pipeline have received relatively less policy and research attention. This is a problem because the decisions people make before entering teacher preparation programs ultimately help determine who is available to join the teacher workforce. 

To help learn more about the early teacher pipeline, a unique partnership between five university-based teacher education programs, the state of Washington, and researchers gathered a rich array of evidence on teacher preparation programs and their implications for the teacher workforce. This CALDER research brief summarizes the partnership’s findings in three sections:

• Section 1 examines who enters teacher education programs and how this shapes the pool of potential teachers.
• Section 2 examines the information teacher education programs collect about applicants, and the applicant attributes faculty consider most important, to better understand how teacher education programs make admissions decisions. 
• Section 3 examines whether the academic preparation students receive in college predicts who eventually becomes a teacher and how effective they are at raising student test scores.