School officials and policy makers have grown increasingly concerned about their ability to attract and
retain talented teachers. A number of authors have shown that in recent years the brightest students—at
least those with the highest verbal and math scores on standardized tests—are less likely to enter teaching.
In addition, it is frequently claimed that the ability of schools to attract these top students has been
steadily declining for years. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence measuring the extent to which
this popular proposition is true. We have good reason to suspect that the quality of those entering
teaching has fallen over time. Teaching has remained a predominately female profession for years; at the
same time, the employment opportunities for talented women outside of teaching have soared. In this
paper, we combine data from four longitudinal surveys of high school graduates spanning the years 1957-
1992 to examine how the propensity for talented women to enter teaching has changed over time. We
find that while the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the
likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen
dramatically from 1964 to 1992—by our estimation, from almost 20% to under 4%