Beginning K-12 Teacher Characteristics and Preparation by School Type, 2009. Web Tables. NCES 2013-153

Research on academic achievement has demonstrated the important role that teachers play in improving student outcomes and has also revealed wide variation in teachers' qualifications and experiences across schools. Schools serving low-income students in urban areas, for example, have fewer well-qualified teachers than schools in nonurban settings enrolling higher income students. In part to address these disparities, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) included provisions to ensure that all students have access to qualified teachers, particularly in core academic subjects. In addition, state and local policies have introduced incentives to attract well-qualified teachers to low-performing and urban schools. Building on earlier studies, these Web Tables present the characteristics of new K-12 teachers within various types of schools from a recent cohort of bachelor's degree recipients. These Web Tables present estimates for the demographic characteristics and teaching preparation, including undergraduate coursetaking and certification, of 2007-2008 baccalaureate degree recipients who taught at the K-12 level within a year of completing their bachelor's degree. Teachers' characteristics are shown both in comparison with nonteachers and by selected characteristics of the schools in which they were teaching or had most recently taught at the time of the 2009 interview. Schools are described in terms of the percentage of students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch and school location (rural, suburban/town, or urban), race/ethnicity, and sector (public and private). The data used in the analysis are from the 2009 first follow-up of the 2008 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:08/09), a nationally representative sample of 2007-2008 bachelor's degree recipients who were first interviewed just before graduation and again 1 year later. Tables 1 through 3 provide a comparison of 2007-2008 bachelor's degree recipients who did and did not teach in 2009 in terms of various demographic, employment, and undergraduate education characteristics. Tables 4 through 7 present K-12 teachers' undergraduate and teacher preparation by the characteristics of the current or most recent school at which the respondent taught at the time of the 2009 interview. The measures of undergraduate and teacher preparation include bachelor's degree institution sector and selectivity, plans for graduate school, teacher certification status and certification in subje