What Do the National Data Tell Us About Minority Teacher Shortages?

For the past several decades, shortages of minority teachers have been a big issue for the nation’s schools. Policymakers at all levels, including recent presidents, have agreed that our elementary and secondary teaching force “should look like America.” But conventional wisdom is that as the nation’s population and students have grown more racially and ethnically diverse, the teaching force has done the opposite. The result, we are told, is that minority students in the nation’s schools increasingly lack minority adult role models, don’t have sufficient contact with teachers who understand their racial and cultural backgrounds, and often lack qualified teachers of any background, because nonminority teachers eschew schools with large percentages of minorities. The minority teacher shortage in turn, we are told, is a major reason for the minority achievement gap and, ultimately, unequal occupational and life outcomes for disadvantaged students. In short, the minority teacher shortage is considered a major civil rights issue (for reviews, see Quiocho & Rios, 2000; Torres et al., 2004; Villegas & Lucas, 2004; Zumwalt & Craig, 2005). The main source of minority teacher shortages, conventional wisdom holds, is a problem with the teacher supply pipeline. In this view, too few minority students enter and complete college, and those who do have an increasing number of career and employment options aside from teaching. Moreover, when minority candidates do seek to enter teaching, this view holds, they encounter barriers—in particular, teaching entry tests, on which minority candidates historically have tended to have lower pass rates. The result is the minority teacher shortage. The prescription, understandably enough, has been to try to recruit more minority candidates into teaching. In recent decades, numerous government and nongovernment organizations have launched a variety of minority teacher recruitment programs and initiatives, including future educator programs in high schools, partnerships between community colleges and four-year teacher education programs, career ladders for paraprofessionals in schools, and alternative teacher certification programs (see, e.g., Hirsch, Koppich & Knapp, 2001; Feistritzer, 1997; Liu et al., 2008; Rice, Roellke, Sparks & Kolbe, 2008). Support for these efforts has been substantial. For instance, beginning in the late 1980s, the Ford Foundation, along with the DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, committed more than $60 million to minority teacher recruitment and preparation programs. Many of these initiatives have been designed to bring minority teachers into schools serving predominantly minority student populations, often in low-income, urban school districts. Some of these initiatives have been designed specifically to recruit minority men, as they are often considered to be in the shortest supply. Today, in more than half of the states, minority teacher recruitment policies or programs of some sort are in place. Despite these ongoing efforts, however, many commentators see little success, claiming that, if anything, the student-teacher diversity gap has widened (e.g., Villegas, Strom and Lucas, 2012). This raises important questions: Has the teaching force grown more diverse or less so? And if diversity has not increased, why haven’t these efforts been successful? This section seeks to address these questions