Re: More 3 Teachers Book Download
Matha Apolito
Dr. Stefanie Livers, associate professor in the department of childhood education and family studies at Missouri State University, gives reasons for why teachers are fleeing and provides advice for current teachers and teacher educators.
Teachers go through rigorous programs to become experts in their field. To become teachers, candidates must apply to and get accepted into the program. Then they must complete programmatic coursework, student teach and pass numerous assessments.
This report examines the case for making candidate diversity and ability equally important criteria in the recruitment and selection of teachers. Looking at available evidence, the report shows that rigorous recruitment and thoughtful selection processes can achieve increased diversity and selectivity simultaneously. It also includes examples of states, institutions, and organizations that have done an exemplary job of setting a high bar for admission and ensuring the diversity of their teacher candidates and the emerging teacher workforce.
Racial diversity benefits every workforce,17 and teaching is no exception. Teachers of color tend to provide more culturally relevant teaching and better understand the situations that students of color may face. These factors help develop trusting teacher-student relationships.18 Minority teachers can also serve as cultural ambassadors who help students feel more welcome at school or as role models for the potential of students of color.19 These children now make up more than half of the U.S. student population in public elementary and secondary schools.20
These findings may partially explain why there is a significant positive effect on the standardized test scores of students of color when they are taught by teachers of color. When Florida researchers analyzed a massive data set of about 3 million students and 92,000 teachers over seven years, they found a positive effect in both reading and math scores when black students were taught by black teachers. For students who performed at the lowest levels, the effect of having a teacher of the same race was even larger.26
North Carolina researchers analyzing another large data set found similar results in 2007.27 More recently, in a study published by the Institute of Labor Economics, researchers and university economists found that low-income black male students in North Carolina who have just one black teacher in third, fourth, or fifth grade are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to consider attending college. In fact, the study estimates that instruction from one black teacher in elementary school cuts high school dropout rates by 39 percent among black boys from low-income backgrounds. These same students were 29 percent more likely to express a desire to pursue a four-year college degree than their peers who had never been taught by a black teacher.28
Nations with high-performing education systems carefully choose who is allowed to become a teacher. In Singapore, for example, 100 percent of new teachers are selected from the top academic third of their class.35 Finland uses a multiround selection process that includes both academic- and competency-based components and admits only the top 10 percent of applicants.36 After a concerted effort to increase the selectivity of its teaching profession, Canada now consistently recruits a majority of its prospective teachers from the top 30 percent of their college classes.37
In the United States, students who are fortunate enough to have a great teacher for even one year are more likely to matriculate to college, attend more prestigious colleges, and earn more later in life.40 Unfortunately, though they stand to benefit most from great teaching,41 disadvantaged students are more likely to be taught by inexperienced or ineffective teachers than nondisadvantaged students.42 As a result, they far too often miss out on these benefits.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) has previously called for more selectivity in the teaching profession and increased diversity of the teacher workforce.59 Therefore, when some in the education policy community raised these concerns, CAP decided to take a look at the data. But first, this report acknowledges and responds to some of the challenges that exist when working toward these equally important goals.
Students of color are even more underrepresented among graduates with education majors, at least 82 percent of whom are white.65 This disparity could be related to a number of factors students of color face, including negative experiences with the public education system;66 the additional costs and time involved for teacher credentialing;67 or pressure from their families to seek out higher-earning and higher-status jobs and career tracks.68
Because of the recent nature of these changes, more years of data are needed to do the type of analysis the authors completed for changes in entrance exam requirements, even for states that enacted these changes first. Although much of this work is still in its earliest phases, a few states have done an exemplary job of thinking through interactions between selectivity and diversity and making a concerted effort to ensure that they are achieving both. The efforts in Rhode Island and New York are profiled below, showing that it is possible to create effective policies with an eye toward these dual goals.
As New York state increased selectivity requirements, it also increased the diversity of its teacher workforce. From 1999 to 2010, the percentage of teachers in the state who were not white or Asian grew by 50 percent, increasing from 16 percent to 24 percent.118 In addition, the average SAT score of nonwhite, non-Asian teachers in the state increased significantly more than the SAT scores of white and Asian teachers.119
As of 2015, the BTR started shifting into research and development mode to pilot a more financially sustainable training model: a neighborhood-based, Pre-K through 12th grade pathway of schools called Teaching Academies, designed to both serve as exceptional schools for students and families and to develop highly effective teachers.167 For the time being, this has necessitated a smaller teacher resident cohort. Leaders anticipate ramping up efforts again in the near future to ensure a steady stream of diverse teachers into BPS for years to come.
Increase the potential pipeline of teachers of color by increasing the college readiness and high school graduation rates of students of color. Efforts to increase the number of students of color who attend and graduate from college may be a powerful lever for increasing the diversity of the teaching profession. State policies to raise standards so that they are aligned to college and career readiness, to increase high school graduation rates, and to provide supports for first-generation college students can all indirectly contribute to increasing the diversity of the teaching profession.
Teacher compensation should be high enough to attract and retain students from all backgrounds. It should also be sustainable so that teacher candidates and teachers know they can count on their current salary for the long term. Just as increasing teacher pay will increase the diversity of the teaching profession, altering other elements of teacher working conditions will also help boost diversity. Improved pay will be most effective as a recruitment lever for high-achieving, diverse candidates if it is coupled with the kinds of working conditions that such candidates can expect in other professional fields, such as high-quality onboarding or induction, relevant professional learning opportunities, opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, and opportunities to advance within the profession.
Measure competencies associated with highly effective teachers and invest in research that will improve how predictive those measures are for teacher effectiveness. Instead of relying solely on blunt academic cut-points, teacher education programs should follow the lead of programs such as the BTR and TFA, where academic proficiency requirements are high but competencies are equally important. Philanthropic or government funders could assist in this process by funding rigorous study of the relationship between teacher competencies and student outcomes to determine which measures and what levels of performance best predict how much students will learn. They can then disseminate their findings widely within the education field.
Build word-of-mouth recruitment by making campuses welcoming places for students of color. Leaders from both TFA and the BTR stressed the importance of making a preparation program one that current participants of color want to tell their friends about. Teacher education programs should make their campus climates more welcoming for students of color by:
Among key findings are that Philadelphia public schools, district, and charter schools combined, employed nearly 1,200 fewer Black teachers in 2020-21 than they did 20 years ago, even as the number of teachers has increased for other race or ethnicity subgroups.
As with prior reports on teacher diversity, this project relied on data received via records requests from the Pennsylvania Department of Education that RFA cleaned and merged with publicly reported student data to calculate the percentages of teachers and students by race/ethnicity and gender at the state, county, district, and school levels for all Pennsylvania public schools. The full eight years of data RFA prepared is available for download here:
The first graph below tells the national story. Student enrollments (in red) fell in the first full year of the pandemic and have not recovered. In total, student enrollments in public schools are down 2.6% (1.2 million) from the 2018-19 academic year. Meanwhile, those same schools employed 32,000 more teachers (a gain of 1.1%, in green).
But the NCES data also allow researchers to unpack employment changes by role. In addition to more teachers, schools now employ more student support staff, a category that includes attendance officers and providers of health, speech pathology, audiology or social services. The number of school administrative support staff, guidance counselors, district administrators and school psychologists are also all above pre-pandemic levels.
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