CLARKSDALE — Clarksdale had the second highest teacher shortage in Mississippi last year — 40 posted vacancies in July. 

For district administrators, that staffing challenge hits particularly hard each year in late summer when they try to fill vacancies before the new school year begins. The problem affects students, too, when they’re taught by substitute teachers for weeks at a time. 

Clarksdale schools leaders have also tried a solution that researchers and think tanks suggest: Identifying potential teachers early — before they even graduate high school. This approach also in local teacher workforces, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Nearly half of Mississippi public school students are Black, but about a quarter of their teachers are, according to . The gap has only shrunk by roughly one and a half points in the last 10 years.

“We cannot continue to work in the education arena like it’s a factory putting out the next product,” said Adrienne Hudson, who runs Clarksdale-based nonprofit organization , which assists aspiring educators with licensure requirements. “As we can see in the numbers, we don’t have enough products. The supply and demand are not matching.” 

“We have to do better at cultivating the educators in our schools and communities.”

Cultivating educators in the community would also address disparities between the demographics of teachers and their students. 

 A way ‘to change kids’ lives’

One way the district is trying to cultivate educators is through a vocational educator preparation class Candace Barron teaches at Clarksdale Municipal School District’s Carl Keen Career and Technical Education center. 

Triccia Hudson, the center’s director, had the goal of widening the pipeline for future educators in Clarksdale. She first recruited Barron to teach the course during the 2021-2022 school year.

“You don’t see as many families of educators any more,” Hudson said. “It was clear to me that aspiring teachers needed more mentorship.”

More than a dozen Clarksdale students are getting a feel for a career well known to them: teaching. In a classroom once devoted to a cosmetology course, students are learning how to plan lessons, manage classrooms and about the different roles in a school district.

In Barron’s course, students start their first semester learning about the origins of public education. The introductory lectures fascinate students.

It was interesting to learn that it’s always been about helping people by “spreading information,” Clarksdale High School sophomore Khloe Reed said.

Beyond having the opportunity to join a profession that predates the country’s founding, students in Barron’s class say they are drawn to education because of their lived experiences in their community. 

Barron has observed that high school-aged students understand the obstacles facing their fellow students and are in a good position to learn skills teachers employ to educate and inspire developing minds.

For sophomore Leah Myles, helping kids with learning disabilities inspired her to take the course. She saw how her brother struggled with his reading lessons, and she was moved “to learn how to help students like him.”

Sophomore Jamarick Davis said education has the power to “change kids’ lives.” He remembers his assistant teachers fondly and saw the impact a good teacher can have on a student who struggles in the classroom and at home — and might act out in class for attention.

Davis’ favorite teacher never seems to be in a bad mood despite challenges that educators face outside and inside the classroom.

Some students come from teacher families, while others admire alumni who entered the profession. All were aware that a teacher’s role involves more than what is in the textbook. 

As Reed put it, teachers are a positive role model in a young person’s life. Myles said teachers help students by challenging them, and demonstrating how they care.

“Teachers play a very important role in our community because without them, we wouldn’t really know anything,” said Reed. “It wouldn’t be a very lively life if you didn’t know anything at all. 

22 years in the classroom

Candace Barron has taught elementary school for 18 years and high school for four, but she still lights up with admiration when a student grasps a new concept or demonstrates eloquence. 

The Clarksdale native has taught hundreds of students and seen her corner of the world regress and progress from under the fluorescent bulbs in Clarksdale’s city classrooms.

When she graduated college, Barron followed in her parents’ steps when she became a teacher. She realized how important empathy was to a teacher whose classroom has students from various households and skill levels. 

“I do have bad days, but I try not to bring it to work,” Barron said. “I don’t know what (students) have been through at home and I don’t want to add to that by coming in and bringing my problems. So I come in, I have my game face on, I’m going to do what we have to do.”

That dedication matters as the teacher shortage has gotten worse in Clarksdale in the past year. 

“We really have lost a lot of the efforts that were put in place to combat the teacher storage crisis, ” Adrienne Hudson said. “Many of the scholarship incentives that used to be prevalent and professional development opportunities no longer exist.”

Barron said she believes the program can ignite students’ interest in an education career. The lessons give students the confidence and skillset to pursue careers where communication and project management are components — even those who don’t end up pursuing education, Barron said.

One student told Barron the class helped her with a speech impediment. The student felt more confident delivering presentations, and began to imagine careers that she felt discouraged from pursuing previously. 

“At this age, they’re still trying to decide what they want to do. So the more you expose them to every different area, it’ll help them decide,” Barron said.

Outside of the state-approved curriculum and textbook, students learn the art of crafting classroom bulletin boards. Fewer craft projects conjure as much nostalgia and appreciation. Some teachers spend hours with a ruler and yards of colored construction paper decorating their classroom in late July before school starts.

Creativity is the key to a successful poster board, Barron said. One student was inspired to construct a data wall with construction paper made to look like wood, while another put together a yellow bulletin board with crayons bearing the name of students. 

“I really hope that by the end of the program that they feel like they can make an impact on somebody’s life by becoming a teacher or getting into the education field,” said Barron. “That is my hope. So all of the negatives that they hear, I hope that I can dismiss some of them. 

“Students tell me at the end of (the course), they want to be successful like teachers.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

That stopped me in my tracks. She had seen me on my , where I explore science and technology — and for which I was recently nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Personality. Zoey had realized her teacher was also a scientist, guiding students through hands-on, real-world science, technology, engineering and mathematics challenges and helping to break down complex topics like microchips, circuits and semiconductors. For Zoey, the possibilities multiplied, with doors to her future opening simultaneously. 

Women engineers are rare. Women scientists are rare. And women of color in those roles are even rarer. , and women of color account for less than 10%. 

Yet across Arkansas and the country, the teacher workforce does not reflect the diversity of America’s classrooms. About . Having even reduces the chance of a Black student dropping out by nearly 40%.��Nationally, according to a report released in early December, about 40% of teacher preparation programs aren’t producing graduating classes that are as diverse as their state’s educator workforce. I am a Black teacher, with about 76.5% of my school’s population students of color.

For Zoey to see me as both her teacher and a scientist wasn’t just encouraging — it was expanding what she believes she can be. If education leaders want more students to see themselves as future teachers, engineers, and scientists, they must prioritize attracting and holding onto teachers of color in education. Diversity in teaching and STEM is not just about who stands at the front of the classroom, but about who students believe they can become. Here are some ideas about how to make this happen:

Start recruitment early through real-world science experiences.

When my students watch me test circuits, build models or record for my PBS show, they begin to see what a scientist looks like in action. I bring STEM to life through explorations like mini solar cars and electricity. These moments make science feel reachable. Schools can expand this sort of work by hosting STEM discovery weeks, funding afterschool clubs and highlighting diverse scientists. Early exposure is the first step to diversifying who enters the field.

Invest in future teachers by nurturing leadership in the classroom.

Representation begins with visibility, and teaching must be seen as a form of leadership. When I see a student helping a classmate, I say, “You just taught that.” For example, during a circuits lesson, one student finished his project early and helped a classmate whose lightbulb wouldn’t turn on; he realized that the switch was not connected to the wire and showed his friend how to fix it. Moments like that illustrate to students that teaching is influential. I also give my students chances to lead mini-lessons or guide small groups. Schools could build on this by offering “Teacher for a Day” programs and electives that teach aspiring educators about child development, lesson planning and what it means to lead a classroom. These types of experiences plant early seeds for a more diverse generation of educators.

Connect students with local professionals who look like them.

When students meet people who share their background doing meaningful work, it changes what they believe is possible. The look on my students’ faces when they see a woman of color leading a tech project or teaching in a lab says it all, and I often play episodes of Chip Kids for them because seeing a familiar face on the screen doing science projects makes that representation feel real. Districts could partner with universities, nonprofits and businesses to create mentorship programs and speaker networks. When classrooms open their doors to diverse professionals, students gain both knowledge and belonging.

That morning meeting moment is one I will never forget. Zoey did not just share a dream — she saw herself in me. Because of that, her world of possibilities grew bigger. 

If schools are serious about preparing students for college, career and life, they must be equally serious about teacher diversity. Education leaders must invest in recruitment pipelines and ensure that all children can look at their teacher and think, “That could be me someday.” Representation is the spark that ignites a lifetime of possibility.

More than two-thirds of lower-performing students come from historically disadvantaged populations, such as English language learners. With English learners projected to make up — and 76.4% of those being Spanish speakers — it’s time to remove the barriers hindering Latino students. 

A key factor holding back Latino students academically is that educators rarely mirror the demographics of schools. When Latino students have teachers with the same background, these teachers reflect the same culture as students, creating an environment for students to have their identity affirmed. Research links exposure to minority teachers to improvements in and .

Latino students now represent across the U.S., yet only identify as such. At the same time, teacher candidates of color encounter obstacles to entering and staying in the classroom. 

Four critical areas need to be addressed to strengthen the Latino educator pipeline: financial support, strategic recruitment, professional networks and culturally responsive practices.

First, financial support must be enhanced at crucial points in educators’ careers. Competitive salaries that allow for a middle-class lifestyle — combined with loan forgiveness programs, scholarships and performance bonuses — can make teaching more attractive as a career path for Latino educators. 

Second, Latino educator recruitment requires strategic workforce development approaches similar to those used in other fields. For example, the Tulare County Office of Education in California has been administering the since 2019, preparing single-subject teachers who focus on STEM and English to meet the needs of local rural school districts. 

“We strive to mirror the student population of the schools we serve and implement grow-your-own programs for preparing local talent as educators in our communities,” explained Marvin Lopez, executive director of the Tulare County Office of Education. All schools in partner districts have a higher population of socioeconomically disadvantaged, Hispanic/Latino and English learners than the state overall. On average, 68.2% of learners qualify for free/reduced lunch rates, 49.2% are Hispanic/Latino and 15% English learners. 

conducted by the Wheelock Education Policy Center on behalf of MassINC in partnership with Latinos for Education recommended a similar initiative in Massachusetts. The study found that while Massachusetts doubled the number of teachers of color hired from 2012 to 2022, students of color increased at a faster rate, leading to a larger gap in representation.

 According to the report, “a homegrown strategy to close gaps in college access and success could have considerable impact.” The researchers also noted that if new hires reflected student demographics, by the end of the decade, the percentage of teachers of color would double — from 10% today to about 23% by 2030.

Third, robust support systems and professional networks for Latino educators are essential for their success and longevity in the profession. pass the Praxis exam even after multiple attempts, while 75% of white candidates ultimately pass. Supporting test preparation for Latino teacher candidates can make a big difference in addressing this hurdle. 

A between ETS®, Study.com and TEACH demonstrated significant improvements in exam pass rates through test prep. The study showed that, with sufficient support, teacher candidates from historically marginalized backgrounds experienced meaningful increases in pass rates. This focus on certification support represents one step toward building a more representative teacher workforce. 

Supporting professional growth is also essential. Latinos for Education’s Aspiring Latino Leaders Fellowship offers one solution, giving Latino education leaders culturally responsive professional development to envision long-term careers in education rather than temporary positions. There’s always room for more organizations to help keep these vital teachers in classrooms. 

These support systems should provide opportunities for leadership advancement, professional development and mentorship connections that understand the unique challenges Latino educators face when navigating school systems.

Fourth, promoting culturally responsive practices that reflect student communities helps retain Latino teachers and improves educational outcomes. It’s not just schools and administration that must address this challenge. Family and community support are vital to expanding the Latino educator pipeline.

One huge asset in this population’s favor: Nine out of 10 Latino parents see high-quality public schools as instrumental to their child’s success, according to a Latinos for Education survey of Houston-area parents.

The same Houston survey uncovered strong support for more teachers who can bridge language and cultural divides. A striking 80% of Latino parents said they would become more involved if more Spanish-fluent educators were present. And teachers see similar value in family support: A of 700 teachers found that 87% believe increased parent and family engagement is the most impactful way to close student learning gaps.

Schools that incorporate culturally responsive curriculum and ensure staff composition reflects student demographics create environments where Latino educators feel valued rather than isolated. These practices also benefit students directly by exposing them to varied perspectives and teaching approaches.

The declining academic scores of Latino students require urgent action. Increasing Latino teacher representation offers a powerful long-term solution. When students see educators who share their cultural background and experiences, achievement gaps begin to close.

Financial support enhancement, strategic recruitment, robust support networks and culturally responsive practices will strengthen the Latino educator pipeline. As more Latino teachers serve as “mirrors” for Latino students, academic outcomes can improve, creating better learning environments for all students.

While the nation’s college-educated workforce overall is diversifying more quickly than the teaching pool, the NCTQ found that California, Texas, and Washington, D.C., are following the opposite trajectory. But the nonprofit questions some of the methods used to increase diversity, such as alternative pathways or lower standards for teacher certification, said Ron Noble, the council’s chief of teacher preparation. 

“We found that places like Texas are achieving [more teacher diversity], but with policies that have us concerned about the long-term health of the teacher pipeline,” Noble said. “California and Washington, D.C., offer potential bright spots that might not have that same pitfall.”

NCTQ’s report follows its December launch of a that tracks the racial makeup of U.S. educator corps from 2014 to 2022. Noble said the organization is focusing on educator workforce diversity because employing teachers of color academic, social, emotional and behavior outcomes for students.

“We really want states to be deliberate and intentional in — and careful how they go about — achieving the goal of a diverse workforce,” Noble said.

Teachers from historically disadvantaged groups in the U.S. make up nearly 23% of working-age adults with degrees but 21% of the teacher workforce, according to the dashboard.

In Texas, 35% of college-educated adults are from historically disadvantaged groups, compared with 43% of teachers. But researchers found that behind the high diversity number were flawed alternative certification programs and uncertified teachers — both of which became more common with educator shortages during the pandemic.

In the 2021-22 school year, 51% of Texas teachers completed alternative certification programs, compared with an average of 19% in other states, according to NCTQ. Alternative pathways are than traditional programs: found that Black Texas teachers were more than three times as likely to pursue alternative certification than a more common route like a bachelor’s degree.

Noble said researchers found that the majority of alternative programs in Texas are fully online and that graduates can become teachers with little to no classroom experience. A found that online alternative pathways have a higher turnover rate than other teacher preparation programs.

“They are thrown right into a high-stakes environment,” he said. “It’s not surprising that there are people leaving the profession.”

The number of uncertified teachers is also growing in Texas classrooms. Last year, that 34% of newly hired teachers in Texas were uncertified. The NCTQ report says racial demographics of uncertified teachers aren’t tracked, making it hard for policymakers to understand the impact on the future diversity of the educator workforce.

In California, nearly 33% of the teachers come from historically disadvantaged groups, compared with 27% of college-educated adults.

The NCTQ report says California’s effort to prioritize teacher diversity, invest in educator training and track industry data are reasons why diversity rates are higher than the norm. The state has in recent years to strengthen the teacher workforce. Advocates have built a and plan to launch a later this year to track demographic and employment data.

NCTQ said in its report that California has lowered standards for teacher candidates to enter the profession. A allows for a bachelor’s degree in any subject to be the sole qualifier for admission into most teacher preparation programs. 

NCTQ also cited Washington, D.C., for its high diversity rates, though its trendlines are not on the same trajectory as California’s and Texas’s. In 2022, 69% of educators came from historically disadvantaged groups, a drop from 77% in 2020. Adults with college degrees from these groups were reported at 35% in 2022.

“It would be easy to explain away D.C.’s teacher diversity by pointing out that it is a city, not a state, and cities are typically more diverse than states,” the report says. “However, comparing D.C.’s teacher and student demographics to those in other large cities in the United States suggests D.C.’s approach to diversifying the teacher workforce is yielding results.”

The NCTQ report shows that the teacher workforce in Washington, D.C., more closely mirrored its student population than those of other districts of similar size and student demographics. 

About 87% of the district’s student population are people of color, as is 74% of the teacher workforce. Researchers found that Atlanta Public Schools was the only demographically similar district that had a smaller student-to-teacher diversity gap.

The report credits consistent prioritization of educator diversity and innovative teacher preparation pathways for the high percentages in Washington, D.C. The region established with university partners and has implemented a centralized hiring process that yields more diverse candidates.

The nonprofit released its analysis alongside a . Previously, they’ve tracked the racial makeup of teachers as compared to their students; this year, for the first time, they’ve added a new metric: the diversity of the college-educated workforce nationally.

“Comparing teacher diversity to student diversity is meaningful, and it is important for students to see themselves reflected in their teachers,” said Heather Peske, president of the organization known as . “But we also have to make sure that as we’re setting goals for diversifying the workforce, [that] we set goals based on who we can … attract into the teacher workforce right now.” 

Historically, teachers have been slightly more diverse than the population of college-educated working adults, a trend which shifted around 2020. As of the most recently available data, teachers from historically disadvantaged groups make up 22.6% of working-age adults with degrees but 21.1% of the state teacher workforce. 

While the 1.5-point gap may seem small, Peske told ����Ӱ�� that it’s significant and points to what she called a “troubling trend:” increasingly people of color are either choosing other professions or are leaving the classroom. 

“We’re really using [the] dashboard both as a rearview mirror … but also as a way to forecast the possibilities of where we’re going. We worry that the gap could grow larger, and so that’s why we think it’s really important to pay attention to it now,” she said.  

The authors of the NCTQ report hypothesize this points to long-standing issues in the teaching profession, including low pay and status, inequitable hiring and the uncompensated and added responsibilities teachers of color often face — like mentoring or interpreting for families— known as the “invisible tax.”

These numbers also shed light on where in the pipeline the disparity originates, according to Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the , who also contributed to the report.

“I think sometimes if we’re only looking at the student and teacher parity … there’s a tendency to just be hypnotized by the problem,” he said, “where this analysis that NCTQ was doing through this dashboard actually gives us even more concrete steps to take to inform our planning.”

El-Mekki said it’s not only important to incentivize people of color to become teachers but also to focus on their retention once they enter the classroom — teacher turnover is higher for teachers of color (22%) than white teachers . Black teachers have some of the highest levels of student loan debt, he added, so offering scholarships or debt relief can make a huge difference. 

“We didn’t want our pursuit to rebuild a Black teacher pipeline to be disconnected from the social and economic realities that Black youth may face,” he said, so his organization designed a Black Teacher Pipeline Fellowship, which provides support to educators socially, professionally and financially. They also emphasize the importance of early exposure, offering career and technical education courses to high schoolers who may be interested in becoming teachers later on. 

NCTQ’s new dashboard continues to show a persistent gap in diversity when comparing the teacher workforce to student populations.  The report cites 48.8% of students nationally who come from historically disadvantaged groups vs. 21.1% of teachers who do. That number was actually two percentage points closer in 2014, with 18.3% of teachers and 44.2% of students.

The organization defines historically disadvantaged groups as including all teachers of color except those who identify as Asian. “While Asian people have certainly experienced discrimination in U.S. history, we haven’t seen the effects of discrimination show up in terms of their educational experiences or earnings outcomes. Asian students often outperform white students, and, as a demographic group, are least likely to suffer from a poor education,” an NCTQ spokesperson told ����Ӱ��.

That being said, Asian students are less likely than many of their peers of color to see themselves represented in their teachers’ racial identities. Almost 11% of working-age adults with degrees and 5.4% of students are Asian, yet only 2.2% of the state teacher workforce is.

While the percentage of Black educators largely mirrors the population of working-age Black adults with degrees (both at roughly 9%), the percentage of Black students at 15% is six points greater. 

To El-Mekki that demonstrates that there is an untapped Black teacher potential in the number of Black students who could — and do — choose teaching as a career if and when they get the opportunity to go to college. This allows advocates to then probe a little bit deeper, and focus on how to get more Black youth to and through college, so a larger pool is eligible to join the teacher workforce down the line.

An even starker trend exists for Hispanic teachers: Just over 10% of both working-age adults with degrees and the teacher workforce identify as Latino, while 28% of students do. 

The dashboard also includes more granular analysis at the state level, where researchers explored the racial makeup of teacher preparation programs in order to better understand their contribution to diversity between 2019 and 2021. This serves as a roadmap, Peske said, demonstrating which teacher preparation programs are “leading the way towards a more diverse teacher workforce, and which teacher prep programs may be adding roadblocks to diversity by actually making the workforce more white.” 

Extensive research has pointed to the benefits of a diverse teacher workforce, both for students of color and for white students, according to Constance Lindsay, a and assistant education professor at the University of North Carolina.

“For particular populations, it’s very important to have access to a teacher of color or teachers demographically similar to them.” she said, “I would say, particularly for Black boys, definitely on both the quantitative and qualitative side, it’s been demonstrated many times [that] it’s super important for them.”

Some other research highlights:

• Teachers of color produce additional positive academic, social-emotional and behavioral outcomes for all students, On average, students of all races (in upper-elementary grades) show stronger gains in reading and math when they have a teacher of color. 
  
• Black students in Tennessee randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade are 13% more likely to and 19% more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who were not. Additional data from North Carolina revealed similar findings. For the most disadvantaged Black males, conservative estimates suggest that exposure to a Black teacher in primary school cuts high school dropout rates by almost 40%.
  
• Black students in North Carolina matched to a Black teacher tend to have and are less likely to experience , such as expulsion and suspension.
  
• Black students matched to Black teachers are less likely to be identified for .
  
• Student–teacher race and ethnicity matches were associated with for Latino students in a California high school district.

“We have this rapidly diversifying public school student population that is tomorrow’s workers, citizens, etc,” Lindsay added. “We know that of all of the different things that we’ve tried to do to get rid of achievement gaps, having diverse teachers is … a very efficient and effective intervention.”

Disclosure: Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, The Joyce Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide funding to the National Council on Teacher Quality and ����Ӱ��.

Two state education boards set aggressive new goals Tuesday for student achievement, attracting and retaining a diverse teacher corps and reducing chronic absenteeism.

It was the second time this year that the Maryland State Board of Education and the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Accountability and Implementation Board held a joint meeting, and members said their decision to set higher targets is intentional.

“You have to have aggressive targets if you’re going to make that kind of gain,” said William “Brit” Kirwan, vice chair of the Blueprint board and chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland, during a break in Tuesday’s meeting.

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Of the new goals approved by the boards, the proposed  changes to student achievement scores were the most notable.

The boards voted to set a new goal for in literacy, formerly known as English language arts, from 48% in 2023 to 63% by the 2025-26 school year for all students in grades three through eight.

The goal to improve math proficiency is even more ambitious. For fifth graders, the goal is to increase the proficiency level from 27% to 46% over the same time period. For students in grades third through eight, the proficiency level target would be raised from 23% to 46%.

When “you’ve got an overall proficiency rate of 23% in mathematics, that’s a long way to go to show significant improvement,” said Maryland Superintendent Carey Wright. “If you don’t set ambitious goals, you’re never going to reach them. And if you set a low bar, that’s what you’re going to get.”

Wright told that one of her educational targets is to get Maryland in the top 10 in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, by 2027. Currently, Maryland ranks 40th.

Besides student achievement, the state also wants to boost teacher diversity and retention.

About 46% of new teachers hired statewide this year were teachers of color. The boards aim to increase that to 55% by the 2026-27 school year.

Schools are currently beating the goal of retaining 70% of teachers of color for three years, with the retention rate now standing at 74%. But both boards voted Tuesday to raise the retention rate goal to 78% in the next three years.

The state also seeks to cut chronic absenteeism by half, from 30% reported in 2022-23 school year to 15% by the 2025-26 school year. Any student who misses 10% of school days is considered chronically absent.

Although state law requires the Blueprint board to make final approvals on any documents, initiatives and proposals in connection with the 10-year education reform plan, it must collaborate with the state Department of Education on expertise to improve learning.

In connection with department goals on workforce diversity, they align with at least one of the Blueprint’s priorities: . The other four priorities, also called pillars, are , providing , preparing students for  and governance and accountability.

Clarence Crawford, who served his last meeting Tuesday as the state Board of Education president, used a football analogy to assess the state’s work to improve overall education.

“What we’re looking to do is to build a dynasty so we’re looking at the culture change necessary to achieve the goal, but also the culture change necessary to sustain the goal,” he said.

“This is not an academic exercise. We’re impacting people’s lives. That’s the magnitude,” Crawford said. “It’s within reach. It’s not going to be easy. There’s going to be bumps along the way, but I believe we can get there.”

Blueprint plans

Both education bodies also discussed Blueprint updates that included submitted last month from every school district in state to the Blueprint board, also known as the AIB.

In the past week, officials said, department and AIB staff reviewed plans from all 24 school districts with suggestions to revise the plans.

The May documents are a follow-up to brief in which school officials responded to at least five questions and prompts from the state on the top challenges they are facing implementing the Blueprint.

No specific school district was mentioned Tuesday, but some common themes emerged from the plans, include prioritizing stakeholder outreach and involvement, increasing collaboration with school district staff and local schools and identifying supports for students who haven’t met the college and career readiness standard.

Emma Pellerin, implementation plan director with the AIB, said six employees with her agency and 30 staff members with the department reviewed all 24 school district plans.

“It took about 10 hours to just review each plan,” she said during the meeting.

State officials continue to review all school district plans that include possible revisions and other feedback.

Rachel Hise, executive director with the AIB, said to reporters some plans could “possibly” be approved by the Blueprint board July 18.

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“It’s got to be a conscious effort,” Wright said during a break at the state Board of Education meeting in Baltimore. “Are we really going into our HBCUs? Are we recruiting? What do those techniques look like?”

Her comments came as the board was considering a recent state Department of Education report that showed the state has made little progress in recent years in diversifying its teacher workforce. 68% of the state’s teachers in the current school year are white compared to 20% Black and about 5% Latino or Asian.

But Wright said another challenge facing school systems is hiring and retaining teachers in the state.

“We aren’t producing enough of those candidates in house, so we’ve got to be thinking about what else are we going to do,” she said.

A few ideas were highlighted as part of a with various data that included teacher retention in all 24 school systems, those enrolled in state preparation programs and number of those who received National Board Certification.

Starting in two weeks, a work group will convene to assess recruiting and retaining a diverse teacher workforce. The task force will include representatives from the Maryland Higher Education Commission, the state’s historically Black colleges and universities, the College of Southern Maryland and at least seven school districts – Baltimore, Dorchester, Frederick, Kent, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore City.

“We have a very diverse group of stakeholders from all of these entities,” said Kelly Meadows, assistant state superintendent in the division of educator certification and program approval. “Our charge is to come together to [find] solutions and overcome the challenges of recruiting and retaining our high-quality workforce here in Maryland.”

Meadows said other solutions are to market the state’s revamped , produce short YouTube videos to summarize the teaching profession and visit school districts to inform officials about various teacher pathways and certification opportunities.

The report also found that of the state’s 1,626 “accomplished” educators – those who have been designated as National Board Certified – 1,204, or 74%, were concentrated in four counties: Montgomery, Prince George’s, Anne Arundel and Howard.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan called for salary increases for teachers with that national designation beginning in the 2021-22 school year. About 976 teachers enrolled in the program that year. When the salary increase was raised a year later to as much as $10,000 a year, more than 3,000 teachers applied, followed by another 3,800 in the current school year.

As of December, Meadows said every jurisdiction in the state has at least one teacher with that designation.

Of teachers with conditional certification – those who have a bachelor’s degrees but haven’t completed the requirements for a professional teacher’s license – more than half have been Black in the last five school years, the report said. In comparison, white teachers accounted for about 32% of those conditionally certified over the same period.

“Our conditional cert teachers better reflect the communities. That’s where many of the people come from,” said Joshua Michael, vice president of the board.

Last year, the legislature approved requiring that the department establish an educator recruitment, retention and diversity dashboard. Data from that dashboard will be publicly available by Jan. 1. Some of the data will include gender, race, new hires and attrition rate. Meadows said the dashboard will also highlight teacher interns.

“The key is to hopefully follow this individual into the school system, into employment and really publicize the diversity of our classrooms so that there is awareness around what we need in Maryland,” she said.

A gift

In other business, the board voted unanimously to approve the use of $350,000 to implement a science of reading program for an estimated 30,000 paraprofessionals, teachers, school literacy supervisors and school administrators across the state. The money will be used for meeting space, stipends and other administrative costs of the program, that focuses on teaching students based on phonics, comprehension and vocabulary.

Wright, who led the science of reading program while superintendent of public schools in Mississippi, announced the money is in conjunction with a four-year, $6.8 million grant from the nonprofit Ibis Group of Washington, D.C.

About $5.3 million will go to the State University of New York (SUNY) and to the AIM Institute for Learning and Research of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, to provide online training for the science of reading program. The other $1.5 million for Johns Hopkins University and the department to research the impact of teacher efficacy, teacher background knowledge and literacy leadership development.

The training, which will be free for Maryland educators, will start July 1.

Tenette Smith, executive director of literacy programs and initiatives in the department, said training will take about 35 hours to complete. Smith worked with Wright in Mississippi on the science of reading program.

All of Maryland’s school systems must have the science of reading program implemented in the 2024-25 school year.

This story was originally published in .

Will a new generation of Black teachers step in to replace them? What must it feel like for would-be teachers to see the classroom become a culture war battleground, with educators facing public attacks and scrutiny? Will they still want to take up that mantle?

I know firsthand that the impact of Black educators reverberates far beyond the classroom. Like many Black folks from the South, I’m the child of two Black teachers who brought the Black teaching tradition into our home and immersed us in spaces that reinforced those principles, from church to and beyond. At Spelman College, I was honored to learn from professors who were committed to fostering the next generation of Black, college-educated women. Today, I work with DonorsChoose, helping teachers ensure their students have access to resources to help them fulfill their potential.

Black educators don’t just communicate history, they shape it. There is a deep legacy of teaching in the Black community. At a time when Black people had limited employment options, teaching was an important way into the workforce, and education was in and of itself an act of resistance. It’s no coincidence that so many civil rights leaders began as educators. , the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, whose literacy and citizenship workshops helped tens of thousands of Black people register to vote, taught in public schools for 30 years. As Clark famously said, “Literacy means liberation.”

Black educators like Clark played , telling the stories of Black history and showing students not just how to navigate a system in which they were seen as second-class citizens, but how to question and change it. Black teachers today carry on that proud legacy. For many, teaching is an .

Their impact is just as powerful: Black students who have at least one Black teacher between grades 3 and 5 are than those who don’t. Black teachers are less likely than their white colleagues to and more likely to refer them to . The benefits go to all students: Black male teachers spend more than double the amount of time outside of class than their white counterparts.

Yet burnout among Black teachers has reached critical levels, pushing many to move to careers outside of education. Black teachers experience significantly more burnout than their white counterparts, and in a , more than 1 in 3 said they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the year. They also face greater financial obstacles. Black college graduates average that white graduates, and they face the highest monthly student loan payment of any ethnic group

Any effort  to ensure that future generations of students benefit from Black teachers must begin with investment in the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. While HBCUs make up just 3% of the nation’s colleges and universities, they produce half of all Black educators nationwide. A from the United Negro College Fund cited HBCU programs as a model to follow in recruiting and training prospective Black teachers and offered recommendations on how to support them. DonorsChoose’s own indicated that educators who are graduates of HBCUs showed the highest student engagement of any group surveyed.

To address these issues and strengthen the pipeline of Black teachers, there are steps that can be taken at every level. Government and private education funders can increase their support of , so they have the resources to implement these types of innovative and effective efforts. They can also invest in financial aid for prospective teachers — fixing loan forgiveness programs and supporting comprehensive programs covering tuition, certification preparation and testing fees, field placement expenses, and other costs. States can also support training for paraprofessionals and other school staff who are already working with students to help them achieve certification as educators.

Districts can get Black students into the educator pipeline while they’re still in high school by exposing them to the value of teaching careers. By cultivating relationships with the education programs and alumni networks of HBCUs and other higher education institutions, they can help students connect with mentors and build relationships that can support them along the path, from choosing a college to completing their degree, attaining certifications and finding work in the field. They can even begin their hiring processes early, to attract a larger and more diverse pool of candidates.

This Black History Month, let’s remember Black history and those who teach it. Let’s invest in the future by investing in those who shape it and whose passion and care will inspire the next generation of Black students and all students.

But at night, there is a lot keeping her up. 

“It feels like perilous times,” she told ����Ӱ��.

The philanthropic backing for the work to build up pipelines for more educators of color — which saw unprecedented support in the wake of George Floyd’s killing — is dwindling. And a generation of young people are being challenged to see education as a viable career, amid poor wages and political restrictions, said Semaan. 

“A number of funds that were set aside specifically for diverse leaders and educators, those things are being sunset now,” said Semaan, who founded the Surge Institute in 2014 to provide leadership development opportunities for educators of color in several American cities. 

“The wild enthusiasm that we saw for elevating and amplifying leaders of color and having them be thought leaders, those tones are becoming more muted.”

After nearly a decade supporting Latino, Asian, Native and Black leaders like herself thrive in higher level positions in districts nationwide, Semaan has witnessed ebbs and flows in public opinion, success and philanthropic priorities when it comes to diversifying the workforce. 

In conversation with ����Ӱ��, she reflected on the biggest challenges to bringing in more leaders of color, her personal experiences being discouraged from the field, and what’s at stake for the next generation without systemic change in recruitment and retention. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about what you’ve been seeing, hearing, thinking. What is the state of diversifying teacher and leader pipelines right now?

It feels like perilous times. 

In 2020, because of the combination of the pandemic and the racial reckoning post George Floyd, there was a lot of attention being paid, or at least lip service being given, to education equity. Regarding the need for not only creating pathways, but for retaining teachers and leaders of color. At the time, when people asked me a very similar question to the way you’re asking now, I would say I was cautiously optimistic. 

The reason I was cautious is because I think that this work has to be movement work. And it felt like people were responding to a moment with all the right words. But if there’s not true belief that is grounding those words and activities, then when the next thing comes, it is very easy to pivot away from that. 

I’m thinking about … the role that pay disparity and politics play, and how that weaves into the ability of teachers to do their job. Burnout from the past two and a half years is particularly impacting teachers of color. I think that those things should give us all pause, and cause us all to question whether that bump of interest and commitment and urgency post George Floyd, if that somehow lost its luster. 

People have felt that they’ve checked some boxes and are now moving on, whether it be book banning or school boards and fighting for seats. 

Could we spend a moment thinking through the barriers to your work right now. What do you see as the largest challenges to diversifying the workforce? How have they changed since you founded Surge in 2014? 

A lot of the challenges that are facing us in education, from teacher pay to student loan debt to politics that are making it really divisive and unsustainable, are all things that aren’t helping us in getting a new generation of leaders interested in seeing education as a viable professional opportunity. That is something that does make me lose sleep … I think about the number of people, especially first generation college goers, that are being told in their communities, by their families, and sometimes even in their schools, that if they want to be successful, have a living wage and a sense of freedom, that education isn’t the pathway for them. 

Education is also policy, education is philanthropy. Education is curriculum writing. Education is graphic design, and using creative measures to contribute to student learning. We haven’t always done a great job of helping young people see how they can use all of their brilliance and abilities, because we’ve created such a narrow definition of what it means to be an educator. And I think that is something that becomes increasingly perilous with Gen Z, who are not the folks that are trying to be in one job for 30 years.

I also have a micro level concern. I’m just going to be honest with you as a CEO of an organization that does invest unapologetically in Black, brown, and AAPI leaders. We experienced some of the largest investments in our work that we’ve ever had post George Floyd, as people were really doubling down on this effort to invest in education, equity. But those things are waning, not just for Surge, but as I talk to peers within this work.

A number of funds that were set aside specifically for diverse leaders and educators, those things are being sunset now. The wild enthusiasm that we saw for elevating and amplifying leaders of color and having them be thought leaders, those tones are becoming more muted. 

Why do you think that enthusiasm has gone away? Why do you think you’re seeing the availability of funders dwindle?

I think some [factors] are just externalities. Think about all the tech funding that supports education, philanthropy — tech has taken a big hit over the past 18 months. People have seen their actual balance sheets impacted. The reality is, a lot of folks have had to make tough calls about where we make cuts. 

In some cases, while there may be this commitment to educational equity, it was often tacked on as a nice thing to do versus being integrated in the fabric of strategic priorities. It’s not surprising to me that issues of equity and diversity have been some of the first things cut when there’s a need to tighten purse strings. It never was really integrated in the thinking about the things that are really good at driving systemic change. 

I also think that as human beings, we follow the shiny objects. As national discourse has changed, there’s been some natural shifting of attention. ‘Oh, yes, we now see many more organizations that are centered around leaders of color. We see a lot more people who are visible in leadership positions, so we can check that box and move on to the next.’ I don’t think that comes from a necessarily malicious place. 

We’re nearing the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board, which as you know resulted in a generation of Black leaders being purged from schools. Could you reflect on that impact? How might students be impacted by these kinds of disparities, if they continue as they have for the next seven decades?

I’m going to make this really personal. I’m 46, so I’m kind of squarely in the middle of that. The adults in my life when I was younger were those who lived through Jim Crow. I was very explicitly discouraged from taking on a role in education. 

I was studying chemical engineering, and I had this epiphany. I had a scholarship, I’m doing really well. And I called my mom my junior year of college and said, I’m going to get this chemical engineering degree, but I know that I’m called to do something different with my life. I was talking in my 21-year-old wisdom about eradicating poverty, revitalizing urban neighborhoods and all this stuff. I grew up well below the poverty line, lived in projects and was homeless at some point in my childhood. My mom said, no, you’ve got to continue what you’re doing, you’ve got to get a good job as an engineer. ‘The best thing you can do for poor people is never be one of them again,’ was her wisdom to me at that time, which you can imagine, I thought was the worst thing in the world to say. 

She was doing her best to prepare her child to live and thrive and live a life that offered opportunities that she couldn’t have imagined. That was 25 years ago, and those conversations are happening with young people now and are even intensified because of things that we’ve talked about earlier. You’re going to not be treated well, and you’re going to burn out, because you’re going to be expected to do all these other things. You’re not going to be treated as a professional. There’s going to be all of these politics that limit your ability to actually do what you think is really necessary for those that you serve.

When I think about what we are living in, it is disheartening. But what gives me hope is there are so many amazing organizations that are out there investing in our young people, our families, who have been underserved or overlooked. their organization like ours, and others that are investing in the current generation of leaders and senior leaders, to actually keep people in these positions, and keep the profession, you know, vibrant and thriving, and a place for innovation and ingenuity that doesn’t become stale, that actually welcomes people to bring the fullness of who they are their experiences, in ways that are going to improve and drive systemic change — those things are happening.

I just think there’s got to be even greater support of the types of work that we are doing to combat all of these other negative externalities that are really haunting me when I think about this next generation of young people entering the workforce. 

And in this new phase, if you were to imagine a school system that was working toward a movement, as opposed to just responding to a moment, how would it look? Can you point to places that you know are more systematically changing the way they bring folks into the classroom and leadership?

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Sharif El-Mekki in Philadelphia, who leads the Center for Black Educator Development. His work … aligns with this idea of a movement. Key is starting with young people and saying, Okay, if we want to recruit and retain folks, there has to be a multi-prong approach. Getting more young people and people from communities seeing roles in education as viable professional pathways is one part of that work. 

How do you actually retain people in these roles, and create the conditions necessary for them to really thrive in these positions? A couple of things that immediately come to mind are first recognizing the different responsibilities that are often held by teachers, administrators and other leaders of color in education, that are frankly just different from their peers. 

A number of folks we have in the Surge Network are Black male educators, who talk about no matter what their role is, they are often pulled into disciplinary experiences. People say, oh, you have good interactions with the students, so we want you to now take on this responsibility for the social and emotional welfare for young people, potentially young Black men. Which is fine. But if there’s not an acknowledgement that you are actually asking people to do a lot more than the one job that they are hired for, that leads to burnout and turnover. You’re asking people to shoulder, in addition to the intellectual aspects of their roles as educators, the emotional and mental burden of students and families because of their proximity to them.

When you have folks wearing all of these different hats, like the multilingual teacher who also has to translate for lots of other people in the school. These are often those unspoken responsibilities that our educators carry, without additional compensation … But what we heard and continue to hear is they also need the space for rejuvenation, real healing, rest and storytelling, to feel like ‘I’m not alone,’ which is something I think is invaluable and too often overlooked as a necessary component in creating greater sustainability in these roles.

If I were in a position at a system level, I would really be thinking about what are the things that are contributing to these roles feeling unsustainable for educators and leaders of color, and then getting to the heart of those matters. 

At Surge, you’re mentoring, coaching, creating community. Why is that kind of nurturing so important for leaders of color? And what are some approaches system leaders could consider in trying to get at those parts that aren’t necessarily a training workshop, for example?

We talk about our work at Surge as head, heart and spirit work. It’s why I sort of cringe when people say, ‘Oh, yes, you do leadership development, for educators of color.’ Yes, there is absolutely a part of that — we can’t say that we aspire for people to achieve and sustain themselves in senior and executive level roles without providing access to skills and knowledge that we know is required in order to thrive. But what’s been transformational in the experience of our fellows and alums that we hear time and time again, is this heart and spirit component.

There’s this myth that our people don’t want to lead a certain level, or that there is this hesitation. Those things are simply untrue … We start from a place of knowing who our people are, having a real asset- and strengths-based approach. We don’t minimize that heart and spirit work, we don’t see it as an add on, we see it as a necessary precursor to thriving in these roles. 

We are often fighting a lot of other things, including systems that have told us that we have to be less of ourselves. Leave those things that actually make you richly and deeply connected and proximate to your students and their families. When I say it that plainly, it makes it pretty obvious how we could, you know, be creating situations that make people feel that they’re unsustainable, because they are having to operate in a place that doesn’t see them for who they are, and therefore can’t bring the best of themselves into spaces.

We believe that that community is necessary in order for people to sustain in this work in the long run. I’m a comic nerd. We dispel this individual superhero myth, and we recognize that it’s Justice League work. And in order to build real connection with other leaders, that can’t be about the transactional stuff, that’s got to be about who we are, what are the challenges that are unique to us. 

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to the and ����Ӱ��.

Charlene Williams is about a month into the monumental job of leading a state education department in the wake of COVID.

She’s recently moved into the same office as her predecessor, Colt Gill, whose tenure as director of the Oregon Department of Education was defined by the public health threat of a lifetime and the challenge of getting 30,000 teachers and 500,000 students out of school buildings and onto computers for more than a year.

Williams’ tenure is likely to be defined by how she helps those teachers and students regain some of what they lost during that time.

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In Oregon, students who were already deemed behind by measurements of credits, assessment tests and attendance before the pandemic, fell further, according to state data. More than 60% of first-time teachers who started in 2020 did not return to their posts the following year, exacerbating educator shortages in certain subjects and areas of the state.

As the newly appointed head of the state education department – the state Senate is expected to confirm her as director in September – Williams, 52, said she will unite the state’s 197 school districts around priorities that include growing and diversifying the teacher workforce, improving outcomes for students furthest behind and boosting literacy rates, attendance and student mental health.

Williams has already proven she can do that work, according to those who’ve worked with her in Portland Public Schools, where she spent the bulk of her education career before leading the state education agency.

Her career has been defined by serving students furthest behind, and who other adults and schools have given up on.

During her 17 years in Portland, Williams helped adults earn their high school equivalency diplomas, taught at and led an alternative high school and became principal of what was the city’s highest-need, lowest-performing high school, turning it around within four years.

Williams, who was born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, by her father and grandparents, said that her family valued school, but there wasn’t much pressure for her to attend college or choose any specific career. Her grandmother had a third-grade education, her grandfather left school after sixth grade, and she was inspired to see her dad earn a bachelor’s degree as an adult.

It wasn’t until Williams started talking with her high school math teachers about her future that she felt she was set on a career course that led her to the highest education office in Oregon, serving as its first Black director.

“I see as exceptional the work teachers do every day to inspire students like myself who may not even know all the options that are available, but who saw fit to inform me, to love me enough, equip me enough, and to pour into me the way they did,” she said. “So I’m just trying to pay that forward.”

Disrupting inequities

Williams’ high school math teachers challenged her to think about how her talents could be applied to disrupting inequities in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. They got her thinking about college.

Just when she thought she’d made up her mind to become an engineer, she was thrust into teaching. During a math class senior year, a substitute who was supposed to teach calculus for the week did not in fact know any calculus. Williams taught the class instead, and loved it.

“After that week, it solidified for me that if I really wanted to disrupt inequities, it was really about time to go into education,” she said.

She earned undergraduate and masters degrees in math education at North Carolina State University and Wake Forest University, and spent her first four years out of college teaching high school math in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a struggling district with high teacher and administrator turnover. The principal she worked under became her model for leadership, she said.

He brought parents, community leaders, teachers and school staff together regularly to share ideas and strategies for improving the school, which eventually made great gains, Williams said. It taught her that leadership was not about making decisions in isolation.

“It’s important to have a range of perspectives that inform your decisions so that you can truly have the community and the school behind what you’re trying to do,” she said.

Then, in 1998, her husband got a job in Portland for what he and assured her would be a three-year journey before they’d go elsewhere, but they stayed put in the Northwest.

Turning Roosevelt around

After several years teaching adults at Portland Community College, Williams started in 2002 to teach math at Rosemary Anderson High School, a private alternative school in North Portland that’s a sort of “last chance high school” for students who’ve been expelled or dropped out of other schools.

The seven years she spent there were among the most formative of her career, she said. She learned that students are always listening and internalizing the labels given to them by adults.

Williams recalled giving a pep talk to students preparing to take a math assessment one day when a student of color interrupted her to say that everyone already expected her and her peers to fail.

“That was a moment where I decided for myself, like, no more of this,” Williams said. “We can’t have students believing that they are the problem.”

Jenni Villano, a retired educator and mentor to Williams, met her in 2006 when Williams was at Rosemary Adams. Alternative schools like Rosemary Adams often seem to be little more than “credit factories,” Villano said, where teachers give students credit just for showing up to class.

“Charlene was going to have none of that,” Villano said. “Charlene created an environment of true learning. She wanted her students to have true options and a future.”

Williams ascended to the school’s director of education while continuing to teach math in the mornings. In 2010, she took a job as principal for one of three small high schools that collectively made up the campus of Portland Public Schools’ Roosevelt High School.

The state had considered Roosevelt an underperforming school since the early 1980s. It had high turnover, and students scored well below state averages in reading and math. It served the highest proportion of high schoolers from low-income families in the district, and nearly 80% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch.

Roosevelt was also among the most diverse schools in the district. About one-third of students were Latino — the largest proportion of Latino students in the district — about one-quarter were African American and another third white.

As the three smaller schools within Roosevelt’s campus prepared to combine into a single high school, Williams helped apply for funding under an Obama-era program to help the lowest-performing schools in each state and brought in nearly $8 million. She was promoted to principal of the combined high school.

With the money, she was able to pay for new computers and technology, hired six nonacademic employees to help with college and career readiness and outreach to families and brought on a behavioral health coach. She also used some of the money to hire more teachers, so that high-performing teachers could spend part of the day coaching their peers one-on-one and in groups.

To boost enrollment and support from the neighborhood families, many of whom had sent their kids to other schools in Portland given Roosevelt’s reputation over the years, she held frequent community informational meetings and organized events to hear about families’ concerns.

People who most vehemently opposed or questioned Williams were invented to meet with her regularly in the school to talk, Villano said.

“When there’s pushback and your views and strategies are questioned, most people don’t handle that well,” Villano said. “In fact, Charlene brings that person onto her team so that they can see what’s really happening as opposed to making assumptions.”

When Williams took over as principal in 2010, there were about 700 students enrolled at Roosevelt, and just 39% graduated on time, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education. By the time Williams left in 2014, enrollment had grown by 30% to more than 900 students.

The on time graduation rate rose to nearly 64% for the class of 2012, but dropped to 53% in 2014, still nearly 15% higher than when Williams assumed the role of principal. The overall completion rate — anyone who earned a regular or alternative diploma or GED within five years of entering high school — was 77% by the time she left.

Alison Taylor, a teacher at Roosevelt High School, said Williams also worked hard to get buy-in from teachers at the school, who were used to administrators who would come in, shake things up and leave quickly.

“What happens is that teachers say, ‘You’re going to leave in two years so I just have to wait you out.’ But she didn’t. She was there. She stayed,” Taylor said.

Williams was promoted to the Portland Public Schools’ central office as senior director of school performance, where she continued to make improvements at Roosevelt and model similar changes across several other schools. During that time, she also earned a doctorate in education leadership from Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

After more than 14 years in Portland Public Schools, Williams left to become assistant superintendent of the Camas School District in Camas, Washington, and then deputy superintendent of Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, Washington, where Williams now lives.

Getting to work

Earlier this year, Williams was contacted by a head-hunting agency that Kotek’s office hired to find candidates for state education director. Williams said she was surprised to be among those contacted. The people who’ve worked with her are not.

Elisa Schorr, a former Roosevelt vice principal who worked under Williams, said students will benefit if Williams can do what she did in Portland for the state.

“If she can pull that off for all these different districts, that all kind of have their own thing going on, to be powerful for kids, I think we’ll be in a great place,” Schorr said.

Craig Hawkins, executive director at the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators, said Williams wasn’t on his radar until her name surfaced as a potential candidate for education director. He talked with people he knew in Washington who knew Williams from Vancouver and Camas and felt confident she’d be good for the job.

“Everything about those conversations leads me to believe that she’ll be committed to the success of each and every kid in Oregon,” he said.

After meeting with her, he’s impressed by her ability to ask good questions and to listen. He hopes she sticks around the education department for several years, as Gill did. The five years Gill was director was exceptionally long compared to his predecessors, none of whom stayed in the office for more than three years during the last decade.

“I’m really rooting for Dr. Williams to be there five years or more,” Hawkins said. “It just helps in terms of having the relationships, that trust that actually speeds things up and allows you to do more.”

It will also help as schools stare down years of turning around learning setbacks from COVID.

Williams, who earns about $250,000 a year, will continue on a statewide tour of districts this year to build relationships with school leaders, teachers, parents and kids and to talk about plans for the years ahead.

“The pandemic was a punch in the gut, and we are recovering and we’re learning how to take those deep breaths,” she said. “We have to get back up and lean into the urgency of our students, learning what they need to learn to be successful.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

With an eye toward changing this, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit focused on educator quality, has issued “,” a report detailing the size of the gaps throughout the country and summarizing promising policies. To diversify the ranks of their teachers, the group’s researchers say, states need to attend to every aspect of training and hiring people from underrepresented communities and making the schools where they work more hospitable.

“Data suggests there is a profoundly leaky pipeline of potential teachers of color into the classroom, with candidates leaving the pipeline at every point from high school through teacher preparation,” the report states. “States can slow the leak by shoring up the pipeline at each point where potential teachers of color slip through.” 

Here are five top takeaways from the report: 

States should set explicit diversification goals and collect data tracking progress toward meeting those targets. 

An appropriate goal might be increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce to match the population of students of color. Officials should both district- and school-level data outlining progress — something only a handful of states currently do. 

In the same spirit, states should use data to evaluate all their efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, with an eye toward identifying — and investing in — the most effective strategies. Nearly every state has created programs to encourage high school students to consider teaching careers, for example, yet little evidence has been published showing how well this strategy works. 

Unless education officials fund efforts to increase racial equity at every stage of teacher training, recruitment and retention, they are unlikely to reach their goals, the researchers warn.

Track how well early career teachers are faring using retention data disaggregated by race and ethnicity at the individual school level. 

This should include surveying educators in their first five years on the job — a time when many struggle and leave — on working conditions and satisfaction. Currently, just one state, Delaware, collects information on how many new teachers of color stay at each school. 

Surveys of working conditions are also important sources of information on teachers’ success and satisfaction. Understanding the factors that cause new educators to quit is important if school leaders are to address their challenges.

The report also recommends improving school climate and leadership and training human resources staff to respond to concerns raised by educators of color. 

Pay teachers more to work in hard-to-staff schools. 

Teachers of color are more likely than their white counterparts to work in schools that struggle to attract and retain top talent, and are more likely to serve large numbers of students who look like them and would benefit from more diverse staff. The NCTQ researchers pointed to a RAND Corp. study that found that for every $1,000 increase in pay for teachers working in these schools, attrition fell by 6%.

“While not specific to teachers of color, this policy would have an immediate impact on those educators (who are more likely to be people of color) already working in schools with the highest need,” the report notes. 

Change layoff policies so teachers of color are no longer disproportionately impacted. 

In many places, teachers of color are much more likely to have probationary status or to be at the bottom of seniority rolls, making them much more vulnerable to losing their jobs when budgets must be cut. States should make sure that decisions about educator layoffs incorporate multiple factors, rather than using seniority as the top or only criterion. 

According to the report, research suggests that making decisions about layoff priorities locally, using information about a community’s needs, can be helpful. 

Teachers of color should be at the policymaking table. 

Educators of color have different ideas about what it will take to diversify teaching than white teachers and education experts do. When asked about barriers to diversification, non-white teachers named better pay, loan forgiveness and supportive administrators, for example, and were less likely to say they want “Grow Your Own” programs where schools and districts seek to train future staff.

Disclosure: Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, The Joyce Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide funding to the National Council on Teacher Quality and ����Ӱ��. 

In a landscape of large-scale employment websites, offers an easy-to-use app focused specifically on education, designed to allow job seekers to promote their skills through resumes, videos and other media while giving employers direct access to a diverse group of candidates.

Marshaun Warren, director of human resources and director of diversity, equity and inclusion for the Belleville Township High School District, across the state line from St. Louis in Illinois, was drawn to EduOpenings because “I recognized an opportunity to execute not only a wider search for candidates, but also a specialized search that focused specifically on school personnel.”

Having used recruiting platforms for nearly two decades, “the inclusive architecture of EduOpenings also supports and encourages the engagement of diverse candidates,” Warren says.

EduOpenings’s origin story isn’t so much about creating a new business, but about two St. Louis education leaders working to solve problems in their own community. Founders Darryl Diggs, director of equity for the Special School District of St. Louis County, and Howard Fields, assistant superintendent of human resources in the St. Louis County School District, met at a leadership academy and discussed their experiences as Black men working in education. That connection led them to start The State of Black Educators Symposium, which provides networking opportunities.

Participants started asking Diggs and Fields to share job referrals with the group. “It was nothing to get 20 to 30 emails a week with this organization just started,” Fields says. 

“When we first started, it was more so a reflective piece of our own upbringings and trying to find a job,” Diggs says. “There are some platforms still around that look the same as they did 20 years ago, if not 40 or 45 years ago. What would it look like to take an old system and put the power and ownness on the job seeker, giving you an amazing first impression through video or audio? We were thinking about our own 314 area code, the St. Louis region. [EduOpenings] has quickly grown and is now across the country in a variety of states and school districts.” 

With the founders’ connections in Black education, the effort began with a focus on diversity, and grew quickly. From St. Louis, the company expanded to serve the five largest school districts in Missouri, including about 90% of the St. Louis area. Then, Black educators in Chicago, Philadelphia and other major cities started joining. 

Funding the year-old platform with no outside investment to date, Fields and Diggs made their first-ever pitch at the 2023 SXSW Edu Launch event. 

“There isn’t a one-stop shop for educators interested in jobs all across the country,” Fields says. “From a vision standpoint, we would like to get there.” 

By focusing solely on education, he says, the posts “live in a space where people find value.” Diggs says it benefits both the job seeker and the employer and adds a focus on pushing jobs out on social media, building advertisements and helping school districts manage inquiries. 

“Imagine if you are able to jump on a site and see all of those who fit qualifications looking for a job all in one swoop,” Diggs says. “You can be a recruiter. You can see everyone on the site and go after them. It is different than any other space.” 

“EduOpenings is unique because the vacancy postings are brief yet informative and attractive to view,” Warren says. “It is ideal for my situation because I do not have to input large amounts of information to utilize the platform. I can contact the team with the vacancy, and they take it from there. This helps tremendously when you work in a large district.” 

The service is attracting large and small districts alike. The larger ones can promote their openings to a greater, more diverse demographic as they try to keep up with a list of vacancies. The smaller districts use the platform to post their jobs to reach a wider audience. Site data allows employers to view how well their post performed and then make changes to gain more interest. For the job seeker, all posts are education-specific. 

“I know when my phone goes off with EduOpenings, it is a job I am interested in,” Fields says. 

The free service — add-ons come with a fee — continues to grow. What started around 100 job postings per month has grown to roughly 300, all without much promotion. Popular with K-12 districts, it also serves private and charter schools and higher education. Diggs and Field hope pitching the business at places such as SXSW will open the door to grants and funding, which could allow them to grow their team and push national.

“We haven’t been paid a dime in terms of the work we have done,” Fields says. “That is not our why. We are trying to build something responsive.”

Then, in her final year at Tarrant County College, Valdes saw a flier for a 12-month program called that would let her earn a teaching degree while being paid to serve as a classroom trainee. The Texas Tech University program was designed to address the state’s growing demand for teachers and widespread dissatisfaction with instructors coming through alternative certification programs that provided little classroom experience.

Texas Tech’s program allows community college graduates like Valdes to earn both a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate by combining online courses with a year-long paid classroom residency working under an experienced mentor. 

Today, a year after completing the program with honors, Valdes is a dual-language third grade math and science teacher at T.A. Sims Elementary School in Fort Worth. As a bilingual educator of color, she is a much sought-after hire in Fort Worth and beyond.

A of have found that when students of color have teachers of color, their attendance improves, disciplinary infractions decline, and academic achievement and college enrollment rise. For all students, having a diverse teaching force strengthens confidence in their own abilities and improves racial attitudes. Yet, while students of color comprise more than 50% of public school enrollment nationally — a share expected to grow steadily in the years ahead — nearly 80% of teachers are white. In many states, this lack of diversity means students frequently attend schools and districts that do not employ a single educator of color.

A new FutureEd of identified a range of programs, like the Tech Teach residency, that offer promising strategies for making the profession more representative of the students in the nation’s schools.

Setting measurable goals for recruiting, training and hiring candidates of color is a key first step. That includes publicizing goals and policymakers’ progress toward achieving them at the state, district and school levels. The federal government can contribute by requiring states to report on the racial and ethnic diversity of students who complete teacher-preparation programs. 

Rather than waiting to begin recruiting teachers of color at the college level, some districts are encouraging middle and high schoolers to explore teaching careers. The , for example, partners with districts to create high school that offer prospective educators a three-year curriculum centered on the Black experience. In Philadelphia, that means high school juniors and seniors can take college courses and graduate with an associate degree in education along with a diploma. 

There’s also an opportunity to tap into local talent via Grow Your Own programs that provide pathways for paraprofessionals and other workers in the community to get the training and experience they need to become teachers. California’s program, for example, has helped more than 2,000 teachers’ aides or paraprofessionals become teachers, nearly half of them Latino. Some programs take the form of teacher residences — like the one Valdes participated in — and apprenticeships, which are particularly promising for candidates of color, as they can receive extensive clinical preparation and earn a salary while they learn to teach.��

The National Council on Teacher Quality has nearly 90 programs that are helping potential educators of color navigate a substantial barrier to the profession: state licensing exams. Candidates of color typically fail these tests at much higher rates than other teaching candidates. But at these programs, there’s little or no racial disparity in first-time pass rates, thanks to the support they provide to help candidates fill gaps in their content knowledge. Massachusetts is piloting a that lets candidates substitute another approved standardized test for the state’s general knowledge exam for aspiring teachers. It also permits candidates who come very close to the passing score on subject-specific tests to submit an essay to demonstrate content knowledge.

Making a diverse teacher workforce an explicit priority in school district hiring also makes a difference. Highline Public Schools in Washington state, where more than half of the 18,700 students are Black and Latino, implemented an interview process designed to elicit candidates’ beliefs about teaching disenfranchised students and to identify implicit bias. Together with other steps, the strategy tripled Highline’s new hires of color from 12% in 2014-15 to 36% in 2022-23. 

But it’s not enough to hire more teachers of color if they don’t stay, and many don’t. Attrition is significantly higher among Black teachers than whites and slightly higher among Latino teachers than whites. Leadership opportunities and clear career pathways for teachers of color can help address the problem. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has launched a fellowship program, , to increase the percentage of superintendents of color over a decade. Another strategy is to connect teachers of color with peers, both locally and nationally, through paid, mentorship and professional learning opportunities. Highline Public Schools, for example, has created eight teacher affinity groups dedicated to racial equity and pays teachers to participate in them.

A comprehensive approach to increasing the percentage of teachers of color in the nation’s schools, pursuing diversity throughout the teacher pipeline, yields the strongest results. That requires a wide-ranging commitment among educators and education leaders. “Institutions of color and people of color are [often] burdened with solving the problem, one they didn’t create,” Anthony Graham, provost of Winston-Salem State University, said in an interview. Addressing teacher diversity, he said, needs to be “our problem collectively.”

A familiar anxiety set in. 

It wasn’t until New York City high school science teacher Joshua Modeste saw photos of the teenagers involved in the December stabbing the tension eased: He did not know her. 

A little over a year had passed since he lost his first student, , 16, shot in the stomach a few blocks away from school. Soon after, he lost another when Benji’s best friend was briefly incarcerated. Ever since, when he hears about violence involving a young person, he feels dread build in his gut.

A few hours passed before he was reminded of why. A student, hanging out in his room over lunch to do makeup work, yelled out, “What?! Oh my God,” before bolting into the hall. The Harlem victim, Saniyah, was her friend.

Modeste felt unprepared, and worn out. Within one year, he and his mostly Black and Latino students at Harlem’s Urban Assembly School of Global Commerce navigated death, prisons, racial violence, a continuing pandemic. As one of the school’s few Black male teachers he shouldered a disproportionate weight through it all, and isolation has become . 

And while the youth mental health crisis mounts, so does the toll for educators on the frontlines — especially as force teachers like Modeste to manage alone. Traction is building for student supports, but some worry teachers are being left behind — a direct hit to learning recovery.

“Nobody in the teaching department or other teacher candidates talked to us about that stuff — trauma and grief, emotions, and how to manage all of that while trying to maintain a classroom of 30 kids who are going through their own situations at home,” Modeste said of his teacher preparation program at SUNY Plattsburgh.��

(While there is no class on these topics at Plattsburgh, the curriculum has been revised since Modeste’s graduation in 2016 and “these themes are woven through many of our courses,” Maureen Squires, chair of the joint bachelor’s and master’s program, told ����Ӱ��.) 

“It was kind of like, ‘If you can’t handle this, then this is not the job for you,’” Modeste said. Still, there’s not a doubt in his mind that he should continue teaching. In fact, he’s flourishing professionally, last year among the prestigious FLAG Awardees for Teaching Excellence. 

But he is struggling. 

Teachers are for experiencing more job-related stress than any other profession. Yet help for classroom leaders is hard to come by. Mental health insurance coverage varies district to district, if visits are covered at all. Even in New York City — where teacher copays for outpatient, in-network mental health care max out at $25 — provider shortages and stigma can prevent educators from accessing care consistently.��

The demand for professional support is also growing rapidly. Anxiety and depression symptoms in teachers are on the rise, highest for early career educators and teachers of color, according to Leigh McLean, a researcher at the University of Delaware. 

Overall in the 2018-19 school year, 4,550 New York City teachers accessed services through their union, the United Federation of Teachers. Last year, the number exceeded 20,000. Daily calls to the program soared, from about 20 to 100 per day; hundreds of school social workers volunteered after school and on weekends to meet the need.��

For McLean, who has studied the impact of teacher depression for years, the reality is simple — educators have been given an impossible task. 

“Especially through COVID, we’re putting the emphasis on teachers themselves to support their own well-being. But we’ve created a system that is not supportive of their well-being,” she said.

Modeste knows this to be true. Now in his seventh year of teaching, he relied on instinct, not training, to meet Saniyah’s friend in the hall that December afternoon. 

He asked about their , whether her mom knew her too, what she might need. He told her grief surfaces in many ways, but “I can’t tell you where that starts or ends,” before offering an empty room for her to cry. 

‘My anxiety lives in my belly’

The son of Trinidadian pastors and youngest of three brothers, Modeste didn’t grow up talking about mental health. Don’t cry, give it to God in prayer. 

“Society has told me that Black men are supposed to be strong and figure things out on their own,” he said. “Black men don’t talk to me about therapy. So it doesn’t seem like something that’s normal.”

But the emotional weight was building each day. Soon after the murder, one of Modeste’s students sat visibly crying in class. Benji’s best friend. He did not know what to wear to the funeral — this would be his first. 

Entering grades at the semester’s end, Benji’s name on his roster stared at him, waiting for an entry. In November, Facebook memories brought back pictures, and emotions, at the year anniversary. The funeral was the first time he had seen many of his students cry, especially the boys.

“I thought I got through it. And then this time of the year resurfaced some stuff for me,” he said.

Psychologists dub the phenomenon or empathetic distress. Studies have mainly focused on clinical staff like social workers or therapists. Tish Jennings, an expert on teacher stress and social-emotional learning at the University of Virginia, said researchers have only recently started to explore how it affects teachers and students. 

“You need therapy when you have trauma exposure,” she told ����Ӱ��. “It’s very hard these days to get good treatment, because there’s such a huge need, and there’s such a shortage of good clinicians.”

Because of the clinical shortages impacting New York City teachers, “members who cannot wait for an appointment sometimes go to a mental health provider outside the networks. These professionals often don’t take insurance and can charge what they want,” said Alison Gendar, a UFT spokesperson.

Unaware of the options provided by the union and in crisis, Modeste urgently searched for a male therapist of color last fall. He ultimately paid over $120 for a month of Talkspace sessions, but could not afford to continue treatment. The NYC Department of Education did not provide grief counseling to staff or students after losing Benji, according to Modeste.

“If you have to deal with traumatized people all the time and you don’t have the skills, you can try to numb yourself as a way to protect yourself from feeling those feelings,” Jennings explained. “You can also become kind of challenged or jaded, sarcastic as a way to protect yourself. And you can also become very overwhelmed and feel depressed and hopeless.”

Teachers’ depression is shown to — teachers plan less, , may rely on independent or group instead of the more demanding whole-class instruction, and are less warm with students. 

High stress , too; Jennings described a scenario where a teacher under extreme stress is quicker to overreact, taking a small disruption personally, “I might not realize this is normal kid behavior and become more punitive in response to that.”

Ideally, teachers should receive training or therapy to become aware of their emotional state so as to, “respond to situations thoughtfully instead of reacting automatically,” she added. 

Modeste is beginning to recognize when physical sensations pop up and articulate his needs, or to meditate — skills he picked up at a mindfulness workshop by NYC Men Teach. 

“My anxiety lives in my belly,” he said.

Experts told ����Ӱ�� teaching mindfulness and compassionate is necessary, but by themselves, cannot reduce the high levels of stress teachers face. The most effective changes are system-wide, not individual: comprehensive health care packages; staff devoted to teacher well-being; professional development; and establishing .��

An invisible tax

They’re the kinds of support that teachers are craving, particularly those who serve students disproportionately impacted by poverty, homelessness, incarceration or violence. For Modeste, constant exposure to violence and death in the community and online weighs heavy on the mind. In his youth, the only time he saw dead bodies was at funerals. 

Last May during class, he confronted what he called a new “death culture:” a student watching the Buffalo grocery store massacre video on Twitch during class. He had mistaken it, like many young people, for a first-person shooter game. This fall, images of rappers Takeoff and PnB Rock’s death circulated.

“I was like, ‘No, why are you watching these things? Do you understand the impact that this stuff is having on you?’” he recalled. “I don’t know if people are processing with them, what that means for you to look at that person, someone that you looked up to or somebody that you listen to their music, to see a picture of them on the floor dead.” 

It’s also not lost on him that, for some students, he may be the only one with whom they’re comfortable talking. Researchers and those in the field refer to this as an “” on educators of color, often among the few adults in a school who represent their students’ racial identities, are more likely to share life experiences.��

Black teachers report having to discipline students of color and be liaisons to families more often because of their race, according to the Center for Black Educator Development. They may also navigate more lack of trust from administrators and colleagues.

Compared to white male teachers, Black teachers spend counseling students outside of class, about five hours per week. Modeste, for instance, shared his phone number with students when they went remote for the first time in the spring of 2020 — a way to stay connected if they needed it. And many did. 

He fielded calls throughout distance learning, while battling his own anxiety and isolation, witnessing anti-Black violence week after week. In sometimes hour-long conversations, he listened to students vent about fights they had with their mother; college applications and whether STEM could really be an option for them.��

Since returning to class, some have opened up about feeling hypersexualized, like they have to perform masculinity and some idea of what it is to be a Black man. Modeste keeps a note from one student, who was suicidal while in his class, in his desk at all times.

While the staff at Global Commerce is racially diverse, Modeste finds himself dispelling assumptions staff place on students — about how they spend their money or why their families live in nearby affordable housing projects — something no one had done for him. And like most other , Modeste is one of the longest-serving teachers.��

“It creates a situation where students feel either abandoned or they feel like they don’t have anyone to connect to … It puts an extra responsibility on me,” he said. 

The research is clear in this regard, according to McLean: “Teachers and students in these underserved contexts are really experiencing the most trauma and are the ones that need the most prioritized and targeted support.”

Modeste knew that would be his reality before beginning his career, but he’s still realizing the toll. 

In December, he briefly tried psychotherapy again through a free Betterhelp trial, offered through a teacher honor society. He had a couple sessions with a Black male therapist and wanted to continue, but the $200 per month price tag stopped him. 

For now, Modeste and his advisory students have started role-play scenarios on setting boundaries and saying no, swapping TV shows and music that helps them cope with feeling overwhelmed. Leaning on cultural affinity groups and colleagues, he is finding ways to “reframe” the parts of his life that serve as informal therapy: journaling, writing affirmations like ‘focus’ and ‘love’ on his bathroom mirror in Expo marker and caring for his pet fish.

In his Ph.D. program at Columbia Teachers College, he’s researching ways to make science education more culturally responsive, and the experiences of male science teachers of color.��

He doesn’t hide emotions anymore, or ignore what’s happening outside of school. His default demeanor is bubbly, but on days he’s going through something, he smiles and talks less. 

“And kids will ask me like, you know, ‘Yo, Modeste are you OK?’ That’s when I open up … ‘Oh, you know, I’m going through some stuff with my family, I just need some space right now,’” he said. “I think that that shows them that when I ask them if they’re OK, the responses that I’m trying to elicit.”

In partnership with California’s , we . The district partnered with Alder Graduate School of Education and Marshall Teacher Residency to design a residency program based on Bank Street College of Education’s Prepared to Teach framework. Lindsay recruited from within the community to attract future educators who understood the district’s unique instructional practices and — most importantly — the experiences of its students. Through the program, residents gained content knowledge as well as hands-on experience by working alongside a mentor for an entire school year. Our findings largely mirrored the Rand study but identified additional factors to improve recruitment and retention. While the factors mentioned in the report are critically important, we see them as just the beginning.

In their analysis of the TNTP residency, the Rand researchers reported that reduced costs associated with the program influenced new teachers’ decisions to enter the profession. By providing tuition assistance, residencies can attract more diverse applicants, particularly those from economically and historically disadvantaged groups. In Lindsay, a federal Teacher and School Leader grant covered graduate school tuition, eliminating the need for residents to assume additional debt as they gained practical experience teaching alongside a mentor and their license. 

For the district, the mentor program also provided cost savings. Before the residency began, the district would spend the first year or two retraining teachers on its instructional system. The residency model served a dual financial purpose: It helped to recruit diverse residents and reduced the need for future training expenses.

At the root of all grow-your-own programs lies the theory that recruiting from within the community brings in educators who understand their students’ lives. has shown that having teachers of color improves academic performance and graduation rates as well as providing social-emotional benefits for all students. In Lindsay, the district recruited potential educators who were predominantly Latino/a, first-generation college graduates and from high-poverty backgrounds, many of whom had graduated from district schools. During a focus group with sixth graders, students said they directly benefited from building relationships with teachers who understood the challenges of their community. 

Recruiting residents from the nearby area also bolsters the local labor market. During a focus group, one principal explained that the district is one of the area’s largest employers, as is common in many rural communities. As a result, the district felt that it was imperative to reduce poverty by fostering the local middle class. The residency program gave students an opportunity to go to college and then return to serve their community in a meaningful way. 

Beyond the coursework needed to prepare residents for licensure — particularly important given that licensing exams often negatively impact candidates of color, making preparation critical for recruiting more diverse educators — retaining new teachers requires explicit attention to building strong social-emotional connections.

As teachers navigate the challenges of 21st century classrooms exacerbated by the pandemic, residency programs have a unique opportunity to create holistic environments that meet new educators’ needs. Beyond instructional training, novice educators need a sense of community and belonging. Lindsay worked to nurture such an environment for both residents and mentors. Our analysis of survey data revealed that residents felt strong social-emotional connections with the program director, residency instructors and mentors. They felt heard, cared for and supported. As evidence of this effect, when asked about their intention to stay in the district after completing the residency program, all the respondents said they planned to stay. 

To address current teacher recruitment and retention challenges, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently stated, “districts should increase their partnerships with educator preparation programs to and use teaching candidates to support educators already in the classroom.” Whether a district chooses a grow-your-own or other residency model, the goal of recruiting residents from diverse backgrounds remains imperative. However, the benefit of a diverse teacher workforce is not just for students of color. A diverse educator pool acknowledges the need for all students to feel included, accepted and academically enriched in learning settings that are reflective of the world — one of various colors, cultures and backgrounds. Our research identifies additional strategies for recruiting and retaining diverse educators while establishing inclusive and innovative mindsets to meet the needs of all students.

Wyoming is vast and sparsely populated. Its only public four-year university is located in Laramie, in the southeast corner of the sharply rectangular state. Those factors can make educator training complicated, explained Laurel Ballard, director of innovation and digital learning at the Wyoming Department of Education. Would-be teachers often are turned off from the profession because of the cost or commuting required for training programs.

“All of our districts are struggling with finding teachers and counselors,” she said. 

Now, to combat the problem, her state is rolling out a program designed to eliminate key barriers to becoming an educator — and doing so with the help of a network of more than a dozen other states at the vanguard of what many consider a . 

Wyoming and its peers in the are applying a decades-old, on-the-job training model long associated with trades like plumbing or welding to educator preparation. They say the technique has the potential to make becoming a teacher more affordable and hands-on.

“I think it’s going to change the face of what teacher prep looks like,” Ballard said. “We’ve seen [apprenticeships] work really well in other industries. So I don’t know why education would be any different.”

The strategy is brand shiny new. Though the federal government has run a skilled apprenticeship program for 85 years, teaching was only of approved professions in 2021.

But rather than attempt to navigate uncharted turf on their own, officials from 14 states and counting have banded together to share tips and tricks from the field. The network launched in August and is led by David Donaldson, one of the architects behind Tennessee’s teacher apprenticeship program, which was the nation’s first federally approved model.

“The group’s made up of the implementers, the people who actually get things done,” Donaldson said. “Everybody is learning from one another. I hope people avoid the mistakes I’ve made [in Tennessee] because I’ve made plenty. We say we want people to start at second base, not home plate.”

Teachers, on average, make compared to similar college graduates, meaning those without access to generational wealth may have difficulty paying back student loans. That’s one of several reasons the nation’s teaching force, which skews white and female, of its students. A broken teacher pipeline also helps explain the educator shortages aggravated by COVID, experts say. 

Apprenticeship advocates believe the new model has the capability to knock down many of those barriers, especially those associated with cost.

“We are going to create a world … where an aspiring educator can become a teacher for free and get paid to do so,” said Donaldson.

Once a month, the network meets over Zoom. During each session, two states give a brief presentation about how their model works and the challenges they’ve overcome in bringing it to life. 

For Ballard and her Wyoming colleagues, it’s a chance to glean lessons they can bring home. A recent presentation from West Virginia, for example, helped her team imagine a teacher preparation pathway that begins during students’ junior year of high school, she said.

“We took copious notes so that we can apply a lot of what they’ve done. … I don’t want to recreate the wheel,” Ballard said.

Laurie Matzke, in North Dakota, feels similarly. The assistant state superintendent works in a 77-person office — the country’s smallest state education agency, she said — so she appreciates any help from out-of-state colleagues.

“To participate in those calls and hear firsthand from other states how they’re moving forward to create their teacher apprenticeship program, that has just been an invaluable experience,” she said.

The U.S. Department of Labor currently recognizes the teacher apprenticeship programs of 16 states, including 10 that participate in Donaldson’s network: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. Several other states in the network are in the process of applying for state or federal approval.

West Virginia was the second state with a federally approved teaching apprenticeship program after Tennessee. There, 250 high school juniors across the state this spring will take part in a that gives them a jumpstart on college with dual enrollment courses in their last two years of high school as well as paid student teaching opportunities. The credits they earn allow the apprentices to start college as sophomores, where they complete two full years of undergraduate coursework in tandem with more student teaching. Finally, to culminate the apprenticeship, they return to their home K-12 district when they are college seniors for a salaried position as a full-time teacher under a veteran educator’s tutelage. At the end of that year, they receive their bachelor’s degree and their teacher certification.

The program will open the door for more West Virginia students to stick around and help future generations of students, predicts Carla Warren, director of educator development at the West Virginia Department of Education.

“It’s a very rural, family-oriented state [and] these individuals want to stay,” she said. That’s important, she pointed out, because those who grew up there are the ones who best understand the issues their communities face, such as opioid abuse and rural poverty.

“This pathway has the potential to level the playing field for our students and allow our best and brightest to say, ‘Hey, I think I want to be a teacher and I can afford to be a teacher in West Virginia,’” the education official added.

“Coming from a community that is so impoverished and rural, it helps a lot,” said Teanna Stubbs, a senior at Mount View High School in McDowell County, West Virginia who grew up in a low-income family. 

The student this year began a vocational track that, like the forthcoming apprenticeship program, gives her an early start on college credits and student teaching. Colleges are already offering her scholarships for next year, she said. When she completes her studies, she intends to return to McDowell County to work with youth.

“I’ve lived here my entire life. I’ve seen how impactful it is to have somebody who’s willing to come in and help the community,” Stubbs said. “A lot of times, the kids here end up struggling because they have nobody to go to. … I just want to change the lives of kids who grew up like me.”

West Virginia, like many other states in the network, has cobbled together several funding sources to offset the costs for students, minimizing debt and compensating them for student teaching. Being an approved apprenticeship program unlocks both state and federal dollars, Warren explained, and her office has also sought out philanthropic funding.

How to build financially sustainable models is a recurring conversation topic at the monthly meet ups, Donaldson said. 

The most common problem states face is “funding, 100%,” he said.

At least four states in the network have ensured tuition, books and licensure exams are fully funded, Donaldson said, meaning no out-of-pocket costs for candidates. At the same time, students can earn a salary for their student teaching roughly equivalent to that of a paraprofessional, around $20,000. In West Virginia, the price tag is a bit higher. Warren estimates apprentices who begin in high school would pay roughly $11,000 per year of higher education, offset by a roughly $32,000 salary in the clinical year before finally earning a teaching certificate.

Some officials, like Matzke in North Dakota, have used COVID relief dollars to foot the bill for grow-your-own programs that, rather than recruiting high schoolers, provide paraprofessionals with the continuing education needed to become full-time teachers. But as stimulus cash dries up in the coming years, states will have to find other funding streams for ongoing programs.

Still, Donaldson is confident that leaders will be up to the task so long as they continue to lean on and learn from each other. It costs nothing to join his network, and every month since its launch, new states have joined, quickly swelling from seven to 14.

“I definitely see this spreading,” Donaldson said. “It’s become a movement.”

Working in a region of rural Arkansas long plagued by teacher shortages, Eveon Rivers seems like the perfect candidate to lead a classroom. With 18 years of pre-K teaching experience, she knows how to work with young people. And a self-described “Greek mythology person,” she has a passion for high school history — the subject she wants to teach.

She’s missing just one qualification: a bachelor’s degree. 

Now, a program that aims to combat rural teacher shortages by upskilling qualified school staff is helping her actualize her dreams — at a bargain price. Rivers pays $75 per month and has only three more semesters left before she graduates and can get her teaching certification.

“Who can beat a BA for $1,800?” said the veteran educator. “That’s a no-brainer.”

Across large swaths of Arkansas, the problem of persistent teacher shortages predated the pandemic, but has “become more apparent” over the last few years, said Karli Saracini, the state’s assistant commissioner of educator effectiveness. In many districts, especially in the southeast Delta region, over 10% of teaching roles are now held by unlicensed educators, according to state data. 

Joe Ross, president of California-based Reach University, believes the solution lies close at hand. Nationwide, over a million paraprofessionals work side-by-side with lead teachers, he points out, and many have the know-how to step into greater responsibility. His school’s model, he said, helps eliminate financial and geographic barriers for those educators so they can gain the credentials necessary to lead a classroom.

“The degree is fully job-embedded from the very first day to the very last day,” Ross explained, meaning candidates continue earning a salary in their existing jobs all the way through the program. Thanks to Pell grants and funding the school receives as an apprenticeship provider, no student pays more than $900 per year, he said, and the program is free for participating districts.

To be eligible, candidates must be employed in a partner school system. They complete half of their degree through on-the-job work, including workplace-based assignments, such as observing and reflecting on the techniques of a veteran teacher, and practicum-style courses that award credit directly for their efforts in the classroom. The other half of the degree comes through online seminars held after work hours and on weekends designed to help the future teachers apply theory to what they’re learning on the ground.

Reach University already serves over 250 learners in Arkansas and roughly 1,000 nationwide.  Now, the program is poised to grow even further. In September, the U.S. Department of Education granted Reach University more than to place some 650 fully certified teachers into high-needs Arkansas classrooms over the next five years. And in late September, Reach received another from the education department to grow its teacher training efforts in Louisiana and is a partner in a separate in that state received by Tulane University. Outside Arkansas and Louisiana, Reach also serves educators in Alabama and California.

In Arkansas, at least . In 2020-21, more than in the state did not employ a single Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian teacher of record, despite some 40% of students holding those racial identities.

“It can change the teacher force by truly opening doors that are currently shut for way too many people,” said David Donaldson, managing partner for the National Center for Grow Your Own educator pipeline programs. There’s recently been a “massive increase” in school officials’ interest in such programs nationwide, he said. But Reach, founded in 2006, is one of the organizations with the most effective and accessible models, he believes.

“To see them spread across the country, they’re really doing good work.”

Some 90% of Reach graduates in Arkansas will be re-hired in the same district after they complete the program, according to the . It’s a boon in the eyes of Carolyn Theard-Griggs, dean of the National College of Education at Chicago-based National Louis University.

“People have a tendency to stay in schools longer if they’re near their home base,” she observed. 

The expansion is much needed, said Saracini, of the Arkansas state education department. Too many otherwise-qualified staff get boxed into lower-paying positions like classroom aides because they can’t afford to go back and study for a degree.

“The people who would make some of our best teachers are some of those paraprofessionals, but they just can’t break that employment and lose those benefits,” she explained. When they do land full-time teaching gigs, however, their pay can more than double.

Furthermore, the training model, Ross argues, mints educators with stronger teaching skills than traditional programs that often graduate and certify candidates after just a semester of student teaching. Reach educators have at least two years working in the classroom under their belts by the time they complete their degrees.

“That will create better teachers,” said the university president. “It will create a rank of graduates who are respected for having this degree.”

Rivers, who will graduate at the end of 2023, agrees.

“I have all this experience. I feel like I’ll be a seasoned teacher,” she said. Her district outside Little Rock, she added, has a job awaiting her when she becomes licensed.

“I want to be a cool history teacher. I want to make it fun for the kids. … I want to dress up, do the props.” 

For now, on her paraprofessional salary, Rivers has to deliver UberEats and Grubhub in the evenings to make ends meet. On nights her delivery work and course schedule overlap, she sometimes uses a phone stand in her car to join class.

“I like the leeway where I can tune in on my phone,” she said. “It’s so accessible.”

Many of the Arkansas school systems facing the most dire need for licensed teachers, Saracini explained, are also areas where higher education is the least accessible, with no nearby options for four-year degrees. Reach fills in the gap, expanding “in some of our most-needed areas,” she said, by offering a model where candidates can build on their community college credits without needing to commute.

Years ago, Rivers was able to complete her associate’s degree while working pre-K, but lacks her bachelor’s. She had previously worked toward a BA, but was forced to stop when her financial aid dried up. 

When she found out about Reach, it was her “saving grace,” she said. “It’s affordable, it’s flexible and the professors are good.”

Now, she talks about the program to anyone who will listen.

“I tell a lot of people about it,” she said. “A lot of people have been in the school system a long time and a lot of people are just starting. So, if you’re going to be there, why not further your education?”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Stand Together Trust provide financial support to Reach University and ����Ӱ��.

Coming out of COVID-19 isolation, I looked forward to making up for many missed social opportunities with friends. I joined the track team at my new school and did well in my events. I made good friends with some of my teammates and other students on campus, which can be challenging for me as a person with autism. When my mom was looking for a church for us to attend, my track coach shared information about his church, and we began attending on Sundays; I also went to a Wednesday church youth group when my study schedule allowed it. Thanks to social media, I could keep in contact with friends from my former school, and I even have a girlfriend who attended my old school.

But despite it being a terrific year for me overall, I feel profound disappointment in the circumstances that led me to South Torrance. Several racially charged events occurred during my middle school years, such as the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery murders and trials. As a result, there were many discussions about race and safety in white communities. In the climate at that time, I expected to be safest with the same people who protested, saying, “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Killing Our Sons.” I thought the people who said my life matters would believe that my education also matters. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the community, accountability, collaboration and support that was talked about at those 8th grade recruitment meetings during my first semester in a school attended mostly by students of color and run mostly by educators of color.

I found myself in a situation where some teachers were not motivated to teach and help their students succeed, some were bullied by their own students and didn’t know how to discipline the class and some repeated the same lessons and shared the answers before they gave tests and quizzes (and some kids still failed!). When my mom, herself an administrator who has been in education for over 20 years, tried to intervene, it was difficult to impossible to get some teachers to respond or administrators or other top education officials to address the problem. Eventually, she started looking for a new home in a different school district and we moved in December.

South High is a predominantly white and Asian ethnic high school where most of the teaching staff is also primarily white and Asian. They treat their students as I expected a school should, providing counselors, tutoring and “Spartan Seminar.” 

Spartan Seminar is a 25-minute session every Wednesday and Thursday, where students sign up for specific classes to catch up on work, get tutoring from the teacher or study for an upcoming test/quiz with that teacher. If you are not doing well in a class or on an assignment, you are expected to attend Spartan Seminar for that class. 

My Spanish teacher has great classroom control. First, he provides us with study guides (not answers!) for upcoming quizzes. He reviews the homework to ensure we are updated on the current unit’s information. Finally, whenever someone does act up, he raises his voice and tells them to stop, which works, and we immediately return to learning.

My algebra teacher at South High was terrific. She showed the class how to work on new equations, like factoring and polynomials. She has a pleasant personality, making learning enjoyable for everyone in her classroom. She didn’t wait for my mom to email or call her; she often emailed my mom if she had information she thought would help me. My friends all agreed that she is a good teacher, which is unusual for a math class, and some even consider her their favorite teacher. 

I finished the semester at South High with 4 As, 2 Bs, and a C. It took much work, and I sometimes spent as many as six hours a night doing homework to learn the subject. I credit my school team and my mom because they challenged me to communicate with them about when I needed help and they created a schedule to review my work and grades to ensure I was on the right track. I was motivated to work harder at South High because I knew it was expected of me. I did not mind staying at my desk for hours and sometimes sacrificing my sleep to get the grades I knew I could if I tried hard. 

Although this was a great school year, I am disappointed that I had to leave a community I loved to find it. I also don’t want to suggest that my old school was not a good school because it was attended and run predominantly by people of color. I was raised by a Black educator, who cared so much about her students that we still go to their weddings, graduations, sporting and social events years after they were in her class.

If I could go back and talk to the staff at my former school, I would want them to know that:

I want to be valued as someone who takes their work seriously.

I want teachers who take their jobs seriously and hold me accountable. 

I want to look up to my teachers, like what I see, and be like them.

I want them to care enough to know who I am because my life matters to them, for them to see my potential and help me reach my goals.

My African-American peers and I want to be educated by teachers who look like us.

We want to hear their stories. We want to hear how they made it to college. If they go, maybe we can go, too. Tell us about African-American fraternities and sororities, dorms and the fun times they had so we know that college isn’t just boring hard work. We want to hear about their mistakes, so we learn from them. 

We want to know about the problems they faced in predominantly white spaces and how they overcame them so that when we have those experiences, we can overcome them, too. 

We want to talk to them about our experiences as African-American students and know that they understand. We sometimes do not want to “air our family business” to people who may not understand or who already stereotype us because we are African American. They don’t understand our community, language, idioms, values or history. They don’t understand us, no matter how well intentioned or woke they are. 

The teachers are the ones who told us they would do all these things for us and it hurts the most to think they are aware of our unmet expectations. I want them to know that, too.

My goal is not to criticize but to remind them that their students need them. We want them to care about us. Some of their students will only care when they do. We are waiting for them.

However, , even though Black children make up at least 16% of the student population. 

For my school district in Middletown City, Ohio, these statistics are motivation to continually challenge ourselves to reimagine strategies to recruit and retain teachers of color. 

While I was fortunate to have several champions throughout my K-12 experience, I didn’t have a single Black teacher until high school Algebra II. My first and only teacher of color set high standards with the expectation I would rise to meet them. Those high expectations are part of the fabric of who I am today — modeling what I, in turn, expect of others. She also inspired my career path: I started as a middle school math teacher and now serve as superintendent of Middletown City School District.

Growing up, no one told me there was a need for Black males in education. But diversifying the field must begin by verbalizing to Black and brown children that they are needed and valued, and that teaching is a meaningful profession where they can truly make a difference. 

Several years ago, my district set out to diversify our staff, but without defining a successful outcome. When we achieved a 5% increase in overall staff diversity, we happily patted ourselves on the back. But when we analyzed what this really meant, we realized we didn’t know how or whether the culture had changed. We needed to define our envisioned success.   

We began reimagining our hiring practices by examining effective national models and finding ways to emulate them. Visiting other districts, we saw how the Toronto District School Board and South Carolina’s Richland School District Two developed successful partnerships with organizations led by former teachers of color. This inspired a partnership with , a mentoring program targeting Black male college freshmen who are undecided on a major.

Through this program, our district is providing an opportunity for students to discover an interest in serving youth through education. We connect them with Black males who are already teachers and mentor them in hopes the students will discover an interest in serving youth and pursue careers in education. Ultimately, our goal is to hire 25 Black male classroom teachers — well-qualified, urban-minded young men with a passion for education and service to others — by 2027.

But even if we meet that mark, we know effective recruitment solves only half the problem – we must also develop supporting retention strategies to truly change the district’s culture. To gain insights on how to effectively retain teachers of color, we connected with Digital Promise’s , to engage our own teachers of color to create solutions for our particular district. A key takeaway was that teachers of color need to feel empowered to share thoughts and ideas, and maintain continuous involvement in the decision-making process. We made sure that educators who’d be most impacted by this program — our Black male classroom teachers — had a seat at the table. Their voices were instrumental in developing and implementing the teacher retention program.  

It was important for our district to create a culture where Black teachers view themselves as instructional specialists, content experts, and sources of inspiration for our kids, as well as support each other as family. Knowing that we needed all staff members to work toward this common goal, the first step didn’t call for action—we simply wanted staff to become aware of their own individual biases, privileges, and perspectives. We then slowly transitioned to action by offering every single staff member a series of micro-credentials based on diversity, equity and inclusion. Our hope is that this type of professional learning will eventually be hard-wired into the cultural beliefs of our school system and become a part of our overarching strategic vision.  

While we’ve still got a long way to go, we are already experiencing positive outcomes from our initial efforts to change our hiring practices to attract more urban-minded educators and diversify our staff. When we first began tracking our results in 2017, we saw a 5% increase in children participating in extracurricular activities over three consecutive years. More recently, a survey of students in third through 12th grade revealed that 96% said they feel safe when they come to school. With that, we’ve found that students feel more comfortable expressing themselves, and we’re getting better at listening. For instance, students expressed interest in a wider variety of different types of opportunities. In response, one elementary school now offers 15 dynamic after-school programs that change quarterly based on student feedback. 

By developing a positive connection to adults and fostering a sense of belonging, which leads to the confidence to speak up, we believe our children will feel more emotionally safe while they’re at school. When teachers include cultural perspectives in the classroom, students experience greater academic and social-emotional success, ultimately graduating with important skill sets and hopefully eager to get back into education.

Ultimately, the key to success is more school districts nationwide working together to prioritize recruitment and retention of Black teachers. If we can all continue to inspire each other, we can keep creating and sharing new, successful frameworks and models to get more Black teachers into our classrooms.  

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides funding for Digital Promise’s Teacher of Color Design Studios and ����Ӱ��.

Fast forward to now, and that glimmer of hope has faded as teachers are now under a microscope with attacks on what they can teach or and are having to put their own health on the line to continue teaching.

It should come as no surprise, then, that there is a crisis happening in our nation’s classrooms as more teachers are opting for retirement, resignation or a career change instead of remaining in the profession. 

Underlying this crisis is one that has also existed for decades, and less people are talking about: We are losing an at a time when the diversity of our students continues to grow. The real measure of whether or not we are able to build back our education system from this pandemic will lie in whether or not we are able to recruit and retain more Black, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander and indigenous educators in the years to come.

Nationally, students of color now make up of the K-12 student population and that number is only expected to grow. However, when you look at our educator workforce, Hispanic teachers only make up 9.3 percent of all teachers in our public schools while 79 percent are white. This is concerning because we know the pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color, so when you read headlines about the Great Resignation impacting teachers, one must wonder: How many more teachers of color will we lose?

We should all be concerned about the lack of diversity in our teaching workforce because the research is clear: Black, Latino, and Asian American Pacific Islander students perform better when they have teachers who understand, share and validate their identities and culture. Exposure to teachers of color short- and medium-term outcomes among elementary school students of color, including less frequent disciplinary actions, lower dropout rates, and higher rates of high school graduation. Teacher diversity also leads to positive increases in reading and math scores. 

As someone who grew up in Venezuela, and moved into the U.S school system as a teenager with Spanish as my primary language, I understand the importance of having a teacher who looks, and sounds, like you do. Unfortunately, many Black and Latino students will attend schools where they never have a teacher who shares their experience since attend a school without a single same-race teacher.

In my case, my family first immigrated to Paramus, New Jersey and a year and half later to the Orlando, Florida area. I finished middle and high school in Florida and didn’t have a single Latino teacher. I did, however, have a white teacher suggest I should go back where I came from and another tell my parents I had the vocabulary of a flea market employee. Those vivid memories — the lack of cultural competence, empathy and compassion — are something that still fuels my dedication to helping underrepresented students see themselves in their leaders and educators. I didn’t need every teacher to have been an immigrant or even Latino themselves, but I would have definitely benefited from having a couple along the way to affirm my identity and journey as valid, worthy ones, deserving of equitable access.

For the educator workforce to mirror the rich diversity of our student population, the U.S would need to add of color to our nation’s schools by 2030. To do this, we need to reimagine how we identify, recruit and retain teachers in general.

Many talented and aspiring teachers will go through rigorous teacher preparation programs, but never fully enter the profession because of outdated state licensure exams which put teachers of color at a disadvantage. We must be looking at new on-ramps to the teaching profession, such as teacher residency programs and alternative certification programs and at different measures for determining who is ready to enter the classroom. 

Additionally, like most professions, preparation can come with a high price tag especially for aspiring teachers that come from low-income families. School districts, city and state elected officials along with civic leaders, such as local credit unions, and employers across the country should find creative ways to help make teaching a pathway to the middle class. This should include helping offset the costs of teacher preparation programs through stipends and debt forgiveness for new teachers along with early-career homeownership programs, career coaching and professional development plans that span 10 years. Had these things been available to me as a young educator, the odds that I would have stayed in the classroom would have been significantly improved.

Although I was becoming a more effective teacher, found great joy and meaning in the connections with children and families, I left the classroom altogether to pursue higher education because the prospects of entering the middle class in Silicon Valley were grim. I lived with five other people, had to find a way to contribute to my family back in Florida, and didn’t see a clear pathway through the classroom to entrench my family in the American dream. I left and found my way to education administration and while I love my work, I think I could have been a career teacher had the right conditions been available to me.

Every school district in America should also have a justice, diversity, equity and inclusion plan with concrete strategies on how they plan to diversify their educator workforce; and more specifically, how they intend to identify, hire and retain more teachers of color — with a specific focus on Latino teachers in communities with growing or predominant Latino student populations. These strong initiatives lead to a sense of belonging that can only be achieved when staffing imperatives are implemented consistently over time and it’s that sense of belonging that provides the psychological safety for diverse educators to see themselves thriving professionally in spaces not historically built for them. Districts should also set up advisory committees, made up of teachers of color, who can provide concrete feedback to school leaders on the challenges they face within their local schools.

Finally, school districts must do more to retain the few teachers of color that are already in the profession. Most Latino educators we work with tell us the same things: we are overlooked for promotion, we don’t get professional development opportunities, our work is not valued in the same way as that of others. It’s worth repeating: Teaching should be a path to the middle class. Giving teachers opportunities to grow, assume leadership roles, and get paid a fair wage are the foundational steps to signaling we’re committed to this ideal.

We have been working with legislators in Massachusetts, for example, to create a national model for other states to follow when it comes to totally overhauling the educator pipeline. Our looks at all the leakages along the pipeline that impact educators of color, and offers solutions around preparation, hiring, recruitment and retention. It’s definitely a starting point for others who care about the current crisis we find ourselves in. 

As we navigate the third year of the pandemic, we cannot stand to lose more educators of color. This is the time for every state and every school district to prioritize educator diversity, because the future of teaching — and the future of our students — depends on it.

When her husband recently retired after 22 years, Andujar began to rethink her own career path and recalled her years volunteering in her children’s schools. She became an educational assistant in a Spanish dual-immersion program in the Clarksville-Montgomery schools, northwest of Nashville.

“I wasn’t planning to become a teacher, but I noticed how a teacher could transform a student’s life,” she said.

Now she’s part of an effort to transform educator preparation with the nation’s first apprenticeship in teaching approved by the U.S. Department of Labor. A partnership between the school district and Austin-Peay State University, the is a “grow-your-own” model in which districts recruit candidates from within their communities and give them extensive on-the-job experience before they take over their own classrooms. With the nation’s teachers far less racially diverse than the public school students they instruct, many consider the approach an effective way to recruit more Black and Hispanic educators. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted grow-your-own programs in a visit to Tennessee State University last week. He was instrumental in getting Labor Secretary Martin Walsh’s support for the apprenticeship, according to Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn.

He visited Tennessee State University to learn more about its own with Metro Nashville Public Schools and told that it’s important to “make sure that teachers aren’t working three jobs to make ends meet.”

With the nation currently fixed on staffing shortages and the persistent challenges of hard-to-fill positions, efforts to strengthen the teacher “pipeline” are among policymakers. Over 20 years ago, a major study of a grow-your-own program for paraprofessionals showed that participants were more likely than new teachers to still be teaching after three years. But the model lacks long-term evidence of effectiveness. Experts say the federal government’s support — and potential funding — should help spread the concept.

“Let’s get rid of this idea of a first-year teacher,” Schwinn told ����Ӱ�� last month when she announced the new Teacher Occupation Apprenticeship. 

By the time candidates finish the three-year program, she said they’ll not only have a bachelor’s degree and teacher certification but also experience working under the supervision of a master educator. While the concept isn’t new, funding for such programs has been inconsistent, according to a from New America, a center-left think tank. The American Rescue Plan offers a new source of support for the model, but that too will run out, Schwinn said.

Access to state and federal funding for apprenticeships, however “is a game changer,” Schwinn said. “It is that permanent, recurring source of funding.”

Putting ‘dreams on hold’

The awarded more than $130 million in grants to 15 states last year for apprenticeships to meet workforce needs across multiple industries. Becoming a with the labor department — which requires programs to meet specific quality standards — puts Tennessee’s program in position to receive funding that would cover both pay and the cost of education for participants, removing a barrier that often keeps lower-income and non-white candidates from pursuing teaching. 

For now, the state is using $20 million in federal relief funds to support 65 grow-your-own programs across the state, including the one in Clarksville-Montgomery, where Scottie Bonecutter is working in a first-grade classroom while earning a degree and certification in special education. 

She grew up in Clarksville, graduated from the district in 2006 and was doing the “whole traditional college thing” she said. Just as she began taking core courses to become a teacher, she got pregnant and had her first son.

“I ended up putting my dreams on hold,” she said. 

She became an educational assistant in the district in 2018. By the time she applied for the residency program last year, she felt more equipped to take advantage of her mentors’ expertise.

“Now that I’m an adult, I’m not scared to raise my hand and say, ‘I have a struggle with this,’” she said, adding that the supervising teachers “are willing to literally walk us through every single step of every single decision they make. They are willing to explain every single standard that we use in class.”

Sean Impeartice, the district’s chief academic officer, said sending candidates to college without the support to balance work, education and family life responsibilities is “educational malpractice.” He hires staff members to work as “facilitators,” who Bonecutter said, provide “emotional support, if you have a lot going on at home, at school or in any aspect of life.”

‘Improving practice’

But it’s a challenging time to become a teacher. Entering the field during the pandemic has been a “baptism by fire,” said Impeartice.

Because of staff shortages, some residents have already led classes on their own. Learning to teach for the first time in a remote arrangement was an additional hurdle. Andujar spent much of her first year in the program teaching Spanish grammar remotely.

“I highly dislike Zoom,” she said. “I’m not a techie person.”

Growing efforts among conservative lawmakers to restrict curriculum also feel out of “touch with the realities of being a teacher,” said Amaya Garcia, the deputy director of New America’s Pre-K to 12 program. 

That’s why incentives, such as full tuition and mentoring support, are important for addressing teacher shortages, she said, adding that recruiting paraprofessionals, like Andujar and Bonecutter, is a “logical and sound investment” for policymakers because many already have some college credit, classroom experience and often hail from the communities they’re serving. 

Apprenticeships generally receive . Governors of both parties have highlighted the model during this year.

But researchers don’t know enough about whether participants in grow-your-own programs stay in teaching or improve student learning, Garcia said. In 2001, the Wallace Foundation its $50 million Pathways to Teaching Careers program for paraprofessionals and other non-certified staff and found that 81 percent of participants remained in teaching for at least three years after completing the program, compared to 71 percent for new teachers in general.

There’s even less data on whether students in high school pathway programs ultimately enter and stay in teaching, even though such programs are growing in popularity.

Just last week, the Chicago Public Schools announced that it wants to expand the number of graduates it hires through its program from about 140 annually to over 500. 

One program that Garcia considers “” is the two-year Bilingual Teacher Fellow program in the Highline Public Schools, near Seattle — a partnership that began in 2016 with Western Washington University to address a specific need for bilingual teachers.

Sandra Ruiz Kim, formerly a manager in a dental office, was among the first to finish the program in 2018. Now a sixth-grade Spanish teacher at Glacier Middle School, she noticed a difference between those who completed the fellowship and those without such experience. 

“We were able — even as first-year teachers — to have meaningful conversations about improving practice,” she said, adding that the experience also gave her access to a network of colleagues, “which can be vital for career progression in an industry that often depends on professional relationships and word-of-mouth reputation.”

A recent showed that “homegrown” teachers — those who teach in the districts where they graduated — contribute to small improvements in student performance in English language arts.

That confirms why recruiting teachers from the community can be “an impactful strategy,” Garcia said, adding, “We’re going to be getting more proof points because we’re going to have more districts like Highline that have been doing this for several years.”

Disruptions associated with virtual learning impacted over 600 million students worldwide, according to the report, while nearly 470 million children could not be reached by digital programs at all. The learning loss associated with global school closures appears “,” said Robert Jenkins, UNICEF chief of education.

In the United States, was seen in steep declines in the rates of students performing proficiently in math and English, including in states like Texas, California, Ohio, and North Carolina, as well as widespread drops in statewide graduation rates. Recent by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press specifically points to falling graduation rates in more than 20 states as an indicator that “the coronavirus may have ended nearly two decades of nationwide progress toward getting more students diplomas.”

Looking beyond global learning loss and America’s waning graduation rates, here are nine other updates from across the country about how states and school systems are confronting the challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants — and working to preserve student progress amid the pandemic:

1NEW YORK – NYC Schools Show Broad Declines in Enrollment Amid Pandemic

According to New York state data, Chalkbeat reports that about this year, with nearly 23% losing 10% or more of their students.��Black and white students in grades K-12 saw the largest drops of all racial groups this school year, declining about 7.5% each; Asian American student enrollment dropped 5% and for Latino students, the drop was 4.5%. School systems across the country have also experienced enrollment declines this year, including nearly 6% in Los Angeles and , the nation’s second and third largest districts.

2 TENNESSEE – Gov. Lee proposes $1 billion boost for Tennessee education

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced . “The priorities laid out in the State of the State, including an additional $1 billion investment in education, an increase in teacher pay, and dedication to expanding career and technical opportunities for students, if adhered to, will make the 2022 legislative session a success for Tennessee’s students and their futures,” Adam Lister, president and CEO of Tennesseans for Student Success, a middle Tennessee-based nonprofit organization, said in a statement.

3IOWA – Gov. Directs Federal K-12 Funding to Increase Teacher Diversity

Gov. Kim Reynolds announced relying on federal relief funds to support high school students who want to earn a paraeducator certificate and associate’s degree and assist paraeducators who want to earn a bachelor’s degree. Lawrence Bice, chair of the task force, told the Iowa State Board of Education that the program is expected to bring in a diverse group of applicants. show more teachers of color are entering the profession, but not enough to keep up with student demographics. Of Iowa’s new teachers in 2000, 2.8% were people of color; two decades later, the figure grew to 5.7%.

4 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA – Health Department Issues Test-to-Stay Guidance for Schools

The D.C. Health Department issued new guidance that recommends as an alternative to quarantining and to keep more students in school. So far, the school system has launched a test-to-stay pilot program only in selected pre-kindergarten classes, whose students are not yet eligible for a coronavirus vaccine. The guidance also updates isolation rules for school staff and students who develop COVID-19.

5 LOUISIANA – New Orleans Becomes First District to Set Student Vaccination Requirement

New Orleans is set to be , though experts are warning that state laws will likely allow parents to easily opt-out their children. District officials recognized the status of state laws, but stated their goals were to eventually work with every student and family to either get vaccinated or obtain a proper waiver.

6 MICHIGAN – Public Poll Shows Priorities for COVID Relief Funding

A survey of hundreds of educators, parents, and community members in Michigan showed strong support for , which both rated among the top of a list of priorities. Despite widespread support for the priorities, the survey did show some differences in focus between parents and non-parents, as well as between Democrats and Republicans.

7 KANSAS – Lawmakers Resist Ending Limitations on Virtual Learning

Kansas lawmakers are standing behind a current state law , forcing districts to close schools instead when a COVID surge necessitates. “I’m almost glad that we passed this because now we can’t blame them for being virtual, even though they don’t have the choice. If they did, they would be blamed,” Kansas Senate Minority Whip Sen. Pat Pettey, D-Kansas City, explained.

8 ILLINOIS – Gov. Ptritzker Navigates Paid Leave, Vaccination Deal for School Staff

Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a new statewide compromise: public school and higher education employees across Illinois — as long as they’re fully vaccinated. “Vaccines are a vital tool in preventing the deadly effects of COVID-19, and those who take the steps to be fully vaccinated against this virus are doing their part to keep everyone safe,” Pritzker said in a statement. The Chicago Teachers Union lauded the agreement Monday, saying Pritzker “clearly understands the value of cooperating with workers, and we hope (Chicago Public Schools) follows his lead.”

9 ARIZONA – State Sues Federal Government Over Funding, Mask Mandates

Arizona sued the Biden administration claiming that the Treasury Department exceeded its legal authority by . This is in response to the Treasury Department threatening to rescind some of the $2.1 billion Arizona received because the state used the funds to establish two programs the federal government said undermine the use of masks in schools. “Treasury believes the rule is correct and allowed by the statute and Constitution,” said Dayanara Ramirez, a Treasury spokesperson.

This update on pandemic recovery in education collects and shares news updates from the district, state, and national levels as all stakeholders continue to work on developing safe, innovative plans to resume schooling and address learning loss. It’s an offshoot of the Collaborative for Student Success’ QuickSheet newsletter, which you can .��

Meet Johnnie Moultrie, a second grade teacher at in . In 2019-20, the school 548 students, including 171 Black and 303 Hispanic students.

Moultrie found his way to this classroom through the district’s .

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“Track me,” says Moultrie to the class.

“Class, class,” he says.

“Yes, yes,” they reply in unison.

“Silent math,” he instructs.

“Shhh,” they all whisper collectively before settling in for the lesson.

To bring the class out of silent mode, Moultrie says to the students, “Go ahead and stand on your chairs. Are you ready to rock and roll?”

Welcome to Mr. Moultrie’s class.

For Moultrie, it’s all about the adventure of learning. Hear about his journey into the classroom.

“Over the past two decades, the K-12 student population has become much more racially diverse, but that same trend in diversity is not reflected in teachers and school leaders,” says Dr. Javaid Siddiqi, president and CEO of the .

Local programs like the in Charlotte or are addressing the issue one district at a time while they wait for systemwide policy change to take hold at the state and national level.

What’s happening statewide in North Carolina

“We need desperately more diverse public school teachers,” said Gov. Roy Cooper last week at a convening of leaders from the state’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

“Many of you participated in the task force I created — the DRIVE task force — which works to get more diversity among our public educators because the studies are pretty stark. Not only do minority students do better when their teachers are more diverse, but all students do better when their teachers are more diverse,” said the governor.

DRIVE stands for “Developing a Representative & Inclusive Vision for Education.” The task force was created by in December 2019. are the appointees.

The DRIVE task force, supported by the team at the Hunt Institute, is working now to .

Among the 10 recommendations in the , DRIVE the following:

• Developing scholarships, loan forgiveness, and tuition reimbursement programs for educators of color;
• Providing sustainable investments in educator preparation programs at North Carolina’s Historically Minority Serving Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities; and
• Releasing an annual statewide report on educator diversity.

, key stakeholders and policymakers will now begin the important work of building a more diverse educator workforce.

What’s happening nationally

Nationally, a coalition of eight organizations, including the Hunt Institute, are working to increase the number of teachers of color by 1 million and school leaders of color by 30,000 by 2030. is the website to learn more.

“DRIVE was our impetus for us being a part of this coalition,” says Daniella Doyle, director of strategic initiatives with the Hunt Institute. “How can we take the work we did in North Carolina and do it nationally?”

The (NABSE) held its 49th annual conference — the largest convening of Black educators — last week. There, the $9 million in grants to organizations working to train and support teachers and education leaders of color, including $1.25 million for the .

“We can — and must — do more to ensure our classrooms reflect the world around us,” said Sandra Liu Huang, head of education for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The coalition includes, , , , , , and the .

Doyle notes that the data indicate ripple effects. More educators of color lead to higher graduation rates, more postsecondary degrees and credentials, better outcomes in terms of disciplines, and higher placement rates in advanced placement (AP) courses.

At the local, state, and national level, the team at the Hunt Institute says the goal of the work is to disrupt inequity in our schools once and for all.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

How bad is it? According to a more than 75% of NJ districts have teaching and professional staffs that are at least 85 percent white and 50 school districts don’t employ a single African-American, Hispanic, Asian or other minority staff member — this in a state where 56% of students aren’t white. When districts are challenged on the lack of teachers of color, they often say “we can’t find them.” Senator Shirley Turner says in response, “they are there. You just have to go look for them.”

Recently I interviewed Shareefah Mason of and Sharif El-Mekki of the (CBED), who believe that schools can only recruit and retain Black teachers — essential role models for students of all colors — if educational leaders create identity-affirming school cultures. Yet few school districts, in New Jersey and elsewhere, accomplish this task. Mason and El-Mekki’s groups just collaborated on a report  called, “.” This report looks at what responsive school conditions look like and what school leaders can do to create those conditions, especially for Black teachers so they accept teaching positions and remain in those schools. The report includes concrete recommendations for teachers, school leaders and state policymakers. It follows an earlier report from Teach Plus and Education Trust called, “”

Here is a lightly edited transcription of our discussion.

Everyone talks about the importance of diversifying the teacher pipeline, but we don’t seem to be making much progress. What needs to happen?

Mason: You’re right — we’re not making much progress at all. By 2030, the majority of working-class America will be people of color. America is becoming less white, yet Black teachers make up only 7% of K-12 educators. And our turnover rate is much higher, even as more and more studies validate the importance of students seeing teachers who look like them, both for their academic outcomes as well as their futures after they graduate from high school. It matters for white students too — their performance increases when they have teachers who are more diverse.

So what are Teach Plus, Education Trust, and CBED doing about this?

El-Mekki: We are going into districts and schools to work with them on creating the sort of culture that Black teachers, Asian teachers, Native American teachers, Hispanic teachers say they need. It starts with having unapologetic dialogues and with the leadership being honest with themselves, with their constituents, both inside and outside of school. It starts with goal-setting, putting resources behind those goals, and asking the question — over and over again — if those goals remain aligned with culturally affirming ecosystems.

So we go in and provide professional development and resources and accountability so that school leaders and teachers are empowered to be bold, courageous and honest. Otherwise, it’s just a roller-coaster.

Mason: Yes, exactly. Representation matters! We all know that children need to have teachers in the school who look like them. If a Black child has even one Black teacher they’re 13% more likely to enroll in college. If a Black student has two Black teachers they’re 32% more likely, for a crucial break in the school-to-prison pipeline. But if schools are going to be successful recruiting and retaining Black teachers, they must embrace extensive transformations so their environment helps Black teachers thrive, honors their vernacular, gives them everything they need — including affinity groups where they can discuss the unique challenges they face, encourage one another, and build skills together. It’s just not enough to have pretty words on pretty websites about equity and inclusion.

The whole point is to go in and ask the hard questions about what is working and what isn’t working. We have the ideas, the resources, the recommendations, but we need to get these foundational concepts embedded throughout the system to take away the fear from school leaders and school teachers and work with them to create a welcoming culture.

What are they afraid of?

El-Mekki: For some, they’re afraid of reprisals from the rest of the community. What does it mean to stand up and say, “this policy is racist”? What if the human resources department isn’t responsive to reports about racism? What do Black educators do in these cases where they’re abandoned? If I’m a Black teacher who is experiencing macroaggressions from colleagues, what do I do if this is triggering not only my own experiences but those of my students too? What if the recruitment team isn’t culturally responsive and puts all the weight of retention on one teacher? What if the Black teacher has to shrink in white supremacist spaces? There are plenty of reasons to be afraid.

It sounds like this kind of transformation to a culturally affirming environment isn’t something that happens overnight.

Mason: Oh no, it’s a year-long or two-year process. It’s all about mindset, how people look at people of color and recognize their own biases. There is a current cultural incompetence that comes with a tendency to undermine relationships and this affects teacher quality and skill levels. Remember, this is all about student outcomes.

El-Mekki: Look, this goes back over a hundred years ago to Caroline LeCount, who was a teacher and principal in Philadelphia when schools were forced to desegregate with Brown v. Board of Education and this country lost 80,000 Black teachers. She “colored children .” That was true then and it’s true now, yet our efforts lack intentionality. There are all these folks talking the good talk about recruitment, but not serious about retention. They recognize the importance of the data but — let’s be honest — if Black teachers walk through the front door, why wouldn’t they leave through the back door as quickly as possible? This will continue to happen when we have the invisible tax of a hostile and racially insensitive work environment.

So with this marriage of Teach Plus and CBED, how can you help schools and districts and campuses create these culturally affirming environments and eliminate those hostile environments?

Mason: We know through all the focus groups and the research — and just talking to Black teachers — that until schools are ready to hear, respect, value and embrace Black colleagues all efforts will fall short. We all need to engage in difficult conversations about race. If these conversations only happen during Black History Month, then you’re not trying hard enough and your efforts are superficial. 

We are here to provide resources so that school leaders know their audience and Black teachers know that they deserve authentic affirming spaces in their classrooms. We have the tools to make this happen to foster a true pipeline so students—and, really, in the end, this is about the students—are able to thrive in an environment that celebrates their authentic selves.

This interview ; a slightly different version appeared previously at .

The paper presented the findings of focus groups conducted during the spring and summer of 2020, compiling the perspectives of 105 Black teachers from across 12 states. Educators in the group had an average of 12 years of classroom experience, though some were newer to teaching and others were more veteran.

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The report offers key insights on how to build school environments that feel welcoming for Black educators, such as ensuring that curricula include the perspectives of historically underrepresented groups. The authors also recommend that leaders provide opportunities for teachers of color to participate in mentorship programs and focus groups to debrief their experiences, especially in schools with majority-white faculty, where Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian educators may be one of just a few colleagues who share their racial identity.

The findings come at a crucial time, as Black teachers are leaving the profession at than many other groups due to myriad issues including professional isolation and burnout. Currently, about 7 percent of all teachers nationwide are Black compared to 15 percent of all students.

Research underscores the academic and social benefits that teachers of color deliver for young people of all races, but . Many experts point to teacher diversification as a , yet nationwide, 79 percent of educators remain white compared to only 47 percent of students.��

“We know that students of color, particularly Black students, if they have a Black teacher, they’re more likely to succeed in school,” Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, told ����Ӱ��. But all too often, he noted, teachers of color are met with hostile work environments that leave them simultaneously overburdened and isolated — what he calls the “invisible tax” of being one of the few Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian educators at their school.

The report co-published by El-Mekki’s team and Teach Plus points out numerous systemic reasons for the current teacher diversity gap. The often-celebrated 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case, for example, integrated U.S. students but not educators — spurring . Many of them were than their white peers because teaching, albeit in segregated schools, was one of the few professions widely available to African Americans with advanced degrees during Jim Crow.��

Today, teacher preparation programs continue to feed of white educators into the field, thanks in part to certification exams that ​​have long been the target of concerns for racial bias.

“The challenges to [boosting teacher diversity] are deeply embedded and calcified in our public schools,” said El-Mekki, who previously worked as an educator and principal in Philadelphia, in a . “Undoing them will require intentional and comprehensive effort by teachers, principals, district and state leaders.”

“Hiring people of color is not enough to create culturally affirming schools,” added Kyle Epps, a Philadelphia teacher cited in the report. “Schools need to have systems, programs, and curriculum in place whose main goals are to foster and celebrate people of color.”

Some first steps toward implementing such measures may be holding meetings and launching surveys through which parents can share their voices, teachers suggest.

“It is imperative that leaders cultivate a culture where families and communities have a platform to advocate for their kids and are given opportunities to play a role in decisions that impact learning and student success,” said Mississippi teacher leader Nicole Moore, who was also featured in the paper.

The group of Black educators who spoke to Teach Plus and the Center for Black Educator Development identified key recommendations for school leaders looking to foster more welcoming environments for their teachers of color. The paper includes practical resources such as for teachers to help examine their own biases and tools to deepen curricular materials with that relate to students’ own lived experiences.

“[The report] addresses not only what an affirming school culture looks like, but also provides clear and concise action steps teachers, educational leaders, and policymakers should take to transform school culture for Black teachers — in service of their students,” said Travis J. Bristol, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a Teach Plus board member.

Similar action steps, however, have recently come under fire in classrooms and rowdy school board meetings across the country. As some schools have begun to acknowledge and discuss systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a nationwide backlash (El-Mekki calls it a “whitelash”) against the perceived propagation of critical race theory in education has put a target on activities like implicit bias trainings or books written by Black authors. In one Texas town, it even led teachers to wrap their own personal bookshelves in , as administrators cracked down on classroom collections.

That’s not stopping El-Mekki or the Center for Black Educator Development.

“This idea of policing … Black minds and Black intellectuals is nothing new,” he told ����Ӱ��. “Doing racial justice work takes courage and bravery.”

His organization will next month hold a conference to , who currently make up just 2 percent of all U.S. teachers.��

But dismantling racism in schools, he underscores, is everyone’s responsibility — white folks included.

“It’s part of being an educator,” said El-Mekki.

And lest the path toward improvement seems daunting, the report cites Arkansas educator Iesha Green, who reminds principals and officials that, for key guidance, they need look no further than their colleagues who show up to classrooms day after day.

“My advice for leaders who wish to create culturally affirming schools is to learn about the nuances of various cultures and then listen to and work collaboratively with the practitioners who know the students best—teachers,” she said.