Low-income minority students benefit from having teachers who look like them, studies show. But qualified minority teachers are in short supply, leading some to advocate relaxing the qualifications. The problem is, that risks putting disadvantaged kids even further behind.
Only about 50% of American students in kindergarten through 12th grade are white;16% are black and 25% Hispanic. For teachers, the proportions are different: 80% are white; only 7% are black and 9% Hispanic.
As a recent front-page story in the New York Times highlighted, there’s evidence this mismatch is holding some students back. Black students have better outcomes when they have teachers of their own race, while white students experience no adverse consequences from having a nonwhite teacher.
One study found that low-income black children who have even just one black teacher between third and fifth grades are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to aspire to college. There’s also evidence that black teachers have higher expectations for black students than white teachers do. Although there’s little data on Hispanic students, some arguethey reap similar benefits from having Hispanic teachers.
So why not hire more black and Hispanic teachers, especially at schools that serve a lot of children from those groups? There’s a pipeline problem. While African-Americans comprise 13% of the adult American population, they’re only 6% of those with four-year college degrees. And although Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States, they’re half as likely to hold a college degree as non-Hispanic white adults.
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College degrees aren’t the only obstacle. Nearly all states also require that prospective teachers pass one or more certification exams, and blacks and Hispanics are more likely to fail than whites. On a series of tests called the Praxis—the test of choice for most states—black test-takers are about 40% less likely to pass than white ones, and Hispanics about 20% less likely.
In recent years, reformers have pushed for teacher certification and other requirements as a way of boosting the quality of the teacher workforce. But now that those measures are making it hard to bring diversity to that workforce, some are beginning to argue they have little to do with effectiveness in the classroom. Last year New York State dropped a literacy test, even though a federal judge had found it measured skills necessary for teaching. Education school deans argued the test was only exacerbating the shortage of teachers of color.
Clearly, tests don’t measure everything that makes a teacher successful. You can pass a test with flying colors and still prove unable to control a classroom or inspire students. But many tests do measure something that should be a threshold requirement for teachers: knowledge.
What kind of knowledge? The math on a Praxis test for elementary teachers may be a stumbling block. The test also covers a wide range of topics in social studies and science. Among the sample questions:
- What percentage of the seats in the United States House of Representatives are up for election every two years? (22%, 50%, 66%, 100%)
- Historically, India’s society has been organized into hierarchical groups known as … (tribes, castes, clans, denominations)
- Which of the following geological processes adds new rock to the surface of Earth? (volcanic activity, glacial activity, soil erosion, weathering)
Does a typical American elementary teacher need a command of these facts to perform her job? There’s no way of knowing. Most other developed countries have a national curriculum, specifying what topics a teacher at a given grade level will cover. In those countries, schools of education can ensure teachers understand those topics and how best to teach them. But in the United States, it’s often up to individual teachers to decide what topics to cover. And especially at the elementary level, it’s unlikely they’ll cover anysocial studies or science, because—partly thanks to testing—the curriculum has been narrowed to reading and math.
You might think that solves the problem: if teachers don’t need this kind of knowledge—and if the certification tests eliminate many minority candidates—why not just get rid of the tests? But that move could perpetuate the very inequities reformers are trying to address.
Black and Hispanic adults are more likely to fail certification tests for the same reason so many children in those groups score relatively low on standardized reading tests: the tests mainly assess general knowledge, because it’s hard to predict what topics they’ll cover. It’s an unfortunate fact that black and Hispanic students in the U.S. are less likely than whites to have well-educated and affluent parents—which makes them less likely to acquire knowledge of the world outside of school. If they don’t acquire knowledge inside school, beginning at an early age, they’re likely to fall far behind their peers from more educated families. And for decades, elementary schools have focused on trying to build illusory “comprehension skills” rather than knowledge.
Knowledge isn’t just important for test scores. Students with less general knowledge, and the vocabulary that goes with it, have a harder time understanding high school and college textbooks, newspapers, and instruction manuals. The less knowledge you have, the lower your chances of success in life.
So the last thing we should do is put teachers who lack knowledge in front of students who lack knowledge. The elementary curriculum may be narrow now, but if we want to break the cycle of multi-generational poverty we need to expand it to include history, science, and the arts—something that is already beginning to happen in some schools. And to do that, we need teachers who know about those subjects. True, we may not need a teacher who specifically knows that hierarchical groups in India are called castes rather than tribes. But a teacher who knows that is likely to know a lot of other things as well.
If we start providing all students with a broad, knowledge-building curriculum beginning in kindergarten, we should see higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and higher rates of passage on teacher certification tests for blacks and Hispanics—eventually. There’s also much more that teacher-training programs can do right now, not only to prepare their graduates to pass certification exams but to enable them to build their students’ knowledge and skills.
One survey of almost 900 undergraduate teacher-prep programs found that only 13% offer courses covering math topics that every elementary teacher is expected to teach. Only 5% require their students to take courses that cover the full range of content that should go into a rich elementary curriculum. Some allow prospective teachers to choose from a long list of courses that include topics unlikely to come up in the elementary grades—like film noir. At the same time, many programs require prospective teachers to spend time learning outdated pedagogical theories.
We don’t have to choose between bringing more teachers of color into the workforce and ensuring teachers have the knowledge they need to equip students for success. To improve outcomes for the most vulnerable students, we need to do both.
This Article was written by Natalie Wexler and the original Article can be found here https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2018/09/14/why-we-need-a-teacher-workforce-thats-both-diverse-and-knowledgeable/#247bae2c7f3c
