Guest blog post by Jaclyn Zubrzycki @jzubrzycki
The teaching diversity gap—there are proportionately fewer minority teachers than minority students nationwide—has been the target of programs aimed at bringing more minorities into teaching. But there's been less attention to the way race affects potential school leaders' pathways to principalship. Given that most principals have taught at some point, you might expect that the principal force would be just as disproportionately white as the teaching force. But it turns out that's not the case.
Still-unpublished research from Stanford University's Imeh Williams and Susanna Loeb explores race in relationship to the career trajectories of teachers, especially black teachers. Using data from the National Center for Educational Statistics and the Wisconsin state department of education, the authors examine the racial demographics of the principal force; to what extent race, rather than teacher characteristics or the schools where they teach, predicts which teachers become principals; where those differences emerge; and how much the career preferences of teachers explain which become school leaders.
