Why we should diversify the overwhelmingly white U.S. teaching force — and how
Students have been shown to benefit from having a diversity of teachers, yet the vast majority of teachers in the United States are white and female. What can be done about this? Leslie T. Fenwick, dean of the Howard University School of Education and a former visiting scholar at Harvard University, takes up that question in this post. Her research examines education equity, school leadership and urban school reform. She is a contributing author to the best-selling book “The Last Word: The Best Controversy and Commentary in American Education.” This appeared in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, and I am republishing it with permission.
By Leslie T. Fenwick
Nearly 75 percent of inner-city school teachers and 91 percent of urban school teachers are white, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Is there anything that can or should be done about the tremendous demographic mismatch between the public school teaching force and student population?
Do we really believe what the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy proclaimed nearly 25 years ago, when it said the nation cannot tolerate a future in which white and minority children are confronted with almost exclusively white authority figures in their schools?
For the first time in history, the majority of the nation’s public school students are children of color. Today’s public school student is more likely to be African-American, Hispanic/Latino or Asian than White and less likely to speak English as a first language.
In fact, 50 percent of English as a Second Language (ESL) students are American citizens. Spanish, too, isn’t the only language ESL students are speaking — Chinese, Haitian Creole, Hmong, Vietnamese, Arabic and Somali are among the top 10 languages spoken in American schools. How this new Why we should diversify the overwhelmingly white U.S. teaching force — and how - The Washington Post: