Students in middle grades are more likely than students in high schools to have out-of-field teachers.

Researchers have explored the hypothesis that teachers' knowledge and ability are associated with student learning in the classroom. These studies have found that students learn more from mathematics teachers who majored in mathematics than from teachers who did not (Goldhaber and Brewer 1997) and more from mathematics and science teachers who studied teaching methods in the subject they teach than from those who did not (Monk 1994; Goldhaber and Brewer 1997). These findings have prompted further examinations of "out-of-field" teachers (i.e., teachers who lack a major and certification in the subject they teach). This indicator reports the proportions of students in middle and high school classes who were taught by out-of-field teachers in 1999–2000. ¹

In academic classes, out-of-field teachers generally taught a larger percentage of students in the middle grades (i.e., grades 5–9) than in high school in 1999–2000. Out-of-field teachers taught 19 percent of English students in the middle grades, compared with 7 percent in high school. The same was true for mathematics (23 vs. 10 percent), science (17 vs. 7 percent), and social science classes (15 vs. 7 percent). Foreign language was the only academic class where no statistical differences were found in the proportions of students in the middle and high school grades who were taught by out-of-field teachers (19 vs. 15 percent).

This pattern was not evident for nonacademic classes like art, music, and physical education, however. In art and music classes, no differences were found between the proportions of students who were taught by out-of-field teachers in middle and high school grades. In physical education, out-of-field teachers taught a larger percentage of students in high school than in the middle grades (5 vs. 3 percent).

Students in the middle and high school grades were more likely to have out-of-field teachers in mathematics, foreign language, social science, and physical science classes than in their art, music, and physical education classes (see table 28-1).

Overall, out-of-field teachers were more common in physical science than in any other regular subject in both the middle and high school grades. They taught 42 percent of physical science students in the middle grades and 18 percent in high school.

¹The data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) used for this analysis are from a representative sample of full- and part-time teachers rather than a representative sample of all students. Thus, technically this indicator presents the percentage of these sampled teachers' students who are in classes with a teacher teaching outside their field. For ease of presentation, however, this percentage will be referred to as the percentage of students who are in classes with an out-of-field teacher. (back to text)