GROWING up in the 1970s and ’80s in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island, Ill., Gladys Marquez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, never once had a Hispanic teacher. Sometimes, when trying to explain to her parents her plans for college — or even why she wanted to play softball or try out for the cheerleading team — she wished she had a mentor who shared her background.
“It would have been nice to have a teacher in the classroom who could help you bridge over and help you become a better version of yourself,” she said in a recent interview.
Now Ms. Marquez is herself a high school teacher in Blue Island. But while nearly half of the students at the school are Hispanic, Ms. Marquez is still one of a small minority of Latino teachers in the building.
Across the country, government estimates show that minority students have become a majority in public schools. Yet the proportion of teachers who are racial minorities has not kept up: More than 80 percent of teachers are white.
In some school districts, the disparities are striking. In Boston, for example, there is just one Hispanic teacher for every 52 Latino students, and one black teacher for every 22 African-American students. The ratio of white teachers to white students: one to fewer than three.
In New York City, where more than 85 percent of the students are racial minorities, 60 percent of the teachers are white. In Washington, black teachers represent close to half of all teachers — in a district where two-thirds of the students are black — but the Latino teaching force lags behind the growing Hispanic enrollment.
Few would say that a black child needs to be taught by a black teacher or that a Latino or Asian child cannot thrive in a class with a white teacher. “Ultimately, parents are going to respect anybody who they think cares for their kids,” said Andres Antonio Alonso, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “But if there are no people who somehow mirror the parents and the kids, then I think there could be a problem.”
A few studies have suggested a link between academic performance and children being taught by a teacher of their own race, although the effects are quite small. According to Anna Jacob Egalite, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and an author of a new study, the largest improvements amounted to about one month of additional learning within a school year.
Other researchers who have found similar academic effects say more than test scores are at stake. “When minority students see someone at the blackboard that looks like you, it helps you reconceive what’s possible for you,” said Thomas S. Dee, a professor of education at Stanford University.
With the population of Hispanic students exploding relatively recently, it will take some time for the population of Latino college graduates — and future teachers — to catch up.
Fewer African-Americans, particularly black men, graduate from college than whites, shrinking the pool of prospective black teachers.
In college, minority students are often the first in their families to attend, and may carry significant debt and have high expectations for future salaries. “The majority of those who successfully attend college choose careers other than education, mainly because of the pay,” said Marvin Lynn, dean of the School of Education at Indiana University in South Bend, who is starting a scholarship program for minority students interested in education careers.
Teach.org, a partnership between the Department of Education and several companies, teachers unions and other groups, is specifically targeting racial minorities for recruitment. Teach for America, the group that places high-achieving college graduates in low-income schools for two-year stints, last year sent recruiters to 100 historically black colleges and 130 colleges with predominantly Latino students, said Elisa Villanueva Beard, co-chief executive of Teach for America. Last fall, half of its incoming corps identified themselves as racial minorities.
Some school districts are also more deliberately trying to hire teachers from underrepresented racial groups. For the first time this year, the Boston Public Schools will send recruiters to Texas and Arizona in an effort to find Hispanic teachers. But Ceronne B. Daly, director of diversity, said such strategies were insufficient. “The people currently coming out of ed schools simply aren’t diverse enough,” she said.
The district recently initiated a program to train community members to become classroom assistants who might eventually go on to become teachers. It is also running a pilot program in four high schools to begin cultivating teenagers who are interested in teaching careers.
Such programs may solve only part of the problem. According to Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania who has analyzed Education Department data, the number of minority teachers has actually doubled since the late 1980s. The real problem, he said, is not recruitment, but retention.
Teacher turnover is a challenge in general, but Mr. Ingersoll said nonwhite teachers were more likely to resign than their white counterparts. They are disproportionately assigned to schools with large populations of children from low-income families, and are subjected to “student discipline problems and lack of resources and lower salaries, with often more top-down and scripted curricula,” said Mr. Ingersoll. He said minority teachers frequently cited frustration with management and lack of autonomy as reasons they quit.
Arianna Howard, a doctoral candidate in education at Ohio State University, left teaching middle school after two years in Columbus. She was frustrated by the district’s rigidly enforced curriculum and said it was culturally out of sync with her mostly black students. “Oftentimes they were unable to relate to” the assigned books, said Ms. Howard, who is African-American. “A lot of the characters were white males, and a lot of the situations were based in rural locales.”
The race gap among teachers is not likely to be closed anytime soon. To help all teachers learn how to deal sensitively with diversity in their classrooms, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, runs seminars for its members. “If you are not aware of your own personal biases,” said Rocío Inclán, director of human and civil rights at the union, “then you lose the kids on a personal level and you can lose them in academics as well.”
