Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The recruitment and retention of effective teachers remains a constant and challenging task for schools and districts across the United States. This is particularly true when it comes to recruiting and retaining teachers of color, as the teaching force remains disproportionately white and female. Accordingly, a large literature investigates the determinants of teacher labor supply. However, whether teaching is transmitted inter-generationally from parents to children has yet to be investigated. Persistence in occupational choice occurs among children from higher socioeconomic statuses, but has also been found across a wide variety of service types. Given racial gaps in college completion and evidence that wages and educational attainment are transmitted across generations, this may potentially explain the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic teachers. Similarly, if fathers transmit professions to their sons, this could explain the persistence of gender imbalances in the teaching profession.

This study begins to fill this gap in the literature on teacher labor supply by testing whether the children of teachers are more likely to become teachers than are the children of other types of college-educated professionals. We will also test whether the intergenerational persistence of teaching varies by parent or child sex, race, and household composition. We hypothesize that children whose parents are teachers are more likely to enter the teaching profession. Finally, we will test whether teaching is more or less persistent a profession than other female-dominated professions, such as nursing.

We address these questions using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979 cohort, which is a nationally representative survey of U.S. citizens who were young adults in 1979. Importantly for the proposed analysis, the children of the original NLSY-79 cohort were also surveyed into young adulthood, so that we can observe both the educational attainment and occupation of parents and adults. A host of other information is observed in the NLSY, including household composition, household income, and demographic characteristics.

Our empirical strategy and econometric model will be motivated by the basic model of inter-generational transmission of socioeconomic status. The idea is to regress child outcome on parent outcome, which in this case is a binary indicator for being a teacher as primary profession. The coefficient on the parent’s outcome is a descriptive parameter known as the intergenerational correlation coefficient. We will test for heterogeneity by estimating the model separately for different demographic groups. We will also test for differences between the effects of the mother’s and father’s occupations by including these as separate covariates in the model.

Our study will contribute to the broader literature on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, broadly defined, with a focus on transmission of occupation. This is a mechanism that might help to explain the relative lack of social mobility observed in the U.S. Moreover, it has direct policy implications for educators and school officials seeking to increase the diversity of the teacher profession. For example, children of non-teachers might lack information about the benefits of teaching or the available and necessary routes to a teaching job.