Why we need a diverse teacher workforce

Nearly two decades ago, then Secretary of Education Richard Riley (1998) said that “Our teachers should look like America.” His words reflect a long-standing concern about the mismatch between the demographics of the teacher workforce and the nation’s students. Indeed, improving the recruitment and retention of teachers of color has long been a policy goal, particularly in districts with large percentages of students of color (Kirby et al., 1999). 

Despite this rhetoric, we have made relatively little progress toward ensuring that the diversity of the teaching workforce reflects the diversity of the student body in U.S. public schools (Albert Shanker Institute, 2015). In fact, by some measures, we seem to be moving backward. Between 2003 and 2012, for example, the percentage of the nation’s teachers who are Black dropped by more than a point, while over the same time span, the increase in the percentage of Latinx students far outpaced the modest increase in the percentage of Latinx teachers (Snyder, 2014).