Over the past 20 years, the teaching force has become larger, grayer, greener, more female, more diverse and less stable, according to a study published by Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, the Huffington Post reports. The report identifies seven major trends and changes shaping the teaching profession in the United States. Their “exploratory research project” relied on data from six cycles of the Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Follow-Up Survey, which were both collected by the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education between 1987 and 2008. In each cycle, NCES administers questionnaires to a nationally representative sample of about 50,000 teachers, 11,000 school-level administrators and 5,000 district-level officials. According to the Census Bureau, PreK-12 teachers represent the largest occupational group in the nation, and the profession is becoming even larger. In recent years, the hiring of teachers has far outpaced student enrollment; from 1987-2008, total K-12 student enrollment in U.S. schools — including public, private and charter schools combined — increased 19 percent…
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