Washington — The longstanding demographic mismatch between America’s public school teachers and the students they serve got a fresh airing Tuesday at Howard University, where a panel explored the nature of the problem and discussed a variety of potential solutions.
Acting U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said the lack of diversity among America’s teachers emanates from problems of recruitment and retention.
“Without question, when you have a majority of students in our public schools who are students of color, but only 18 percent of teachers are of color and only 2 percent are African-American men, we have an urgent need to act,” King said during a panel discussion in the auditorium at Howard’s school of social work. “The question for the country is: How do we address this quickly and thoughtfully?”
In many ways, it was distressing to see the acting secretary lament the statistics that delineate the underrepresentation of minority teachers at the tail end of the second term of the Obama administration in much the same way that his predecessor, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, did about six years ago on the same campus.
Despite the longstanding recognition of the fact that America’s public school teachers are not demographically reflective of the students they serve, a report on hand at Tuesday’s event found “disquieting trends” in nine cities that “depart from the national trends” of gains in minority teacher representation—from 12 to 17 percent—of increases in the share of the teacher workforce among Asian and Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, American Indian and multiracial individuals.
“Specifically, we are very troubled by the fact that, in every city and every sector, the share of Black teachers in the workforce has been declining at rates ranging from the slight to the massive—from roughly 1 percent in Boston’s charter sector and Cleveland’s district sector to more than 24 percent in New Orleans (combined sectors) and nearly 28 percent in Washington, D.C. (combined sectors),” states the report, titled “The State of Teacher Diversity in American Education” and put out by the Albert Shanker Institute, a nonprofit endowed by the American Federation of Teachers.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, suggested to King that the U.S. Education Department begin to track such statistics instead of having organizations such as the Shaker Institute have to compile the data—a suggestion that prompted King to jot down an apparent reminder to at least look into the matter.
