Recruitment to Teaching: Patterns of Selection and Retention

Abstract

Utilizing data from a seven-year longitudinal study of high school graduates, this paper focuses on the careers of girls who planned to become and/or eventually became elementary and secondary school teachers. The concern of the paper is the way in which factors such as socioeconomic status background, rural-urban residence, measured intelligence, time of occupational choice, level of education, marital status, and husbands' occupational status are related to recruitment to teaching and to retention in the teaching profession. SOCIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG been interested in the way in which occupations selectively recruit persons with distinctive characteristics. In particular they have been concerned with the social origins (e.g., class, rural-urban, ethnic origins) of persons who enter a variety of occupations. The present paper is in this tradition. The focus is on a high school senior cohort followed over a seven year period. Our interest is in the characteristics of the young women in this group who aspired to become and/or became elementary and secondary school teachers.