Ingersoll, Richard
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Professor of Education and Sociology
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Richard M. Ingersoll, a former high school teacher, is Professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His area of expertise is America’s elementary and secondary teaching force. His research and writing focus on teaching as a job, teachers as employees, and schools as workplaces.
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Publication Loosely Coupled Organizations Revisited(1993) Ingersoll, RichardOver the past two decades organizational analysts have become increasingly intrigued by those complex organizations which, despite appearing to be highly rationalized, paradoxically seem to lack expected levels of internal coordination and control of their productive activities and employees. The resulting body of research has popularized several new labels for such organizations - loosely coupled systems and organized anarchies. This essay evaluates this line of research by focussing on its analysis of schools, which are usually considered to be the epitome of loosely structured organizations. In brief, I disagree with this perspective's conclusions and argue that distinguishing the mode and degree of organizational coupling and control depend on where, by what criteria and how one looks. My contention is that although this debunking perspective ostensibly rejects tidy rational and efficiency models of organization, ironically it unwittingly employs many of the latter's assumptions of organizational behavior. In particular, these analysts adopt, I argue, a framework that precludes the discovery of both the degree and forms of organizational control within schools. Subsequently, by re-examining and re-interpreting the existing research on school organization, this paper identifies and illustrates a range of institutional and organizational mechanisms by which schools and the work of teachers are constrained and circumscribed.Publication An Agenda for Research on Teachers and Schools: Revisiting NCES' Schools and Staffing Survey(1995-11-01) Ingersoll, Richard MThis paper outlines an agenda of research on teachers and schools utilizing NCES' Schools and Staffing Survey. SASS is an unusual education survey. Unlike most major large-scale nationally representative surveys, SASS does not focus on students, nor on feature measures of student achievement and student outcomes. Instead, SASS focuses on teachers and schools. Indeed, it is probably the largest and most comprehensive survey of teachers in existence. SASS consists of linked surveys of schools, districts, principals, and teachers. It has obtained a wealth of information on teachers-their backgrounds, training, attitudes, behavior-and on schools-their principals, working conditions, contexts, characteristics, processes, and climate.Publication Rejoinder: Misunderstanding the Problem of Out-of-Field Teaching(2001-01-01) Ingersoll, RichardThe phenomenon of out-of-field teaching - teachers assigned to teach subjects for which they have little education or training-is an important, but long unrecognized, problem in schools. It is an important issue because highly qualified teachers may actually become highly unqualified when they teach subjects for which they have little background. This issue has long been unrecognized, however, largely due to an absence of accurate information about it - a situation remedied with the availability, beginning in the early 1990s, of new data on teachers.Publication The Wrong Solution to the Teacher Shortage(2003-05-01) Ingersoll, Richard; Smith, Thomas MIn recent years, researchers and policymakers have told us again and again that severe teacher shortages confront schools. They point to a dramatic increase in the demand for new teachers resulting from two converging demographic trends: increasing student enrollments and increasing numbers of teachers reaching retirement age. Shortfalls of teachers, they say, are forcing many school systems to lower their standards for teacher quality (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1997).Publication Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage(2011-09-01) Ingersoll, Richard; May, HenryThis study examines and compares the recruitment and retention of minority and White elementary and secondary teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey. Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two decades, the number of minority teachers has almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful. This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. Moreover, though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was consistently or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors. In contrast, organizational conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and White teacher turnover. The schools in which minority teachers have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where White teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover.Publication The Organization of Schools as an Overlooked Source of Underqualified Teaching(2002-12-01) Ingersoll, RichardBehind the headlines about a looming and large teacher shortage lies another story, one that suggests the problem ought to be addressed within schools as much as by external solutions. The organization of schools and how teachers are used account for a great deal of the underqualified teaching in public schools. Most policy actions, however, stress improved recruitment, teacher training, and certification requirements as the best ways to assure qualified teaching in the nation’s schools. This study focuses on one aspect of unequal distribution of quality teaching – out-of-field placement. In schools serving primarily low-income and/or minority students, out-of-field teaching is an acute problem and occurs even though the causes have little to do with the lack of certified teachers. Rather, school district policies and decisions made by school leadership often create inequalities in teaching quality within schools.Publication A Comparative Study of Teacher Preparation and Qualifications in Six Nations(2007-01-01) Ingersoll, RichardAcross the educational systems of the world, few issues have received more attention in recent years than the problem of ensuring that elementary and secondary-school classrooms are all staffed with adequately qualified teachers (Mullis, et al., 2000; OECD, 1994, 2005; Wang, et al., 2003). Even in nations where students routinely score high on international exams, the issue of teacher quality is the subject of much concern. This is not surprising. Elementary and secondary schooling is mandatory in almost all nations and children are legally placed in the care of teachers for a significant portion of their lives. It is widely believed that the quality of teachers and teaching are among the most important factors shaping the learning and growth of students. Moreover, this impact goes beyond student academic achievement. Across the world, observers routinely tie the performance of teachers to numerous, larger societal goals and problems—economic competitiveness and productivity, juvenile delinquency, moral and civic culture, and so on. In addition, the largest single component of the cost of education in any country typically is teacher compensation. Along with a general consensus among many nations that the quality of teachers and teaching is a vital resource, there is accordingly much concern surrounding how equitably this resource is distributed within educational systems. Indeed, some nations suffer from an apparent paradox—that despite an overall overproduction and oversupply of new teachers, there nevertheless appear to be substantial numbers of students without access to qualified teachers. Such concern has resulted in a steady stream of commissions, reports, and studies all targeting teacher quality as one of the central problems facing school systems. In many nations this concern has resulted in new legislation and policy. Foremost among these have been widespread efforts to increase the entry standards and preparation requirements for teachers. Hong Kong, for instance, initiated in 1997 an “all graduate, all trained” policy requiring new primary- and secondary-school teachers to have bachelor’s degrees and to be professionally trained. In Japan there has been an active reform movement to increase teacher preparation requirements and increase evaluation and accountability of teachers. In the United States this concern surfaced within a massive new piece of legislation in 2002, the federal law known as the No Child Left Behind Act, which in addition to new standards for student achievement, set a new and unprecedented goal— to ensure that elementary and secondary students in the United States are all taught by highly qualified teachers. In addition to, or perhaps because of, recognition of its importance, the issue of teacher quality also is a source of debate and disagreement in many nations.Publication Why Do High-Poverty Schools Have Difficulty Staffing Their Classrooms with Qualified Teachers?(2004-11-01) Ingersoll, Richard MThe failure to ensure that the nation’s classrooms, especially those in disadvantaged schools, are all staffed with qualified teachers is one of the most important problems in contemporary American education. The conventional wisdom holds that these problems are primarily due to shortages of teachers, which, in turn, are primarily due to recent increases in teacher retirement and student enrollment. Unable to compete for the available supply of adequately trained teachers, poor school districts, especially those in urban areas, the critics hold, end up with large numbers of underqualified teachers. The latter is, in turn, held to be a primary factor in the unequal educational and occupational outcomes of children from poor communities. Understandably, the prevailing policy response to these school staffing problems has been to attempt to increase the supply of teachers. In recent years, a wide range of initiatives has been implemented to recruit new candidates into teaching, especially to disadvantaged settings. This report investigates the possibility that other factors – those tied to the characteristics and conditions of schools – are behind the teacher shortage crisis. Unlike earlier research, this analysis focuses on those kinds of schools deemed most disadvantaged and the most needy – those serving rural and urban, low-income communities. The data utilized in this investigation are from the Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, the data collection arm of the U.S. Department of Education. This is the largest and most comprehensive source of data on teachers available.Publication Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis(2001-09-01) Ingersoll, RichardContemporary educational theory holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate school performance is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers. This theory also holds that these school staffing problems are primarily due to shortages of teachers, which, in turn, are primarily due to recent increases in teacher retirements and student enrollments. This analysis investigates the possibility that there are other factors - those tied to the organizational characteristics and conditions of schools - that are driving teacher turnover and, in turn, school staffing problems. The data utilized in this investigation are from the Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the Teacher Followup Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. The results of the analysis indicate that school staffing problems are not primarily due to teacher shortages, in the technical sense of an insufficient supply of qualified teachers. Rather, the data indicate that school staffing problems are primarily due to excess demand resulting from a "revolving door" - where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement. Moreover, the data show that the amount of turnover accounted for by retirement is relatively minor when compared to that associated with other factors, such as teacher job dissatisfaction and teachers pursuing other jobs. The article concludes that popular education initiatives, such as teacher recruitment programs, will not solve the staffing problems of such schools if they do not also address the organizational sources of low teacher retention.Publication Teacher Professionalization and Teacher Commitment: A Multilevel Analysis(1997-02-01) Ingersoll, Richard; Alsalam, Nabeel; Quinn, Peggy; Bobbitt, SharonTeacher professionalization—the movement to upgrade the status, training, and working conditions of teachers—has received a great deal of interest in recent years. This report is concerned with the effects of teacher professionalization on elementary and secondary teachers in the United States. The analysis assesses the effects of teacher professionalization by examining the relationships between a selected set of characteristics, traditionally associated with professions and professionals, and one of the most important aspects of the quality and performance of teachers: their commitment to their teaching careers.