Diversifying the Education Workforce: Take-aways from NYKids Positive Outliers

By Aaron Leo & Kristen C. Wilcox

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the majority of students attending public schools in the United States are children of color. Despite this increasing level of diversity among the student population across the country, over three-quarters of teachers are White. As Black History Month draws to a close, we explore the benefits of a diverse educator workforce. We conclude by sharing some of the ways educators in positive outlier schools researched in NYKids College and Career Study work to increase diversity in their workforce.

The Benefits of a Diverse Educator Workforce

A number of studies have found that a diverse education workforce enriches students’ learning experiences. Though all students benefit from interactions with diverse educators, research findings have demonstrated that a diverse education workforce can provide particularly impactful benefits for students of color.

Role Modeling and Adapting Curriculum and Instruction

Students of color reap valuable benefits from developing relationships with educators with whom they share a racial and ethnic identity. For starters, students of color may naturally look to educators with similar backgrounds and experiences to act as role models and those same teachers may help mentor students in how to navigate challenges in and out of school and connect them to their social networks. Teachers of color may also be well positioned to use culturally responsive approaches in their classrooms as they can draw on their own experiences and cultural identities in the design of lessons and choices of activities and materials.

Raising Expectations

Some researchers have found that educators from diverse backgrounds may hold higher expectations for students of color than their White teachers do. These expectations may also shape how student behavior is managed as Black teachers have been found to be less punitive towards students of color and act to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. As a recent NYKids blog post explains, teacher expectations are crucial in shaping student motivation and engagement. These effects are so powerful that researchers even found that the likelihood of college enrollment among Black students was nearly one-third higher if they had two Black teachers by third grade.

Reasons Behind Low Teacher Diversity

Although there is no consensus on the reasons behind the low levels of educator diversity across the U.S., scholars have pointed to several potential causes.

One of the issues contributing to low levels of teacher diversity is the pipeline into teaching via teacher education programs. As Christine Sleeter, for instance, explained diverse teaching candidates may find few faculty of color in teacher preparation programs and therefore lack the mentoring that may help them persist in their programs. Teacher candidates from diverse backgrounds may also be disheartened as they find that the curricular and pedagogical strategies recommended to them in their teacher preparation programs do not capitalize on the perspectives and knowledge possessed by students of color.

Some researchers have also pointed to the poor rates of diverse teacher retention as an enduring problem. A report released by the U.S. Department of Education, for example, found that Black and Latinx teachers are less likely to stay in teaching compared to their White colleagues. One reason which could partially account for this statistic is the propensity for teachers of color to work in schools that are poorly resourced and under oversight from the state for underperformance. In addition, teachers of color working in less culturally and ethnically diverse contexts may find that they are pigeonholed as the “go-to” person to handle any issues around race. Additional workplace insensitivities can make it difficult for teachers of color to develop supportive relationships with their White colleagues which can lead to higher rates of burnout.

 Diversifying the Teacher Workforce: NYKids Research Findings

Educators in the most diverse positive outlier schools that took part in NYKids College and Career Study provide some insights into measures district and school leaders and educators can take to diversify their workforce.

In all of the most diverse positive outlier schools we found that district and school leaders and others involved in staffing paid close attention to diversity in their processes and with a “high expectations twist”.

Example 1: In Freeport High School leaders prioritized the hiring of Spanish-speaking and ENL-certified (English as a New Language) teachers and support staff to support their growing Spanish-speaking population. A student support staff member commented on how families reacted positively to the additional bilingual staff:

“When [parents] learn that they’re able to call someone in the building who speaks their language, you can see, you can feel, the relief in them.”

Example 2: The principal at Port Chester Senior High School articulated a similar emphasis on diversity in the recruiting and hiring process. As he explained:

“I knew I wanted teachers who looked more like my students. I knew that I wanted to hire qualified applicants who were filling niches… African-American teachers, Hispanic teachers, Spanish-speaking teachers. Those were what we certainly looked for very hard when we were filling positions, with always the idea that merit is what mattered most.”

Example 3: At Malverne High School, school and district leaders endeavored to find skilled candidates who shared commonalities with their students and held high expectations for all students. The principal, for instance, explained the need for all new hires to embrace students’ strengths and refute deficit views:

“One thing I will not accept, and everybody knows it: I want all kids to have the opportunity to take honors courses. I don’t ever want to hear what kids can’t do.”

Implications for Diversifying the Teacher Workforce

In addition to redoubling efforts to hire diverse candidates like the positive outlier schools discussed here, a few implications from NYKids research as well as other studies include:

• Craft creative pipeline initiatives to bring more young people of color into teacher education programs. Higher education institutions need to drive these initiatives, but K-12 schools can also seek out connections with teacher preparation programs – especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) to ensure a stream of well-qualified educators from diverse backgrounds.
• Develop and use high quality mentoring programs for teachers of color to mitigate the factors leading to attrition and offer all teaching staff high quality professional development programs aimed at raising the bar for school-wide ambitious and equity-oriented instruction.

Enhancing the diversity of the teacher workforce benefits all students and may even help close long-standing achievement gaps between different racial, ethnic, and linguistic subgroups. As the student population in classrooms across the United States continues to become more diverse, it is imperative that the educator workforce keeps pace with these demographic changes.

For more findings regarding how positive outlier schools meet the needs of students and educators of color please visit our webpage. As always we welcome your requests for research or any of our reports as well as comments at nykids@albany.edu.