Headlines about teacher diversity issues often neglect to tell an equally important story: the significant dearth of faculty of color in schools of education. Indeed, there is a large racial gap between the 80 percent of white teachers that make up the educator workforce and the over 45 percent minority student population in America’s public schools, where teacher candidates at schools of education are presumably aiming to teach.
For our new publication out yesterday, Max Marchitello and I spoke with a number of faculty and staff from minority serving institutions (MSIs) on the topic of teacher preparation. These conversations and a comprehensive literature review pointed us to a few key ways that teacher preparation in this country can improve, such as building teacher candidates’ cultural awareness, ensuring candidates engage with diverse students and contexts through well-designed field experiences, and increasing diversity in the teacher candidate pool.
However, without a critical mass of faculty of color in these programs, it will be difficult to implement these recommendations. Diverse faculty can make the institution more inclusive for students of color and help disrupt white dominance that leads future educators to be ignorant of the communities they will likely serve.
Over the past thirty years, we have focused on K-12 educator diversity and seen some gains, but we are not seeing reciprocal change in the faculty of schools of education. According to a recent Inside Higher Ed report, the percentage of underrepresented groups as full-time faculty has not changed much over the past two decades. In 2015, African Americans accounted for six percent of full-time faculty in all U.S. universities, whereas African Americans made up 14 percent of the student population in all U.S. universities. Similarly, Hispanic faculty made up five percent of full-time faculty members compared to the 17 percent of Hispanic students in higher education. While there has been progress in the number of minority faculty, significant gaps persist.
Faculty diversity is important to teacher preparation for a few key reasons. First, more diverse faculty helps recruit more diverse teacher candidates, as studies show that students find security in sharing a background or experience with faculty. Second, diverse faculty are important to the issue of helping teacher candidates unpack their own biases and understand the points of view of educators of color. For instance, in a 2008 study, a researcher observed a teacher preparation program’s classroom discussion of bilingualism with a classroom of majority Latino teacher candidates. Initially, white candidates focused on the economic downsides of bilingualism, but then shifted to the moral necessity of dual-language teachers when discussing the topic with Latino classmates. In addition, faculty of color’s research focus and what they incorporate into classes likely will vary from white professors, which will help train all teacher candidates, and offer different, more complete perspectives on classroom management, student discipline, and more.
In order to address faculty diversity, schools of education need to interrogate their hiring practices and eliminate sources of bias. Institutional leadership must carefully examine where disruptions occur for prospective candidates of color in the faculty pipeline. For instance, when the Rowan University College of Education refocused on creating a culture that embraces social justice and equity, leadership began prioritizing hiring faculty specifically embedded in this work.
Without acknowledging that the quality of teacher preparation is inextricably linked to the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in faculty, teachers will remain insufficiently prepared to educate diverse students. Diversifying faculty, like other changes to long-standing institutions, is undoubtedly a difficult challenge, but it is an incredibly important stride towards educational equity.