Teacher diversity: Grounding our goals in reality

One feature of an ideal school environment, we
believe, is that both students and their teachers reflect America in all of its
diversity. Everyone, including children coming from privilege, benefits from a
diverse school experience.

It’s no wonder that as the minority student
population has grown in numbers in the past few decades, surpassing 50 percent,
so many of us are troubled that the minority teacher population has failed to
keep pace, standing now at only 18 percent minority. The push to achieve racial
parity between teachers and students has never been stronger, with urgent calls
from school boards, states, and even the U.S. Department of Education for the
nation to make teacher diversity a top goal for school districts.

This sentiment is understandable, commendable, but
— at the risk of being a wet blanket — not even remotely achievable within the
foreseeable future.

No matter how you run the numbers, school districts
simply cannot recruit and retain enough black and Hispanic teachers to achieve
racial parity between the teacher workforce and the U.S. student body – no
matter how many reprimands HR officials have to face from the their school
boards for the paltry results.

Researchers from NCTQ and The Brookings Institution
recently analyzed what it would take to create a teaching workforce as diverse
as the students it serves. You can find a full report of our analysis and
findings here.

We estimate the effects of different interventions
that might increase the number of minority teachers, extrapolating population
projections for the next four decades to see how close they can come to
creating a racially representative teacher workforce.

The findings are startling: parity or even
significant inroads to parity will remain completely elusive unless we fire on
all cylinders. If we can somehow boost the rates of college completion,
interest in teaching, hiring, and retention so that these rates for black and
Hispanic college students and adults mirror the rates of their white
counterparts, then parity becomes an achievable goal – but is still several
decades away.

How can this be?

Let’s walk through what we found, drawing on a
model we built using U.S. Census projections and data about the current teacher
and student populations to estimate the impact of various interventions.

For example, let’s see where a big push on
retention of black teachers gets us. Currently, 16 percent of America’s public school
students are black, compared to 7 percent of teachers, creating a nine
percentage point gap in the diversity of students and teachers.

What could happen if schools took real and
substantive steps to retain their black teachers so that year in and year out
black teachers stay in the classroom at the same rate as white teachers
(improving their current attrition rate from 10 percent to mirror white
teachers’ 7 percent)? We still wouldn’t close the diversity gap even projecting
out to 2060 (the furthest year of Census projections available).

Next, imagine we committed ourselves heart, body,
and soul (as many districts are, in fact, trying to do) to hire more black
teachers. The rewards would be tiny even projecting all the way out to 2060.

Okay, so what about persuading more black college
students to consider teaching? Higher education could heavily promote teaching
with undergraduates, or graduate programs and alternative providers could
recruit more black candidates—something that many claim to be doing already.
But let’s imagine pouring some real resources into these strategies, such as increased
salaries, loan forgiveness, or more leadership opportunities to succeed in
persuading black adults to consider teaching at the same rate as white adults (currently
4.3 percent of black undergraduate students major in education compared with
6.9 percent of white undergraduates; we see similar disparities for graduate
college education degrees and alternative certification enrollment).

Again, the results would be fairly paltry – closing
the diversity gap by about two and a half percentage points by 2060.

I’m guessing that a lot of people reading this are
thinking “but look at the success of Teach For America, now recruiting new
cohorts which are about 50 percent teachers of color?” TFA was able to achieve
these huge gains in part because it developed unprecedented recruitment efforts
of minority students beginning in their freshmen year—a great strategy to
emulate. But keep in mind that the corps is tiny compared to America’s needs.
Teach For America supplies less than 3 percent of the nation’s teachers. Its
hard push on this problem still only produced about 800 new black corps members
in a year. That’s enough to translate into significant gains for TFA, which is
only recruiting some 4,100 teachers in a year, but remains a far cry from the
300,000 more black teachers needed to achieve parity across all American
schools.

Let’s go back to the point of greatest disparity
between black and white students: the college completion rate. If we invest
heavily to support black students and ameliorate their low college completion
rate so that they graduate college at the same rate as white students
(currently 28 percent of black 22-year olds have earned a bachelor’s degree,
compared with 47 percent of white 22-year olds), we still will not come close
to closing the gap by 2060.

Disheartening, no?

For Hispanic teachers, the dismal scenario is much
the same. In fact because the Hispanic population in the US is growing at such
a fast rate, much faster than the black population, the diversity gap is
expected to widen if we do not take action.

Only if we are able to graduate more Hispanic
teachers from college or draw more Hispanic adults into careers in teaching can
we reduce the growing diversity gap significantly, otherwise expected to be 22 percentage
points by 2060.

Clearly, the answer is to combine all these
interventions and be successful at
all of them (success defined here as achieving the same rates as their white
counterparts) to make any real dent. If over the next decade we were to improve
college completion rates, interest in teaching, hiring, and retention to mirror
that of white teachers at every point, we would actually achieve parity by the
year 2044 for black teachers and students. The picture is less cheery for
Hispanic teachers, only coming within the ballpark (three percentage points
away from racial parity) by consistent pushes through 2060.

 So are we
suggesting we all throw up our hands and give up on achieving greater parity?
Absolutely not. But let’s not underestimate the ambition, commitment, and
persistence needed, or browbeat school superintendents or human resources
officials when they are only able to make incremental progress. Let’s also not
advocate for racial parity at the expense of quality. The research is clear
that students’ success still depends most on the quality of their teachers

In the meantime, other important solutions can
achieve greater equity in our schools. Let’s look for meaningful ways to ensure
that teachers – who want to do right by their students – don’t unintentionally
do harm to the kids who don’t look like them. Let’s go beyond the stuff of
current trainings in which teachers and teacher candidates engage in a lot of
reflecting on their implicit biases, analyzing their white privilege, or
developing cultural sensitivity, much of which hasn’t had much impact –
although these do play an important role. Let’s do more to have teachers
examine their daily interactions with students by asking themselves: which
students do they call on to answer questions? Are some students more likely to receive
harsher disciplinary actions than others? Do they select some groups of students
for more challenging work over others? Give teachers the training and tools to
make sure that they do not allow their biases along race, gender, class, or any
other lines to get in the way of helping every child thrive.