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Study Details Barriers to Career-Changers Going Into Teaching

Ruth Petkaitis, a graduate of Connecticut’s Alternate Route to Certification, teaches kindergartners music at Mary M. Hooker School of Environmental Sciences in Hartford, Conn.

—Photograph by Christopher Capozziello for Education Week

By Stephen Sawchuk

Experts are pointing to a new opinion survey and research analysis as evidence of a need to overhaul teacher training, compensation, and support, in order to appeal to potential career-changers interested in teaching.

Demand for new teachers is expected to exceed 1.5 million over the next decade, as members of the baby-boomer generation of teachers retire. And career-switchers could become an increasingly important source of fresh talent: More than two of every five college graduates between the ages of 24 and 60 would consider teaching as a second career in the future, according to the survey released last week by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation .

Among a subset of respondents especially interested in teaching, 27 percent said they would consider doing so within the next five years, according to the survey findings, which the foundation released along with a research analysis that lays out a range of...