Jersey Jazzman: The State of New Jersey's Teachers, Part 2: A Failure To Achieve Diversity

Jersey Jazzman: The State of New Jersey's Teachers, Part 2: A Failure To Achieve Diversity

The State of New Jersey's Teachers, Part 2: A Failure To Achieve Diversity

I'm breaking down my new report for the New Jersey Policy Perspective on New Jersey's teachers in a series of blog posts:

Part 1: Teachers, Aging, & Pensions

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This graph is from the "short" version of my new report on New Jersey's teachers:

About 1 in 5 students in New Jersey is a white female -- but two-thirds of NJ's teachers are white females. Our teaching corps looks nothing like our student population.

Before I dive deeper into the data, let me first answer the obvious question: Why should we care? Does it matter that our teachers are overwhelmingly white women? 

In fact, we have more and more evidence that it does, and I share a short summary of this evidence in my report. Among the studies I cite:

Colette N. Cann, 2013: This article has an excellent review of the research on teacher-student racial alignment:

In the area of race matching, Dee (2004) examined how the racial background of CONTINUE READING: Jersey Jazzman: The State of New Jersey's Teachers, Part 2: A Failure To Achieve Diversity