does teacher preparation matter for beginning teachers in

teachers (Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002). These results support the general conclusion that
the more students are at risk of failure, the less well prepared are the beginning teachers hired to
teach them.
Teachers’ Union Membership. With respect to union membership, beginning SETs and
GETs with extensive preparation were more likely than other beginning teachers to secure teaching
positions in unionized schools (see Table 2). Union data indicate that such schools provide
somewhat higher salaries and more achieving students (as measured by higher SAT scores) (Nelson
& Drown, 2003). Teachers generally prefer such schools.
Regular vs. Charter Public Schools. As also seen in Table 2, a very small percentage of beginning
SETs and GETs were hired by charter schools (0.5% vs. 1.3%, respectively). Even though
these percentages are small, they show that charter schools had proportionately fewer beginning
SETs than GETs.
Full- vs. Part-Time Employment. Finally, extensive teacher preparation did not give beginning
SETs an advantage over those with only some preparation, or unprepared, SETs in securing
full-time/regular teaching positions (see Table 2). In contrast, completing extensive teacher
preparation did give beginning GETs a slight advantage in securing full-time/regular teaching
positions.
Overall, the results shown in Table 2 demonstrate that completing extensive teacher preparation
matters considerably in hiring beginning SETs and GETs into schools in which teachers prefer
to practice. Further, these results show that beginning teachers who complete only some
preparation are not only disadvantaged in this respect, but they gain little or no advantage over
beginning teachers without any teacher preparation.
Do Teacher Reports of Being Well Prepared to Teach Vary by Amount of Teacher Preparation?
Figure 2 shows the percentages of beginning SETs in public schools who reported being
well prepared in each of seven capabilities according to amount of preparation in pedagogy and
supervised teaching. Excluding the seventh capability listed (to use computers in education) for
which differences among amounts of teacher preparation were not statistically significant, SETs
with extensive preparation reported being “better prepared” than SETs with only some preparation
in each of the other six teaching capabilities. As might be expected, SETs without any
preparation reported being the least well prepared (except for small differences in assessing students
and handling classroom management).
15