Why we need a diverse teacher workforce?

Why do we need a diverse workforce?

Almost two decades ago then Education Secretary Richard Riley (1998) said, "Our teachers should look like the United States of America." His words reflect a long-standing concern for the equality of the country's teaching and student body. In fact, improving color teacher recruitment and retention has long been a political goal, especially in districts with large numbers of color students.

Despite this rhetoric, we have made relatively little progress to ensure that the diversity of teaching staff reflects the collective diversity of students in American public schools (Albert Shankar Institute, 2015). In fact, we seem to be giving in to some measures. For example, between 2003 and 2012, the proportion of black teachers in the country decreased by more than one point, while the proportion of Latin students increased over the same period, resulting in a small increase in the proportion of Latin teachers. Moved forward.

Should schools, districts, and teacher training programs be explicitly sought to recruit colored teachers? The answer to this question depends on the importance of traditional employment opportunities for the groups in question and how it relates to efforts to create a culturally diverse and culturally sensitive teaching body. It also depends on whether color teachers are more effective in educating certain students.

Conceptual justification for the diversification of the teaching staff.

A major literary body argues that race and ethnicity between teachers and students lead to better student outcomes, especially among significant groups of students in environments of high poverty (e.g., Ogbo, 1992). At least three widely held theoretical beliefs explain why racial teacher role models have positive educational benefits, especially for students of color. The first is that colored students, especially those who live and attend school in disadvantaged environments, benefit from seeing role models for their generation as leaders (Walligus and Lucas, 2004). In particular, some scholars have suggested that an example of academic achievement with patterns of success in adults can remove the stigma of "white doing" in some color students (Fordham and Ogbo, 1986). Second, some researchers say that color teachers have very high expectations of color students (Ferguson, 2003). This is important because students of color, especially black students, are typically middle-class whites. Teachers are more sensitive to student expectations than students. 

For low-income black students in grades 3 to 5, the risk of having at least one black teacher drop out is reduced by 39%.

Finally, some argue that teachers from different backgrounds can draw attention to their own cultural context when deciding on teaching strategies and interpreting student behavior. Extensive literature suggests that black students are more likely to be disciplined and suspended from school than other students, even after listing the nature of student corruption (e.g. Shiba et al., 2002). This discrepancy in disciplinary action may be based on teacher interpretations of student behavior that can be communicated through negative stereotypes (Gregory et al., 2010).

When experimental researchers look at the impact of teacher diversity, they have found that color-savvy students benefit from being taught by a teacher and that everyone is equal (and more importantly, not all are created equal). One or more generations of empirical evidence focuses on student test performance, but we also discuss other important outcomes such as individual assessments and discipline-related disciplinary evidence.

What does the evidence say?

Over the past two decades, researchers have had increasing access to longitudinal data containing the annual student test results of individual teachers, which has led to an explosion of research into predicting student test performance. This evidence generally suggests that the same generation of teachers has a small but significant impact on student test scores. In an experimental study, Thomas D. (2004) analyzed data from the Tennessee Project STAR class size experiment (in which students were randomly assigned to teachers) and found that they were taught by teachers of the same generation. Assigned students had a standard deviation of 0.11 in math and 0.06 standard deviation in reading compared to different students of the same class, admissions, and school assigned to teachers of different races. These effects were greatest when black students were assigned a black teacher.

The results of D have been diversified by recent studies with extensive administrative databases of students and teachers at the state level, although the scope of these results is more modest. Using longitude data from North Carolina, Charles Clotter and colleagues (2007) found that students with 0.03 standard deviations in math and 0.02 standard deviations in reading were more likely than teachers to be teachers of the same race. was commissioned. another caste. When Dean Goldhaber and Michael Hansen (2010) used the same dataset, they had an even bigger impact on black students. In particular, black students with black teachers had a standard deviation of 0.04 more than black students with a white teacher in reading and math, with everything else being the same. More recently, Anna Eglite and colleagues (2015) found that math test scores improved by more than 0.02 standard deviations and that black teachers matched black teachers compared to black teachers. Match test results received a standard deviation greater than 0.004. Everything else is the same.

Although the empirical evidence discussed relates to student test performance, additional evidence shows the importance of teacher role models for non-test outcomes such as thematic assessment, discipline, and the likelihood of dropping out of school. For example, Ronald Erinberg and colleagues (1995) found that teachers were more likely to be more likely to be relatively better at assessing the future success and behavior of students of the same race. Using the same data, Thomas D. (2005) found that teachers of different origins increased the difficulty of interrupting a student by 46%, neglect by 34% and assigning tasks slightly. 28% completed.

These exam-related role model effects are potentially important as teachers' subjective assessment can influence the extent to which teachers encourage students and the recommendations they write in colleges. In addition, disciplinary action has been largely associated with future student success and a reduction in future corruption (Archie, 2006; G. Gregory & Ripsky, 2008), suggesting that the discipline gap is a major contributor to success (Gregory et al. , 2010). .

In addition, recent research shows how these color differences affect student results. For example, Constance Lindsay and Cassandra Hart (2017) found that black students who were taught exclusively by black teachers were 2 to 3 percentage points less likely to achieve disciplinary discipline. If only they had met non-black teachers. Seth Gerson and colleagues (2016) found that non-black teachers had significantly lower educational expectations of black students than black teachers. And recently, Gerson and colleagues (2017) found that low-income black students in grades 3 through 5 reduced tuition by at least one black teacher by 39%. Decreases the likelihood of dropping out and increases a student's intention to pursue a four-year college degree by 29

Put role modeling in context

While the results described above are encouraging and provide an experimental basis for teacher diversification, it is important to be clear about the magnitude of the impact of this assessment. Figure 1 (math) and Figure 2 (reading) show how this model estimate compares to the difference in success between black and white students and the predicted impact of other teacher characteristics on student success. The success rate was slightly lower (0.68 for the fourth grade and 0.72 for the eighth grade).

If we look at the first two sets of bars in each figure, which represent projected role model effects, we can see that those effects alone will not close the Black White public school success gap. Although workforce diversity is unlikely to have a direct impact on success denominations, we would consider the generality of these effects to be educationally important, especially when compared to the many characteristics of teachers. For example, while it is well established in the literature that highly qualified teachers and state certified teachers are better qualified than other teachers, all others are equal. The estimated impact of each certificate is less. Effect of the above model. Another way of assigning a black student to a black teacher is more educational than assigning the same student to a teacher with a standard deviation, high exam scores, or a national authority-certified teacher. In addition, the largest estimates in the literature on role model effects (De, 2004) are surprisingly surprising due to the more than five years of experience and the high impact on teacher quality.

Correspondingly, other estimates of role model effects (Klatt Filter et al., 2007 e Eglite et al., 2015 Gould Goldhaber and Hansen, 2010) are significantly more modest, with one article showing that role model effects are less than half. Less is reported about the return of teachers with five or more years of experience (Kloot Filter et al., 2007). In contrast to the other teacher qualifications summarized in Figures 1 and 2, however, it is clear that it is of educational importance for colored students to have a diverse teacher as to how good role model effects are.

Caverns and challenges

Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence generally support the idea that improving faculty diversity will help fill the gap in ethnic success in public schools. However, teaching staff diversification is only one of many ways to improve the education system, and teaching staff diversification can create significant challenges and potentially uncertain outcomes. One challenge is that we know very little about what contributes to the lack of diversity in teaching staff. Before we can come up with an effective strategy for hiring more color teachers, we need to understand the answer to this question. Another challenge is that while the empirical evidence above agrees with the three theoretical arguments about the importance of teacher diversity, we have no conclusive evidence as to why students of color are of the same race. Benefit from teaching positions. .

Policy makers should also be aware that teaching staff diversification can have uncertain consequences. One problem is that color recruitment (recruiting through diversity policies) may not be as effective as current working color teachers. For example, suppose a state pursues evidence that colored candidates are disproportionately affected by exam requirements for teacher licensing (Goldhaber & Hansen, 2010) - and decided to reduce or remove these barriers. Government education can improve workforce diversity, but there is also evidence to support this (e.g., Klatt Filter et al., 2010; Goldhaber, 2007; Goldhaber and Hansen, 2010). Teachers are more efficient. So it is not clear what the overall impact such a policy would have.

However, they only concluded that there are good reasons to believe that colored students would benefit from a diverse learning workforce. Therefore, policymakers should consider teaching diversity policies as one of the strategies to bridge the gap between ethnic and racial performance in public schools.