From High School to Teaching: Many Steps, who Makes It?

In this paper, we focus on the roles that race, ethnicity, and academic skills play in predicting whether high school students persist along each of the various steps of the path into teaching. We show that the challenge of creating a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force is not primarily one of influencing the occupational decisions of minority college graduates. Instead, the critical challenge is to increase the high school graduation, college enrollment, and college graduation rates of minority youth. We use a sequence of four samples originating in the sophomore cohort of High School and Beyond (1992). We explore high school sophomores’ career transitions along each step of the path into teaching—high school graduation, entry into college, college graduation, and entry into teaching.