Thousands of students of color attend public schools where no teacher looks like them
When Sha’Diya Tomlin began attending Kirkwood High School three years ago, a white teacher asked her: “How many kids do you have?”
The teacher had not only assumed she was a teenage mother, but she had mistaken Sha’Diya for another black student.
Sha’Diya has had only one black teacher in high school, a fact that has weighed on her and at times caused her to doubt her self-worth.
“I can’t even really articulate exactly what it is, but being in a room full of people constantly every day who look nothing like you, it’s something that wears down on your subconscious,” Sha’Diya said. “It’s harder to learn when somebody doesn’t understand you or when you feel like somebody’s not going to understand you.”
Her experience with having few diverse teachers is common for students of color in the St. Louis region. More than a quarter of public schools in eight Missouri and Illinois counties — or 179 schools — had no teachers of color last year, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of data obtained from the state education departments for Missouri and Illinois.
All told, more than 27,400 students, or 21.9 percent of black, Latino and Asian students, in the eight counties went to a school last year that had no teacher who looked like them.
“White students don’t have that problem,” Sha’Diya said. “They don’t have to think about, ‘I feel out of place here because of my skin color.’”
This mismatch in demographics mirrors a national reality. While half of students attending U.S. public schools were students of color in 2012, 82 percent of teachers were white.
Experts stress that just because a student of color has a white teacher doesn’t mean that teacher is less effective or cares less about that student.
“This is assuming teachers are equally good,” said Nicholas Papageorge, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who studies how a teacher’s race is connected to student achievement. “We’re talking about one thing that matters among many other things.”
But research also shows there are significant consequences when students lack teachers who look like them. Papageorge found in his research that black students who don’t have at least one black teacher in third through fifth grades are 29 percent more likely to drop out of school and 18 percent less likely to express interest in college.
That’s partly because white teachers are less likely to expect a student of color will be successful, research shows.
Another study by Papageorge found that white teachers are about 40 percent less Thousands of students of color attend public schools where no teacher looks like them | Education | stltoday.com: 
