Over the past few years, as a research team, we have analyzed the best national data available on teacher staffing to uncover what trends and changes have occurred in the diversity of the K–12 teaching force over time. This analysis has resulted in a more complicated portrait of this critical topic than is commonly provided. It suggests, for example, that teacher-recruitment programs focused on increasing diversity have made a significant impact, but that more attention needs to be paid to the working conditions and job satisfaction of teachers of color to improve their retention. Here are five key findings on teacher diversity today:
1. The teaching force remains primarily white, and a gap continues to persist between the number of students and the number of teachers from underrepresented racial-ethnic groups.
In 2018, approximately 40 percent of the nation's population, and 51 percent of all elementary and secondary school students, were from underrepresented racial-ethnic groups. But only 20 percent of all K–12 teachers were from underrepresented racial-ethnic groups. This student-teacher parity gap holds for each of the main racial subgroups—Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American/Indigenous (see Figure 1).
2. The number of teachers of color has dramatically increased in the last few decades.
Even though a gap persists, this portrait has been changing. While it remains true that the teaching force does not look like the population of the U.S. in its diversity, this is decreasingly true. Our data show that the gap is not due to a failure to recruit teachers of color. In fact, there has been a large surge in the numbers of teachers of color in schools. Since the late 1980s, the number of elementary and secondary teachers of color has increased by 148 percent, although there are large gaps in the pace of these teacher increases by group (see Figure 2).
3. The increase in recruitment of teachers of color varies widely across different types of schools.
At the same time, the increase in employment of teachers of color has been highly uneven, both across states and regions and school types. Most of the increase has been in high-poverty public schools. Teachers of color are two to three times more likely than white, non-Hispanic teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools serving low-income, highly diverse, urban communities. By the same token, there are very few teachers of color in affluent, suburban schools, and this pattern has shown little change over time (see Figure 3).
4. Recruited teachers of color are leaving their schools, or teaching altogether, at high rates.
The diversification of the teaching force is all the more remarkable because it has occurred in spite of a relatively high turnover and quit rate among teachers from underrepresented racial-ethnic groups. While members of these groups have entered teaching at higher rates than whites in recent decades, they have also left schools at higher rates. Indeed, the race gap in turnover has widened since the mid-1990s. Male teachers of color have especially high turnover (see Figure 4).
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5. Working and job conditions in schools are the main factors driving teacher turnover.
The same difficult-to-staff schools that are more likely to employ teachers of color are also more likely to offer less-than-desirable working conditions, and these conditions account for the higher rates of teacher turnover. Our data analyses show that over half of teachers of color who have departed their schools report that job dissatisfaction was a large part of their decision.
Interestingly, the job and working conditions most strongly related to dissatisfaction and turnover are not salaries or benefits, but issues connected to the governance and leadership inside buildings. In particular, two such factors stand out as strongly related to turnover: The degree of autonomy and discretion teachers are allowed over issues and decisions in their classrooms, and the level of collective faculty "voice" influence over schoolwide decisions that affect teachers' jobs.
