Study: Recruitment of more minority teachers is not the answer

For decades, educators and policymakers have looked for ways to encourage more minorities to go into the teaching profession.

Last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he planned on recruiting more African American and Latino teachers in hopes to narrow the achievement gaps between students, according to CNN. And Duncan has traveled around the country to places like New Jersey, California and Louisiana trying to recruit more minority students to pursue teaching,

But a new study shows that it's not recruitment that's lacking but retention of minority teachers.

The study, "The minority teacher shortage: Fact or fable?," printed in the September issue of Kappan Magazine, acknowledges the fact there is a significant gap between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers. In the 2008-09 school year, 41 percent of all elementary and secondary students were minorities but just 16.5 percent of all elementary and secondary teachers were. And the Huffington Post reported last month that while 22 percent of public school students are Latino, just 7 percent of teachers are.

"But the data also show that this gap has persisted in recent years largely because the number of white students has decreased while the number of minority students has increased," the authors of the study, Richard Ingersoll and Henry May, conclude. "It is not due to a failure to recruit minority teachers."

In fact, from 1998 to 2008, the number of minority teachers in the classroom nearly doubled — from 325,000 to 642,000. This growth outpaced both the growth of minorities in the classroom (by 24 percent) and the growth rate of white teachers (by 48 percent).

Minority teachers are also two to three times more likely to teach in public schools that are high-poverty, high-minority and in urban communities, the study reports, something that many states have spent time and money trying to accomplish.

But "while minorities have entered teaching at higher rates than whites over the past two decades, minority teachers also have left schools at higher rates," the authors of the study wrote.

For example, in 2003, about 47,600 minority teachers entered the profession, but by the following year, 56,000 or 20 percent more had left teaching. The main reasons these teachers gave for leaving were not lack of pay or lack of classroom resources, it was low faculty influence in the decision-making of the school and lack of instructional autonomy in the classroom.

So what can be done?

"The data suggest that poor, high-minority, urban schools with improved working conditions will be far more able to (staff classrooms with minority teachers)," Ingersoll and May wrote. "To be sure, altering these conditions would not be easy. However, unlike reforms such as teacher salary increases and class-size reduction, changing some conditions, such as teachers' classroom autonomy and faculty's schoolwide influence, should be less costly financially — an important consideration, especially in low-income settings and in periods of budgetary constraint."

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