Teacher Diversity: A Civil Rights Issue
From Christine Sletter’s SubStack
About once per month I post a synopsis of research that challenges recent White House attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. Please share widely. On April 8, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, allowed the Trump administration to block the dispersal of $65 million in teacher development grants over concerns they were promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which in the eyes of the White House, violates current civil rights law. The grants were being used to both address teacher shortages and diversify the teacher workforce. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Currently nationwide, teachers are about 80% white, 9% Latino, 6% Black, 2% Asian, and 2% multiracial. In contrast, public school students are about 46% white, 28% Latino, 15% Black, and 5% Asian. From the perspective of the White House, intentional work to diversify the teacher workforce violates the rights of white prospective teachers. But research data show overwhelmingly that failing to diversify the teacher workforce violates the rights of students of color, and particularly Black students. To investigate this matter, I surveyed the research on teacher-student racial/ethnic matching. The table below summarizes the results of 16 studies examining the impact of teacher-student racial/ethnic matching, on various achievement-related student outcomes. While I probably missed a study or two, this is a fairly complete collection. All but one (Scott et al., 2019) were large-scale quantitative studies. Most used large databases, such as from Tennessee, Indiana, North Carolina, or from national sources. All except Gershenson and colleagues (2017) were published in peer-reviewed journals. Most focused on student academic achievement. The overarching question these studies address is: Does having a teacher of the same race/ethnicity benefit students academically? According to 14 of the 16 studies, the answer is yes, particularly for African American students, and particularly at the early elementary level.
Research is clear that students, particularly African American students, achieve better when taught by a teacher who looks like them. Further, the impact of being taught by a teacher of one’s own race/ethnicity is cumulative. By that, I mean that a student taught by two same-race teachers in elementary school is likely to achieve more academically than a student taught by one same-race teacher. If a student is fortunate enough to be taught by three same-race teachers in elementary school, the achievement benefits are even greater. Now, look back at the teacher and student demographic data in the second paragraph above. What is the likelihood of White students being taught by White teachers? What is the likelihood of Black students having even one Black teacher? Wait a minute, you may be saying: What about teacher quality? Am I suggesting that all teachers of color are good teachers? No, I am not. Teachers of any race or ethnicity vary in quality. But if we think of teacher quality as meaning ability to connect with students and get them to learn, similarity between a teacher’s background and that of students appears to add to teacher quality. For example, in 2010, Goldhaber and Hansen reported a study that found that Black students achieved better with a Black teacher who failed one of the teacher licensure exams (the Praxis) than the same students would achieve with a White teacher who passed it. In other words, a supposedly racially-neutral test to determine teacher quality favored the teachers who were less likely to benefit the Black students academically. If teacher quality means ability to teach children, the test was racially biased in favor of White teachers. In his book Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color, Easton-Brooks explained why ethnic matching impacts on student learning. Interviews with teachers of color revealed that they “found ways to connect with students outside of the curriculum. The teachers met with students where they were and worked on connecting with students on both an individual and group level.” They were patient with students, had high expectations of them, ensured that they could see themselves in the curriculum, and “assisted students to use knowledge as a form of activism” (p. 64-65). As a result, their students of color achieved more success in schools than was the case with teachers who did not thread these commitments through their teaching. About twenty years ago, when research on teacher-student racial matching was just beginning, I was skeptical. Didn’t that research involve stereotyping? Didn’t it suggest that white teachers cannot learn to teach minoritized students well? Didn’t it oversimplify racial or ethnic identity? For example, would matching a Mexican American student with a Chilean teacher count as ethnic matching? Programmatically, would this research encourage school segregation? These are reasonable questions. But they can distract us from what the data show, namely that all students, and particularly Black students, achieve better in school when they have access to teachers of their own racial or ethnic background. Currently White students are the ones with plentiful access to teachers of their own background. To me, this is a significant civil rights issue. It is one that can be meaningfully addressed by programs such as “Grow your Own,” which recruit and prepare teachers to work in their own communities. The preparation is comparable to that in traditional programs, but programs are configured to fit the needs of community members who otherwise might not enter teaching (for example, adults working fulltime in another field, or who hadn’t seriously considered teaching). Some Grow your Own pathways programs begin mentoring young people while in middle or high school to encourage them to consider a teaching career. But apparently the White House regards such programs as illegal, and cut funding for them, because …. they discriminate against White people?
Links to the research cited in the table: Egalite, Kisida & Winters, 2015 Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016 Gershenson, Hart, Lindsay, & Papageorge, 2017 Hwang, Graff, & Behrends, 2023 Hwang, Graff, & Behrends, 2024 Markowitz, Bassok, & Grissom, 2020 Redding, 2022 Scott, Gage, Hirn, & Han, 2019 This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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