As the national population of students and college-educated adults diversifies, the pool of K-12 teachers across the country has not kept pace, according to a new report released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
The nonprofit released its analysis alongside a teacher diversity dashboard. Previously, they’ve tracked the racial makeup of teachers as compared to their students; this year, for the first time, they’ve added a new metric: the diversity of the college-educated workforce nationally.
“Comparing teacher diversity to student diversity is meaningful, and it is important for students to see themselves reflected in their teachers,” said Heather Peske, president of the organization known as NCTQ. “But we also have to make sure that as we’re setting goals for diversifying the workforce, [that] we set goals based on who we can … attract into the teacher workforce right now.”
Heather Peske (National Council on Teacher Quality)
Historically, teachers have been slightly more diverse than the population of college-educated working adults, a trend which shifted around 2020. As of the most recently available data, teachers from historically disadvantaged groups make up 22.6% of working-age adults with degrees but 21.1% of the state teacher workforce.
While the 1.5-point gap may seem small, Peske told The 74 that it’s significant and points to what she called a “troubling trend:” increasingly people of color are either choosing other professions or are leaving the classroom.
“We’re really using [the] dashboard both as a rearview mirror … but also as a way to forecast the possibilities of where we’re going. We worry that the gap could grow larger, and so that’s why we think it’s really important to pay attention to it now,” she said.
The authors of the NCTQ report hypothesize this points to long-standing issues in the teaching profession, including low pay and status, inequitable hiring and the uncompensated and added responsibilities teachers of color often face — like mentoring or interpreting for families— known as the “invisible tax.”
These numbers also shed light on where in the pipeline the disparity originates, according to Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, who also contributed to the report.
“I think sometimes if we’re only looking at the student and teacher parity … there’s a tendency to just be hypnotized by the problem,” he said, “where this analysis that NCTQ was doing through this dashboard actually gives us even more concrete steps to take to inform our planning.”
Sharif El-Mekki (Center for Black Educator Development)
El-Mekki said it’s not only important to incentivize people of color to become teachers but also to focus on their retention once they enter the classroom — teacher turnover is higher for teachers of color (22%) than white teachers (15%). Black teachers have some of the highest levels of student loan debt, he added, so offering scholarships or debt relief can make a huge difference.
“We didn’t want our pursuit to rebuild a Black teacher pipeline to be disconnected from the social and economic realities that Black youth may face,” he said, so his organization designed a Black Teacher Pipeline Fellowship, which provides support to educators socially, professionally and financially. They also emphasize the importance of early exposure, offering career and technical education courses to high schoolers who may be interested in becoming teachers later on.
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NCTQ’s new dashboard continues to show a persistent gap in diversity when comparing the teacher workforce to student populations. The report cites 48.8% of students nationally who come from historically disadvantaged groups vs. 21.1% of teachers who do. That number was actually two percentage points closer in 2014, with 18.3% of teachers and 44.2% of students.
The organization defines historically disadvantaged groups as including all teachers of color except those who identify as Asian. “While Asian people have certainly experienced discrimination in U.S. history, we haven’t seen the effects of discrimination show up in terms of their educational experiences or earnings outcomes. Asian students often outperform white students, and, as a demographic group, are least likely to suffer from a poor education,” an NCTQ spokesperson told The 74.
That being said, Asian students are less likely than many of their peers of color to see themselves represented in their teachers’ racial identities. Almost 11% of working-age adults with degrees and 5.4% of students are Asian, yet only 2.2% of the state teacher workforce is.
While the percentage of Black educators largely mirrors the population of working-age Black adults with degrees (both at roughly 9%), the percentage of Black students at 15% is six points greater.
National Council on Teacher Quality Teacher Diversity Dashboard
To El-Mekki that demonstrates that there is an untapped Black teacher potential in the number of Black students who could — and do — choose teaching as a career if and when they get the opportunity to go to college. This allows advocates to then probe a little bit deeper, and focus on how to get more Black youth to and through college, so a larger pool is eligible to join the teacher workforce down the line.
An even starker trend exists for Hispanic teachers: Just over 10% of both working-age adults with degrees and the teacher workforce identify as Latino, while 28% of students do.
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The dashboard also includes more granular analysis at the state level, where researchers explored the racial makeup of teacher preparation programs in order to better understand their contribution to diversity between 2019 and 2021. This serves as a roadmap, Peske said, demonstrating which teacher preparation programs are “leading the way towards a more diverse teacher workforce, and which teacher prep programs may be adding roadblocks to diversity by actually making the workforce more white.”
Extensive research has pointed to the benefits of a diverse teacher workforce, both for students of color and for white students, according to Constance Lindsay, a leading expert and assistant education professor at the University of North Carolina.
“For particular populations, it’s very important to have access to a teacher of color or teachers demographically similar to them.” she said, “I would say, particularly for Black boys, definitely on both the quantitative and qualitative side, it’s been demonstrated many times [that] it’s super important for them.”
Some other research highlights:
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Teachers of color produce additional positive academic, social-emotional and behavioral outcomes for all students, regardless of race. On average, students of all races (in upper-elementary grades) show stronger gains in reading and math when they have a teacher of color.
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Black students in Tennessee randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who were not. Additional data from North Carolina revealed similar findings. For the most disadvantaged Black males, conservative estimates suggest that exposure to a Black teacher in primary school cuts high school dropout rates by almost 40%.
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Black students matched to Black teachers are less likely to be identified for special education.
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Student–teacher race and ethnicity matches were associated with fewer unexcused absences for Latino students in a California high school district.
“We have this rapidly diversifying public school student population that is tomorrow’s workers, citizens, etc,” Lindsay added. “We know that of all of the different things that we’ve tried to do to get rid of achievement gaps, having diverse teachers is … a very efficient and effective intervention.”
Disclosure: Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, The Joyce Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide funding to the National Council on Teacher Quality and The 74.