Each and every year of my K-12 education in central Oregon, the teacher at the front of my classroom was — like me — white. I was not lacking for smart, caring adults who looked like me, spoke like me, and were familiar with my cultural background. By contrast, when I became a teacher, nearly all of my students were black or Hispanic. Throughout my first year of teaching, I was forced to grapple with race in a way that I never had before.
In my best moments, I developed relationships with my students through deep personal interactions and frank conversations about race and privilege. I helped them build the skills and knowledge to navigate entrenched power structures to unlock greater opportunities. But in my worst moments, I allowed my racial stereotypes to cloud my understanding of who my students really were. I mispronounced their names. I tokenized them in an effort to make content “relevant” to them. I let my own implicit biases influence the hundreds of split-second pedagogical decisions that I — like all teachers — made each day.
Almost 20 years ago, then Secretary of Education Richard Riley wrote, “Our teachers should be excellent and they should look like America.” Last month, for the first time in the history of American public education, students of color filed into public school classrooms across the country in greater numbers than their white classmates.
Yet as America becomes increasingly black and brown, districts are struggling to cultivate a diverse teaching workforce and close the substantial representation gaps between teachers and students. Teachers of color remain significantly underrepresented relative to the students they serve.
Across the country, persistent segregation teams up with a lack of teacher diversity to create powerful and uncomfortable realities in many school districts. From Miami, where I got my start in teaching, to Boston, where I now manage district-wide recruitment and diversity, similar challenges exist. I have walked through the hallways of schools to see classroom after classroom filled with black and Hispanic children, most of them with a white teacher at the blackboard.
TThe “race gap” between public school students and the teachers we provide them is visually striking, but its effects extend beyond optics: It can send a powerful message to young students of color about who owns knowledge in this country. The knee-jerk response from policymakers and the public at large has been to narrowly focus on recruiting more teachers of color. As a result, districts across the country, including Boston Public Schools (BPS), are faced with mounting public pressure to hire diverse talent at increasing rates. This year, schools across Boston filled over 40% of their vacancies with candidates of color, while at the national level, teachers of color comprise just 17% of the total workforce.
Despite the measured success with recruiting teachers of color, this approach is short-sighted, has diminishing returns, and does not address the root cause of the race gap. Recruitment alone will never counteract the broader demographic forces conspiring to widen the teacher-student race gap.
While demand for teachers of color is steadily increasing, numerous factors have conspired to tamp down the supply. In Massachusetts, only one in ten students enrolled in teacher preparation programs identify as black or Hispanic. We also know that black teachers are retiring at greater rates than white teachers and, in general, teachers of color exit the profession more frequently. A narrow focus on recruitment ignores the underlying challenge of the shallow candidate pool and will not overcome the “leaky bucket” effect that is draining teachers of color from district ranks.
Rather, we need to strengthen teacher pipelines, inspire young students of color to pursue careers in education, and support them through high school, college, schools of education, certification, and hiring. Once they’re in front of a classroom, we need to provide the coaching, support, and mentoring that will help them work through the steep learning curve and become effective teachers that remain in the classroom for lengthy careers.
I recently spoke with Ava Jennings, a young, energetic teacher who just started her first year as a first-grade teacher. Jennings grew up in Dorchester, a diverse, low-income neighborhood that sprawls across southern Boston. Growing up, she attended public schools that primarily served black and Hispanic students. Today, she provides her own students with something that she seldom had in school: a teacher of color who, like them, grew up in Dorchester. “The majority of my teachers were definitely white,” Jennings recalled. “My first-grade teacher was African-American. I’ll never forget her. Everyone else was Caucasian.”
RRace, segregation, and public education have long perplexed Boston, challenging the self-styled liberal bastion of equality — the “city on a hill” — to confront uncomfortable truths. In the birthplace of both American public education and the American abolitionist movement, Boston residents have long fancied themselves as progressive defenders of racial justice.
It is true that Bostonians were particularly active in the civil rights movement, sending hundreds of volunteers and even more dollars to fight Jim Crow. However, in the wake of landmark civil rights decisions and iconic images of lunch counters in Greensboro and barking dogs in Birmingham, many began to question the role of northern cities in perpetuating a more insidious breed of racism and inequality. Civil rights activists expanded their fight beyond de jure segregation in the south, to de facto segregation in the north. Nowhere was this more poignant than in Boston’s deeply segregated public schools.
As pressure mounted, federal judge Arthur Garrity responded in 1974 with a court-ordered remedy for achieving “racial balance” within Boston’s schools — the compulsory busing of 18,000 black and white students to different neighborhoods. The resulting riots and white flight to the suburbs dramatically changed the racial landscape of the greater Boston area.
In an effort to achieve a greater balance between teacher and student diversity, Garrity issued a subsequent order requiring that African-American teachers comprise one-quarter of the teacher workforce. Over thirty years later, BPS has yet to meet this threshold.
FFew would argue that providing black and brown students with similarly hued teachers is sufficient to close achievement gaps. Certainly, a teacher’s effectiveness matters far more than his or her racial identity. But racial interactions do shape student performance: Some studies have shown a bump in student achievement for students who are taught by teachers of the same race. Additionally, teachers of color serve as valuable models of professional success and academic achievement for the students of color in their classrooms. Closing the diversity gap between students of color and teachers who look like them can indeed contribute to closing the achievement gap between those students and their white peers.
It’s no accident that Jennings became a teacher. Her decision to enter the teaching profession was driven not just by her own passion, but also by BPS’ “grow-your-own” approach to recruiting promising prospective teachers of color — while they are still in high school. Jennings joined Teach Boston during her junior year, along with a cohort of her classmates. She worked as a teaching assistant in the summer before 12th grade, lived on campus, and took academic coursework through Wheelock College, where she eventually enrolled for her undergraduate degree.
Ceronne Daly, Director of Diversity Programs for BPS, oversees the program that originally sparked Jennings’ interest in teaching — and also served as Jennings’ mentor. “The program really helped Ava to realize that she wanted to be a teacher,” said Daly. “There are a lot of people who are good with kids who end up working at the Y.”
Programs like this harness high school students’ passion for working with children and channel it into a desire to teach. These programs also provide concrete development opportunities, mentorship, and early exposure to a university setting.
While this program is a promising start, Daly is concerned that there are still too many barriers preventing these students from persisting through college and on to graduation and certification. “The transition from high school to college needs to be more intentional,” she explained, “by meeting the students when they get there and creating cohorts that will advance together.” Students of color are more likely to be the first in their family to attend college and may require additional support to navigate the challenges of the unfamiliar university setting.
According to Jennings, once in college, many of her classmates of color struggled with the coursework. Without the support they needed, some opted for less rigorous degree programs and others dropped out entirely. After graduation, Massachusetts licensure exams — some of the most rigorous in the country — proved to be yet another barrier. Some students, like Jennings, managed to overcome the systemic failures in the fragmented pipeline — but they were the exception, not the rule.
This dynamic is not unique. Around the country, schools of education are not graduating diverse cohorts of prospective teachers. Without increasing the overall pool of teacher candidates of color and properly supporting them, districts will be left to compete for the precious few with other districts that need them just as badly.
As districts look to increase workforce diversity through recruitment, stronger and more contiguous pipelines offer a more promising and sustainable solution. To make these programs successful at a large-enough scale to move the needle on teacher diversity will take close coordination between districts, universities, and state licensure agencies, with a common goal of establishing a robust pipeline that leads from urban schools into colleges and, ultimately, back to the schools.
According to Daly, in order to make this possible “we need to work in a much more connected and concerted way, recognizing that the unit we are working with is a student passing through all these stages.”
We also must not reduce the discussion of diversity down to mere racial proportionality between teachers and students. While Jennings believes that a shared racial identity helps teachers build relationships with their students of color, she also believes that shared experience matters more. “It’s one thing to be African-American but also come from the suburbs or a middle-class background,” she said. “It’s another thing when [a teacher] grew up in the same neighborhood as her students.”
As districts, we need to update and broaden our definition of “diversity” to truly reflect the complexity of our students’ identities — including race, culture, language, gender, sexual orientation, and the nuances of personal experience.
Perhaps most important is cultivating and supporting a culture — among all teachers — of empathy, awareness, authenticity, and commitment to each student as an individual. Jennings encourages her colleagues to get to know each child individually.
“Step back, ask questions, and don’t think that you understand your students,” she said. “It’s hard. You still will never truly understand what it’s like to be an African-American kid growing up in Dorchester, or grow up in public housing, or grow up without a father. You can still care a lot. But you won’t ever truly understand.”
Ultimately, we need to recognize that while students’ racial identities define much of their experiences, they also have many other identities that we must attend to. Putting black teachers in front of black students or Hispanic teachers in front of Hispanic students won’t necessarily solve this problem. Putting culturally competent teachers in front of culturally complex students will.
