No longer your stereotypical schoolmarm, a schoolteacher today has a profile markedly different from a generation ago. She - teachers are still overwhelmingly female - is less likely to make teaching a lifelong career. Having possibly worked in another field first, she's a bit older than her counterpart 40 years ago. Chances are, she's also more educated.

But there's one shift in the new demographic of teachers that has drawn particular attention - and concern. It seems that fewer "high-aptitude" women - those from the most selective colleges with stellar SAT scores - are becoming elementary and high school teachers.

"These teachers were never a big share, but they were a non-negligible share," says Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., whose research focuses on the economics of education. "People say they were important leaders. They weren't in every classroom but they were mentors." Ms. Hoxby and Andrew Leigh of the Australian National University have authored the latest study on aptitude in the newest generation of schoolteachers.

In a sense, their findings simply underscore a broader issue - the widespread need for talented teachers to step up to the chalkboard as baby boomers begin retiring. To fill the vacancies, as many as 2.2 million teachers are needed between 2000 and 2010. Certainly most experts would agree that creative new strategies must be employed to ensure the brightest are included in this bunch.

But lost in talk of how best to recruit a fresh crop of teachers has been the equally pressing problem of retention. More than 20 percent of beginning teachers quit after four years, and many barely survive the first year's baptism by fire. Some educators believe that this tough work environment and the sink-or-swim attitude toward new teachers are keeping people away.

In "Wage Distortion," however - which appears in the current issue of Education Next, a journal published by Stanford University's Hoover Institution - Hoxby and Mr. Leigh suggest that pay is the reason so few high-aptitude women opt to teach. Specifically, they cite "pay compression," whereby the salary differential between high- and low-aptitude public school teachers has narrowed since the 1960s, so that today "those with the highest aptitude earn no more than those with the lowest."

Even more troubling, say Hoxby and Leigh, pay compression has not only diminished the number of smart female teachers, but it has also increased the share of women from bottom-tier colleges who performed poorly on achievement tests. (See table, right.)

This explanation defies conventional wisdom. Most experts hold that fewer women are going into teaching than in the past because such an array of appealing career options is open to them - both service-oriented and more lucrative. Women looking to help people can become doctors or work for public-interest groups. More graduates consider law and engineering, while investment banks and management consulting firms recruit women from selective schools on campus.

As a result, the so-called "hidden subsidy of education," those talented, well-educated women - and minorities - who traditionally filled the ranks, is disappearing, says Susan Moore Johnson, director of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

Morgaen Donaldson, a doctoral student on Professor Johnson's research team, says that during her first year teaching in a Boston public school she would be asked, "You went to Princeton. Why aren't you a lawyer?" She'd respond by asking why someone with an undergraduate degree from Princeton University shouldn't be a teacher. But Ms. Donaldson worries that some elite colleges may be sending their graduates the message that teaching is an "antiintellectual profession."

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