MASSACHUSETTS HAS MADE strides in its effort to increase teacher diversity, but the K-12 student population is growing more diverse at a much faster rate, according to a new report.
Over the last decade, Massachusetts has doubled the number of new teachers of color hired annually, and minority teachers have gone from making up 7 percent of the K-12 teacher workforce to 10 percent. But because the state’s student population is diversifying much faster, the gap between the share of teachers of color and students of color in the state has grown wider over this period, and is projected to get even larger, according to the study carried out by MassINC in partnership with the advocacy group Latinos for Education and the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University. (The MassINC research center is part of the nonprofit Boston organization that publishes CommonWealth Beacon.)
“These changing teacher demographics are not keeping pace with the changing student demographics in the state,” said Olivia Chi, one of the Wheelock researchers who consulted on the report. “If the historical trends continue as they’ve been doing over the past number of years, that gap between students and teachers of color in terms of that representation gap is going to continue to widen.”
In 2012, when teachers of color made up 7 percent of the state teacher workforce and students of color accounted for 33 percent of the K-12 student population, the representation gap was 26 percentage points. Despite the increase in teacher diversity over the next decade, that gap grew to 35 percentage points in 2022. Based on current trends, it’s projected that the gap will be 38 points by 2030, when it’s estimated that teachers of color will make up 14 percent of the teaching workforce and students of color will be 53 percent of the K-12 student population.
A significant body of research shows that students of color benefit from having teachers of the same race in the classroom. Studies indicate that such students achieve higher test scores, are disciplined less, have higher attendance, and are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. For that reason, the report says, increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce is “essential to closing racial and ethnic disparities in educational achievement.”
The report says increasing the diversity of the teaching workforce is a multifaceted challenge, starting with there being fewer candidates of color on track to become educators. Students of color complete high school at lower rates than White students, and those who do graduate go on to college and receive four-year college degrees at a far lower rate. Students of color who obtain a bachelor’s degree are then far less likely than their White peers to pursue teaching careers, the report said.
This is partly because students of color tend to carry more college debt and have less family wealth, which may discourage them from going into a profession with lower pay than other fields. The report says would-be educators of color also carry the trauma of racism in their own educational experience and recognize “structural racism continues to permeate education.”
Those college graduates of color who go into teaching remain at a lower rate than Whites, further exacerbating the problem, according to the report. After five years in the field, less than 40 percent of new teachers of color remain, while more than 50 percent of new White teachers are still in classrooms.
The report outlines a set of strategies that could boost teacher diversity, including creating multiple pathways to teacher licensing, creating more early pathways to educator careers through Early College programs, and more funding for grass-roots community groups that work to draw more people of color into teaching, and the development of teacher apprenticeship programs for people without four-year degrees.
Legislation filed on Beacon HIll includes a bill that would create an accelerated, tuition-free teacher occupational apprenticeship program as well as legislation that would establish a fund to support bilingual teachers and incentivize dual language certification.
Latinos for Education is advocating for a broad bill, filed by state Rep. Alice Peisch, the assistant House majority leader and former education committee chair, that incorporates many of the report’s recommendations, including alternate certification pathways and a requirement that public school districts set goals for teacher diversity, and collect and report publicly on progress meeting those targets.
There is also legislation, filed by Sen. Pavel Payano and Rep. Priscilla Sousa, aimed at boosting teacher diversity by allowing school districts to consider factors like diversity in addition to seniority if layoffs are necessary. Teachers unions are strongly opposed to the legislation, saying that it would give districts too much discretion over layoff decisions.
The teacher diversity report takes a different tack, advocating instead for hiring and retention bonuses for new teachers in districts with high minority student populations coupled with early retirement incentives for the pool of mainly White educators in those districts approaching retirement age.
Urban districts in the state accounted for three-quarters of the net growth in teachers of color in Massachusetts from 2012 to 2022. The study says the chances that a student of color is taught by an educator of color vary widely across urban districts. It estimates that students of color in the four Gateway Cities in the Merrimack Valley (Haverhill, Lawrence, Lowell, and Methuen) have about a 23 percent chance of having a teacher of color in given school year, while those in the seven urban districts in Metro Boston (Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Malden, Quincy, and Revere) have about a 60 percent chance of having an educator of color.
Former state education secretary Paul Reville said that even without the extra barriers that prospective teachers of color face, the teaching profession has a recruitment and retention problem that has worsened since the pandemic. He said retaining teachers longer by making the teaching profession more attractive is an important part of the answer to the overall teacher shortage and the goal of bringing in – and retaining – more educators of color.
“We haven’t done a good job of attracting people to the teaching profession particularly in post- COVID times. Teachers were so stressed during COVID,” said Reville, now a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “There’s something of a crisis in teacher supply right now, let alone in the supply of teachers of color. We, in some respects, haven’t created an attractive sustaining profession for a lot of people who have choices.”
Despite the report’s discouraging projections on teacher diversity, if current trends hold, it says the state education department has been focused on the issue, and by “strategically allocating resources, Massachusetts can bend the curve and ensure that it ends the decade with a far more diverse and inclusive educator workforce,”
“There are a lot of innovations already happening across the country that we can draw upon and many of these are already in process within the Commonwealth,” said Amanda Fernandez, CEO of Latinos for Education. “It’s a matter of organizing and really starting to make more investments in the organizations that are providing services and support for teachers of color to come into the profession and to stay in the profession.”