End Note

Then and Now

In the 100 years since the staff of Portland’s Clinton Kelly School posed for this portrait, much has changed in the classroom. As the 20th century began, many public school teachers were required to arrive early at the schoolhouse to ready the fire, they were forbidden to marry, and they faced urban classrooms built for 60 children, with desks bolted to the floor. Rural teachers—who taught 67 percent of America’s children in 1910—made do with an average expenditure of $26.13 per student: substantially below the $45.47 that city systems spent.*

One statistic hasn’t changed, however: Then and now, women comprise approximately 75 percent of the teaching workforce. Some other interesting tidbits about today’s three million public school teachers (from the National Center for Education Statistics):

• Average age is 42 with 29 percent age 50 or older
• Average teaching experience is 14 years
• 12 percent are teaching out-of-field in their main assigned area

Photo courtesy of Oregon Historical Society, #020837

*Source: Cuban, L. (1984). How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890-1980. New York: Longman.

Northwest Education is available online in both PDF and HTML versions. Look for Web exclusives, marked with .