The
Diversity Crisis in Teaching
Few in the education field would disagree with the following
statement: A diverse teaching staff is good for students. Teachers
of color serve as cultural translators and role models for students
of color -- 35 percent of America's student body -- and help to
debunk stereotypes about racial inferiority for their white
students.
I witnessed this myself several years back when I student-taught
in a middle school with an African American teacher, the only one in
the entire school. African American students from all over the
school would seek her out for advice in navigating the waters in a
predominately white community. Meanwhile, for many of the white
children, this was their first extended contact with an African
American person, and I watched these students as they moved from
wariness and suspicion in the beginning of the year to out-and-out
adoration later on.
Yet, despite the obvious benefits of a diverse teaching staff,
the news on diversity isn't very good: Only 14 percent of teachers
are people of color, according to Mildred Hudson, CEO of Recruiting
New Teachers Inc., a nonprofit organization founded 14 years ago to
bring esteem to the teaching profession. Worse, many of these
teachers are getting ready to retire, and there aren't enough new
teachers in the pipeline.
Across the country, 40 percent of students have never been taught
by a person of color. "This is a terrible burden for the teachers of
color who are in the system," says Hudson. "If you are a person of
color and are good at what you do, you serve as a role model, an
advocate, a cultural translator, an academic advisor, not only for
your own students, but for students throughout the school. You
welcome all of those roles, but it also often means you're working
four times as hard, and there is a danger of becoming burned out."
She likens it to a situation in which there is only one woman
working for a corporation. "Not only are you doing your job, but you
are serving as a role model and an advocate for all women," she
says.
Not only students of color, many of whom live in urban areas,
suffer from a lack of diversity among teachers, but so do white
students living in more suburban areas. "It's a tremendous problem
for white students not to have access to teachers who look like
America and come from every background," Hudson says. "It's
crippling to that population, because they have to face their own
stereotypes at a later time in life. How much nicer it would be if
children could dispel these myths early and then get on to real
work."
Hudson says the best news on diversity is that the education
field has learned a lot in the last 10 years about how to train and
retain teachers of color. Among the current strategies:
