Low caliber of people going into teaching

A note from a friend on the caliber of people going into teaching:

To your point about the caliber of people going into teaching, I quoted David Levin in 1998 saying essentially the same thing. The footnote supporting that quotation in No Excuses reads as follows:

A good deal of recent research backs this claim. Among high-school students who took the SAT in 1994-1995, those who intended to study education in college scored lower on both the verbal and math sections than students expressing an interest in any other field. (Thomas D. Snyder, et al., Digest of Education Statistics 1997, U.S. Department of Education, p. 135.) In 1998 the mean SAT score for students who intended to major in education was 479 math and 485 verbal—32 and 20 points lower than all college-bound seniors. (Tyce Palmaffy, “Measuring the Teacher Quality Problem,” in Better Teachers, Better Schools, edited by Marci Kanstoroom and Chester E. Finn, Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, pp. 21-22.) According to another study, once in college, education majors were more likely to be in the bottom quartile and less likely to be in the top quartile than any other major. (Robin R. Henke, et al., Out of the Lecture Hall and into the Classroom: 1992-1993 College Graduates and Elementary/Secondary School Teaching, U.S. Department of Education, p. 58.)