DIVERSITY RESEARCH SUMMARY

Purpose / This document provides a summary of research describing the impact of teacher diversity on student learning. District teams can use this document to provide backing and support for efforts to increase diversity.
Intended User(s) / Partners only

TRENDS IN THE TEACHING FORCE

Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force

Using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey, researchers found the teaching force to be:

  1. Larger- The teaching force has ballooned in size. The Census Bureau indicates that PreK-12 teachers form the largest occupational group in the nation (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011), and it is growing even larger… This ballooning all took place by 2008. Since the economic downturn that began in 2007-08, growth in the teaching force has leveled off. Between 2007-08 and 2011-12, while the student population slightly increased (by less than 1 percent), the teaching force slightly decreased (by about 1 percent). It is unclear how much of this decrease in teachers is due to layoffs or to hiring freezes combined with attrition.
  1. Grayer- The teaching force has gotten older, and teacher retirements have steadily increased. But our analyses also show that this trend is largely over, and the continuing stream of reports with dire warnings of an aging teaching force are simply repeating an old story that is no longer true.
  1. Greener- As the proportion of older, veteran teachers increased, so has the proportion of beginning teachers. The increase in beginning teachers is largely driven by the ballooning trend, that is, by the huge increase in new hires. Most of these new hires are young, recent college graduates; however, a significant number are older but inexperienced beginning teachers.
  1. More Female - With career and employment alternatives increasingly available, one might think that fewer women would enter occupations and professions that traditionally have been predominantly female. This has not happened for teaching. Both the number of women entering teaching and the proportion of teachers who are female have gone up.
  1. More Diverse, by Race-ethnicity- While the teaching force is becoming more homogenous gender-wise, the opposite is true for the race/ethnicity of teachers. At first this finding may also seem odd. For several decades, shortages of minority teachers have been a major issue for the U.S school system. It is widely held that, as the nation’s population and students have grown more diverse, the teaching force has not kept pace…. But this portrait is changing. Our analyses do show that teaching remains a primarily white workforce and that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system… But the data also show that this gap is not due to a failure to recruit minority teachers… Since the teaching force has dramatically grown, numerically there are far more minority teachers than before. In 1987-88, there were about 325,000 minority teachers; by 2011-12, there were over 666,000. Growth in the number of minority teachers outpaced growth in minority students and was over twice the growth rate of white teachers.
  1. Consistent in Academic Ability [Over Time]- About a tenth of newly hired first-year teachers come from the top two categories of higher education institutions. About a fifth to a quarter come from the bottom two categories. About two-thirds of first-year teachers come from middle-level institutions. This has changed little in recent decades.
  1. Less Stable- The data show that the teaching force has slowly but steadily become less stable in recent years. For instance, from 1988-89 to 2008-09, annual attrition from the teaching force as a whole rose by 41 percent, from 6.4 percent to 9 percent. But these overall figures mask large differences in overall turnover among different types of teachers and different locales, revealing the need to disaggregate our data. These departures include both movers (teachers who move between districts and schools) and leavers (those who leave teaching altogether). The flow of teachers out of schools is not equally distributed across states, regions, and school districts. The largest variations in teacher turnover by location, however, are those between different schools, even within the same district… The data also show that rates of both moving between schools and leaving teaching altogether differ by the race/ethnicity of the teacher. As mentioned in Trend 5, over the past couple of decades, minority teachers have had significantly higher rates of turnover than white teachers.

Ingersoll, R., Merrill, L., Stuckey, D. 2014. Seven trends: The transformation of the teaching force. CPRE Report.

The State of Teacher Diversity

  • Over the 25-year period from 1987 to 2012, the minority share of the American teaching force—including Black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander, American Indian and multiracial teachers—has grown from 12 percent to 17 percent.
  • The minority share of the American student population also grew during these 25 years, albeit not at the same tempo as increases among minority teachers. Minority students now account for more than half of all public school students.
  • As a consequence of the growing minority student population, however, progress toward reducing the substantial representation gaps between minority teachers and students has been limited. Minority teachers remain significantly underrepresented relative to the students they serve.
  • The most significant impediment to increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce is not found in the recruitment and hiring of minority teachers: Nationally, minority teachers are being hired at a higher proportional rate than other teachers. Rather, the problem lies in attrition: Minority teachers are leaving the profession at a higher rate than other teachers.
  • Minority teachers are not evenly distributed across schools: They tend to be concentrated in urban schools serving high-poverty, minority communities. But analyses of survey data show that minority teachers are not leaving the profession at a higher rate because of the poverty or the race and ethnicity of their students but because of the working conditions in their schools. The strongest complaints of minority teachers relate to a lack of collective voice in educational decisions and a lack of professional autonomy in the classroom.
  • When examining teacher diversity trends over the course of the 10 years in our study—from 2002
    to 2012—a number of disquieting trends become evident. In every one of the nine cities studied, the Black share of the teacher workforce declined, at rates from the very small to the quite large.
  • In the nine cities we studied, trends for Hispanic teachers were more positive than those for Black teachers, but still well short of the need. Over the course of the 10 years in our study, the Hispanic shares of the teacher workforces across the selected cities were basically stable or showed modest growth. The one exception was Los Angeles, where the Hispanic share of the teacher population grew markedly in both the district and charter sectors. In contrast to Black teachers, the actual numbers of Hispanic teachers in the cities also grew during these years, with Cleveland being the lone exception.
  • Across our nine cities, teachers of all races and ethnicities tended to teach in schools with high concentrations of students who were low income and minority. As a general rule, Black and Hispanic teachers taught in schools with at least modestly higher concentrations of low income and minority students.

Albert Shanker Institute. 2015. The State of Teacher Diversity.

RECRUITMENT & RETENTION OF DIVERSE TEACHERS

Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage

  • Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two decades, the number of minority teachers has almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful.
  • This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. Moreover, though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was consistently or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors.
  • In contrast, organizational conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and White teacher turnover. The schools in which minority teachers have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where White teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover.

Ingersoll, R. & May, H. 2011. Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage. CPRE Report.

Retaining Teachers of Color in Our Public Schools

  • There are many reasons for the underrepresentation of effective teachers of color, including inadequate early academic preparation, which leaves too many people of color unprepared for a teaching career; it can manifest as failure to graduate from high school, to enter and succeed in postsecondary education, or to pass competency tests at the teacher-preparation or certification level. Other reasons include inadequate high school counseling; expanded opportunities in other careers; limited access to higher education or high-quality teacher-preparation programs due to socioeconomic circumstances; the amount of discrimination people of color experienced en route to the teaching field; or general dissatisfaction with the teaching profession, a result of low salaries and low occupational prestige.
  • Once in the classroom, challenging teaching conditions and a lack of professional and administrative support quickly drive teachers of color from the profession. Exiting teachers cite poor preparation, insufficient classroom support, and limited opportunities for career advancement as reasons for leaving.
  • But while certain factors—including large numbers of students in poverty or high concentrations of students of color—are strongly related to whether white teachers stay at or leave a school, this is not the case with teachers of color. For these teachers, organizational conditions—such as low levels of administrative support, lack of classroom autonomy, and lack of collective faculty decision-making influence—often trump financial and resource factors, including money for instructional materials and professional-development opportunities. Based on these findings, education researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry May recommend that among other policy-amenable aspects, high-minority, urban schools should shift their focus to improving organizational conditions to increase their chances of retaining teachers. For example, if policymakers and administrators implement more coherent human resource approaches, they can positively affect the ways in which schools are organized, managed, and operated.

Partee, G. 2014. Retaining Teachers of Color in Our Public Schools. Center for American Progress.

TEACHER RACE & STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Representation in the Classroom: The Effect of Own- Race/Ethnicity Teacher Assignment on Student Achievement

  • We find small but significant positive effects when black and white students are assigned to race-congruent teachers in reading (.004 to .005 standard deviations) and for black, white and Asian/Pacific Island students in math (.007 to .041 standard deviations). We also examine the effects of race matching by students' prior performance level, finding that lower-performing black and white students appear to particularly benefit from being assigned to a race-congruent teacher.

Overview from NCTQ’s May 21, 2015 Bulletin of this study

  • A new study from a group of researchers from Harvard, University of Arkansas and University of Colorado offers more evidence that the lack of minority teachers is hurting student achievement. It's a study that plays well and has gotten a lot of attention—but one whose findings should still be put in perspective.
  • The researchers took advantage of Florida's large dataset, finding some limited evidence that matching teacher race with student race can improve outcomes. In reading, for African American and white students, a .004 to .005 standard deviation bump in scores was achieved. In math, a slightly stronger effect size was picked up for not only African American and white students, but also Asian/Pacific Island students, who experienced a .007 to .041 standard deviation bump. (No effect was found for Hispanic students; but since the study did not control for assignment to ELL classes, we think the lack of findings should be attributed to the methodology employed here, and not because Hispanic students don't actually benefit from having Hispanic teachers.)
  • As these results suggest, certainly having race-congruent teachers appears to nudge the needle on student achievement, but what gets overlooked is that other interventions can move it more. Here we compare the effect sizes of teachers of the same race as their students with the effect sizes of a few other interventions, mostly achieved when schools have altered the curriculum.

  • It's hard not to notice that choosing a better math curriculum yields effects seven times greater (using the most conservative calculation) than matching teacher and student race.

Egalite, Kisida, & Winters. 2015. Representation in the Classroom: The Effect of Own- Race/Ethnicity Teacher Assignment on Student Achievement. Economics of Education Review.

Retaining Teachers of Color in Our Public Schools

Emerging research reflects the positive impacts that teachers of color have on a range of academic outcomes for students of color, including school attendance, retention, standardized test scores, advanced-level course enrollment, and college- going rates. For example, a study of the relationship between the presence of African American teachers in schools and African American students’ access to equal education in schools found that fewer African Americans were placed in special-education classes, suspended, or expelled when they had more teachers of color, and that more African American students were placed in gifted and talented programs and graduated from high school. These findings are attributed to teachers’ of color affinity for infusing their classrooms with culturally relevant experiences and examples, setting high academic expectations, developing trusting student-teacher relationships, and serving as cultural and linguistic resources—as well as advocates, mentors, and liaisons—for students’ families and communities.

These findings do not mean that all teachers of color achieve these benefits or that white teachers cannot or do not. They do mean, however, that efforts must be made to aggressively train, recruit, and retain effective teachers of all races and ethnicities to prepare new, larger youth populations—many of which are largely made up of first- and second-generation immigrants—for postsecondary education and careers.

Partee, G. 2014. Retaining Teachers of Color in Our Public Schools. Center for American Progress.

Relationship Between Teacher Race/Ethnicity and Student Academic Achievement

See link for more studies at your leisure.

REL Midwest Reference Desk. 2015. Relationship Between Teacher Race/Ethnicity and Student Academic Achievement.

TEACHER GENDER & STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Teachers and Gender Gaps in Student Achievement

  • Assignment to a same-gender teacher significantly improves the achievement of both girls and boys as well as teacher perceptions of student performance and student engagement with the teacher's subject.

Dee. 2004. Teachers and Gender Gaps in Student Achievement. Journal of Human Resources.

The Effect of Teacher Gender on Student Achievement in Primary School: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

  • Female students who were assigned to a female teacher without a strong math background suffered from lower math test scores at the end of the academic year. This negative effect however not only seems to disappear but it becomes (marginally) positive for female students who were assigned to a female teacher with a strong math background. Finally, we do not find any effect of having a female teacher on male students’ test scores (math or reading) or female students’ reading test scores. Taken together, our results tentatively suggest that the findings in these two streams of the literature are in fact consistent if one takes into account a teacher’s academic background in math.

Antecol, Eren, & Ozbeklik. 2012. The Effect of Teacher Gender on Student Achievement in Primary School: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment.Social Science Research Network.