The Right Way to Boost Teacher Diversity | American Enterprise Institute

Key Points

• The left’s approach to promoting teacher diversity is problematic, but that does not mean we should dismiss the goal of increasing teacher diversity.
• We should encourage schools and districts to affirmatively recruit and hire teachers whose lived experiences match those of the students they will teach.
• Schools, districts, and states should tear down the walls that are keeping great teachers out of the classroom and recruit teachers who embrace a high-expectations attitude.

Introduction

Any effort to actively diversify the teaching profession is likely to put conservatives in a defensive posture. It’s not that conservatives can’t appreciate how, for example, a poor black girl growing up in Detroit might benefit from having a teacher with life experience similar to her own, just as a poor white boy growing up in Appalachia might benefit from having a teacher who grew up in similar circumstances. Nor are we blind to the possibility that dysfunctional school districts might still be using recruitment and hiring practices that unintentionally impede highly qualified black and Hispanic candidates from landing teaching jobs.

Rather, the push for teacher diversity risks bringing all the ethical and constitutional issues of affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion to the classroom.

Even so, students really do benefit from teachers who share their background, and there are conservative ways to recruit such teachers that don’t amount to racial bean counting.

Progressive Myopia on Race

When progressives argue that students benefit from teachers who “look like them,”¹ it sounds to many conservatives like fingernails on a chalkboard. There are many, many problems with this argument and the initiatives that flow from it. Wouldn’t students benefit simply from good teachers regardless of race? Wouldn’t the implementation of such a policy program necessitate discrimination in the hiring process?

Moreover, those who make such statements tend to focus on superficial diversity. After all, that’s how selective universities have approached racial diversity in recent decades—by focusing on visual diversity,² as if to make sure that their college brochures feature students with varying hues of skin color, even if the black students are mostly second-generation African or Caribbean immigrants³ or the Hispanic students are mostly the children of Latin American elites. It is cynical race essentialism at its worst.

The left is also insincere when it sets the bar for teacher diversity at unrealistically high levels. It’s often stated that states and districts should aim to hire black and Hispanic teachers in the same proportion as their enrollment of black and Hispanic students.⁴ But this is mathematically next to impossible. Consider the following:

• Black students make up 15 percent of all public school pupils; for Hispanic students, it’s 29 percent (as of 2022).⁵
• Public schools hire about 250,000 teachers a year.⁶
• For new teachers—much less all teachers—to be racially proportionate to the student population, public schools would have to hire 37,500 black teachers and 72,500 Hispanic teachers every year.
• Yet just 200,000 black students graduate from college every year; for Hispanic students, it’s 326,000.⁷
• Therefore, we would need to recruit 19 percent of all black college graduates and 22 percent of Hispanic college graduates into teaching every year to reach proportionality.
• For comparison, American colleges produce 1.1 million white college graduates annually, and white students now make up 44 percent of public school enrollment. So, to be proportional, we would need to recruit into teaching 110,000 white teachers per year—or just 10 percent of the white college graduate population.

Yet ignoring this basic math allows advocates on the left to forever decry the paucity of teacher diversity. Unless we want to remove college degree requirements for teaching in public schools (which we shouldn’t),⁸ we need a more realistic approach. This is primarily because, like it or not, the evidence largely suggests that students do benefit from having at least a few teachers whose backgrounds resemble their own.

The Evidence That Teacher Backgrounds Matter

It’s true that many (though not all) studies have found that children of color, and even white students, can benefit from having black or Hispanic teachers.⁹ The best of these studies use sophisticated methodological approaches to establish a causal relationship between a teacher’s race and student achievement.

For example, in a seminal paper in the Economics of Education Review, Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas W. Papageorge use student test-score data and teacher survey responses to investigate teachers’ varying levels of expectations for their students, how those expectations differ by race, and what impact this may have on student achievement.¹⁰ The scholars find that, in general, black teachers hold higher expectations for black students than white teachers do (determined by how much education they expect each of their students to attain) and that these higher expectations, in turn, are related to higher student achievement.

But there’s an important caveat to this and other studies. Namely, the researchers control for teachers’ characteristics beyond race, such as years of experience, the selectivity of the college they attended, and, where possible, their teacher licensure exam scores. This means that the studies find a benefit for black students when they are taught by black teachers—all else being equal when it comes to the teachers’ qualifications.

Unfortunately, given large achievement gaps that still exist in this country, all else is rarely equal. In the real world, schools may struggle to find many black and Hispanic candidates whose academic credentials (as gauged by verbal ability tests or graduation from selective colleges and universities) are as strong as those of many white and Asian candidates.¹¹

So where does that leave us? The progressive argument that simply hiring more black teachers to teach black kids will somehow usher in an educational utopia is simply false. That said, there is substantial evidence that students do benefit from having a few teachers whose backgrounds resemble their own. It’s a small, achievable benefit we can secure with policy that will not radically improve our schools but will nudge them in the right direction.

Three Conservative Steps to Teacher Diversity

So the left’s approach here is highly problematic. But that does not mean we should dismiss the goal of increasing teacher diversity. That’s partly because of the evidence cited above, but it’s also due to the commonsense notion that students can benefit from being taught by a teacher with an upbringing like their own—at least a few times over their K–12 career.

Teachers, after all, are not just robotic instructors. They are human beings, whose relationships with students can play a critical role in helping students see what might be possible for their own lives. No doubt, students can learn a lot from great teachers from any walk of life. But we increase the odds of kids feeling like they belong if they have access to at least a few teachers (and coaches and counselors) to whom they might relate on a more personal level.

Here’s how to do teacher diversity right:

1. All schools should hire at least a few teachers with life experiences similar to their student populations. Critically, though, we shouldn’t equate life experience simply with race. Instead, let’s encourage schools and districts to affirmatively recruit and hire teachers whose own lived experiences match those of the students they will teach. For Appalachian schools, that means teachers who grew up in Appalachia. For urban Title I schools, that means teachers who themselves attended urban Title I schools. For schools in the Rio Grande Valley, that means teachers who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley.

• There are two important caveats. First, we shouldn’t waive other important qualifications. All candidates should demonstrate strong academic achievement and the likely ability to boost student learning.
• Second, schools should not use life experience as a proxy for race. That would violate conservatives’ principles concerning race neutrality in public policy—and would likely violate the Constitution as well.

2. Schools and districts should recruit teachers who demonstrate a commitment to traditional educational practices. Practices such as explicit phonics instruction in early-grade reading classes and high expectations for student behavior tend to boost student achievement. Fortunately, some research indicates that graduates of HBCUs are more likely than other teacher candidates to embrace these methods.¹² Perhaps that’s because of the higher expectations black teachers tend to hold for their students (as discussed above). But it might also be the tendency for black teachers to be more suspicious than their peers of progressive fads promulgated by traditional education schools.

   It’s certainly appropriate—praiseworthy, actually—for schools to look for teachers who embrace a high-expectations attitude and to focus most of their recruiting efforts on universities that tend to produce many such teachers.

3. Schools, districts, and states should tear down the walls that are keeping great teachers out of the classroom—including black and Hispanic ones. Traditional licensure and certification requirements present a barrier for many prospective teachers by requiring expensive coursework and student teaching before an individual can start to earn a paycheck from teaching.¹³ That creates a hardship for all future teachers, but especially for those who can’t afford to work without pay—including many black and Hispanic teacher candidates, who disproportionately come from low-income, noncollege-educated families.¹⁴ That’s surely one reason that alternative certification programs tend to have much more success recruiting black and Hispanic teachers and also why charter schools—which are exempt from some certification rules—feature teaching staffs that are more diverse.¹⁵

Policy wonks have long known about other, more subtle barriers to the teaching profession that unfortunately remain in too many districts and may preclude less-advantaged college graduates, in particular, from landing teaching jobs.¹⁶ For example, posting jobs late in the hiring season creates a unique challenge for teachers from lower-income families, who can’t afford to wait until well into the summer to know where their paycheck may come from. Fixing that could also go a long way toward bringing more diverse teachers into the classroom.

These three steps offer the right way to promote teacher diversity, and we should celebrate charter schools, private schools, and school districts that embrace them.

About the Author

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.