In Plyler v. Doe, a landmark educational equity case decided in 1982, the United States Supreme Court overturned a Texas statute, which would have denied public education to undocumented immigrants. The Court determined that denying public education to immigrant children would have deprived them of the full ability to participate in American democracy, and cast them as a permanent underclass.
Three decades after Plyler, the Court’s concerns have proven well-founded, as inequity continues to plague public education. For instance, a troubling diversity gap persists between U.S. teachers and their students. In the 2011-2012 school year, 49% of U.S. public school students were nonwhite, while only 18% of U.S. teachers were nonwhite. According to a study recently presented by Penn State’s Jing Liu and Hee Jin Chung at the University Council for Educational Administration’s annual convention, this diversity gap is especially severe in Pennsylvania. Liu and Chung found that, in the 186 Pennsylvania public schools sampled, only 4% of the teachers were nonwhite compared to 25% of the students.
More troublingly, the diversity gap is widening as teacher diversity fails to keep pace with accelerating student diversity. The national percentage of minority students grew by 5.9% from 2004 to 2012, while the percentage of minority teachers grew by only 1% from 2004 to 2012. In fact, the number of minority students recently surpassed the number of white students. As a result, expanding numbers of minority students are losing access to minority teachers.
Liu and Chung point to a body of research showing how the growth of the gap could hinder student learning. That research shows that scarcity of minority teachers will result in fewer minority role models to dispel stereotypes, inspire minority students, and bridge cultural boundaries between students and educators. Furthermore, inadequate diversity may contribute to high teacher turnover plaguing needy schools because white teachers are less likely to remain at such schools.
Another inequity plaguing public education is the unfair distribution of effective teachers. Nationally, schools serving poor and minority students are more likely to be staffed by teachers who are uncertified, underprepared, or teaching outside their field. The U.S. Department of Education (“ED”) recently moved to address this problem by proposing regulations to improve universities’ teacher preparation programs (“TPPs”). The regulations would cultivate state-designed rating systems to identify effective TPPs, and direct scholarship funding toward highly-rated TPPs. Critics such as the American Federation of Teachers, however, argue that the regulations would exacerbate the teacher diversity crisis by deflecting funding away from TPPs which prepare high concentrations of minority teachers.
Although ED’s proposal to improve TPPs would not aim to address diversity, Liu and Chung’s findings suggest that TPPs can play a crucial role in diversifying the teaching force. In Pennsylvania during the 2011-2012 school year, 10% of pre-service teachers enrolled in TPPs were nonwhite. This finding reveals that while Pennsylvania’s pre-service teachers are more diverse than its active teaching force (4% nonwhite), diversity in TPPs still lags behind Pennsylvania’s general population (17% nonwhite) and far behind its student population (29% nonwhite). TPPs also experience de facto racial segregation. For instance, a typical white pre-service teacher attended a TPP where 92% of her peers were white and 4% were black, while a typical black pre-service teacher attended a TPP where 80% of her peers were white and 14% were black.
ED’s proposal would not support diversifying the U.S. teaching force by itself. However, Pennsylvania and other states could use the regulations to improve teacher diversity. Although the regulations would require states to rate TPPs on certain factors such as job placement and their graduates’ performance on student outcome measures, the regulations expressly allow states to include factors of their own choosing. Pennsylvania and other states should use this latitude to evaluate TPPs’ success in producing diverse teachers, and include this factor in their TPP ratings. While the Plyler Court’s fear of perpetuating a permanent underclass through educational inequity may have proven well-founded, it is far from inevitable. By valuing and increasing diversity among our teachers, Pennsylvania and other states can meet the increasingly diverse needs of our students.
Published March 27, 2015