TeachStrong, a coalition of disparate advocacy groups formed with the unifying goal of modernizing and elevating the teaching profession, released its first policy paper last week. The paper focused on the need to identify and recruit more diverse teacher candidates.
Education Reform Now is a member of the TeachStrong coalition and supports its work. But in future policy papers, we hope the coalition will focus more attention on how to elevate the role of HBCUs and HSIs in particular in meeting the demand for quality teachers from diverse backgrounds.
Coalitions being what they are gravitate toward consensus. And with this group, whose members range from teachers unions like the AFT and NEA to advocacy groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality and Chamber of Commerce, consensus counts as a genuine accomplishment. Still, the envelope needs to be pushed.
To diversify the teacher workforce, the TeachStrong coalition recommends:
- Undergraduate and graduate preparation programs, the institutions of higher education that house them, and school districts work together to recruit diverse, high-achieving candidates;
- Undergraduate and graduate preparation programs—and the institutions of higher education that house them—dedicate more resources to finding and recruiting diverse, high-achieving individuals with great potential to succeed as teachers;
- States incentivize a shift toward more intentional recruitment and provide resources for doing so;
- States encourage districts to more intentionally recruit diverse, high-achieving candidates through “grow your own” programs;
- Districts develop priority-hiring processes for high-needs schools to ensure that all students have access to diverse, high-achieving teachers;
- States and school districts work with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) to ensure diversity in the teaching profession; and
- States and school districts work with programs that connect diverse, high-achieving candidates, including high school students, to the classroom.
Good. Students who think their teachers can relate to them achieve at higher levels. And the demographics of our student population do not match the demographics of our teacher population. Nationwide, 40 percent of public school students are Black or Hispanic but only 15 percent of teachers come from those backgrounds. It’s even worse for minority males. Only 1 in 50 teachers is an African American male.
We’d like to see a lot more with respect to the TeachStrong HBCU & HSI recommendation, because of the prominent role those institutions play in preparing teachers of color. Now to be clear, we want all teacher preparation programs be they at HBCUs, HSIs, other institutions of higher education, or alternative preparation programs to train and train well more teachers from diverse backgrounds.
But HBCUs and HSIs are special among teacher preparation providers, because of their very large impact on teachers who are racial minorities and their institutions’ economic need and historic place. HBCUs confer 25 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in education. Some 50 percent of current Black teachers attended an HBCU. HSIs produce 90 percent of the country’s Latino teachers.
Many HBCUs and HSIs as well as their students have significant financial need. Certainly HBCUs and many HSIs still suffer from the vestiges of legal discrimination both against the school itself and against their racial minority students. For example, a recent report found that HBCUs pay more to issue bonds than institutions of comparable financial strength.
These colleges also find their endowments artificially depressed due to artificially depressed wealth of their racial minority alumni. People forget that the parents of today’s students are the first generation to be protected by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. And it’s in housing where most family wealth rests. Not coincidentally, on average racial minority students have less wealth to pay for higher education than their more advantaged peers.
So what should we do? Well, we should invest in minority serving institutions (MSIs) and do so in ways that make their teacher preparation programs national models. That means not only additional resources for access and completion in general, but also resources for highly-regarded teacher preparation programs in particular.
Highly-regarded teacher preparation programs typically have some or all of the following key characteristics:
- Heightened selectivity or exit standards (e.g. minimum grade point average or proof of impact on K12 student achievement);
- Year-long, high-quality clinical experiences for all candidates;
- Extensive training of all candidates in evidence-based methods of reading instruction;
- Training in the use of data to differentiate instruction;
- A system for tracking the performance of program graduates; and
- A full-time, in-field job guarantee (preferably where they’ve had their clinical experience) at the conclusion of their program.
We want more teachers of color and we want them, like all teachers, to be ready for the job on day one in the classroom.
Ready on Day 1. Hmm. . . where have we heard that before?