The diversity gap for public school teachers is actually growing across generations
Editor's Note:
This post is part of "Teacher diversity in America," a series from the Brown Center on Education Policy that examines minority underrepresentation among public educators in the U.S.
The public teacher workforce has been slowly growing more racially diverse over the last three decades. A notable study from Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill finds the number of teachers of color more than doubled between 1987 and 2012, resulting in the share of nonwhite teachers in America’s public schools expanding from 12 to 17 percent over that same period. More current survey results from 2016 show the share of nonwhite teachers has jumped even higher, nearing 20 percent.
These rather encouraging trend lines may lead observers to conclude that public schools are successfully attracting an increasingly larger share of people of color into the teaching profession—whatever we’re doing, we’re moving in the right direction. And though this conclusion seems reasonable, it runs counter to what the underlying data tells us about racial underrepresentation among the teacher workforce.
In this installment of our ongoing teacher diversity series, we examine the racial diversity of the teacher workforce looking across different generations of teachers. For readers following this series, our analysis here is part of our contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color, edited by Conra Gist and Travis Bristol (expected publication: Spring 2020)—a volume that should also be of interest.
In this piece, we analyze national survey data spanning 25 years and arrive at a counterintuitive finding: The public teaching profession is growing disproportionately white over time. In other words, we see very worrying trends about racial diversity that have been decades in the making. If states and districts are taking teacher diversity seriously, the following analysis should be a wakeup call that much more needs to be done to promote more racial diversity in schools.
WORRYING SIGNS FORMING
Though the general teacher diversity trend has been steadily moving upwards for decades, two recent studies offer a different interpretation on the same trends, casting doubt on whether the teacher workforce will become sufficiently diverse.
First, a study we published with co-authors Hannah Putman and Kate Walsh in 2016 estimated the racial/ethnic breakdown of both the teacher CONTINUE READING: The diversity gap for public school teachers is actually growing across generations
