From high school to teaching: Many steps, who makes it?

In this paper; we focus on the roles that race, ethnicity, and academic ski lls play in predicting whether high school students persist along each of t he various steps of the path into teaching. We show that the challenge of c reating a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force is not primarily o ne of influencing the occupational decisions of minority college graduates. Instead, the critical challenge is to increase the high school graduation, college enrollment, and college graduation rates of minority youth. We use a sequence of four samples originating in the sophomore cohort of High Sch ool and Beyond (1992). We explore high school sophomores' career transition s along each step of the path into teaching high school graduation, entry i nto college, college graduation, and entry into teaching.