Most NC teachers are white. Here’s why the state wants to get more minority teachers.
There’s a new statewide push to attract more minority educators to diversify North Carolina’s overwhelmingly white teaching workforce.
Gov. Roy Cooper issued an executive order last week creating a task force to recommend strategies for recruiting more minority teachers. State leaders say teachers should look more like the students of color who are now the majority in North Carolina’s public schools.
Cooper cited research that shows how students of color often do better academically and are less likely to have disciplinary issues when they’re taught by minority teachers. He said a diverse teaching workforce is key to meeting the state’s constitutional requirement to provide all students with a “sound basic education.”
“Research is pretty dramatic that shows that all students benefit from a more diverse teacher workforce, but particularly students of color who are more successful in school when they have a diverse teaching population leading their classrooms,” Cooper said at an education summit last week. “Representation and inclusion leads to equality for all students.”
Cooper announced the new task force at the Developing a Representative and Inclusive Vision for Education (DRIVE) Summit held Dec. 10 at N.C. State University in Raleigh. The summit was hosted by Cooper’s office, the North Carolina Business Committee on Education and The Hunt Institute.
Diversity disparity between students and teachers
The summit comes at a time when students of color account for 52% of North Carolina’s public school enrollment. But 80% of the state’s public school teachers are white.
State Board of Education chairman Eric Davis said it’s “sound education strategy” to have a more diverse teaching workforce. He said it’s the responsibility of education leaders to change the system, even if they face criticism from some people.
“It’s important that each day we remind ourselves that the essence of education is when an adult connects with a child on an individual basis,” Davis said at the summit. “We know without debate that the probability of those connections and the effectiveness of those connections rises exponentially when more of our teachers share life experiences and cultural and racial and socioeconomic and language background with more of our students.
“Clearly our students benefit by getting a better education and by seeing role models that build their confidence and belief that they too can achieve.”
Students see themselves in teacher
Mireya Ruiz, a 5th-grade teacher at Lake Myra Elementary School in Wendell, said she can empathize with her students because she came to the U.S. as a first-grade student who didn’t know English. She told summit attendees that she tries to include cultural references in her lessons to help her students. A fifth of Lake Myra’s students are Hispanic.
“These students respond to me differently because I think they see themselves in me,” Ruiz said. “They respect my classroom management style because it resembles what they see at home or how their parents speak to them with firmness.”
White students account for a plurality of North Carolina public school students at 48%, followed by 25% for black students and 18% for Hispanic children.
Cooper said the state can help diversify the teaching workforce by adding historically black colleges and universities to the N.C. Teaching Fellows program. The program provides scholarships to people who want to teach in the fields of science, technology, engineering, math or special education.
No HBCUs are among the five University of North Carolina schools and private institutions in the program. Legislation expanding the program to include three more schools and directing the N..C. Teaching Fellows Commission to choose a “diverse selection” of schools is in limbo.
“Our historically black colleges and universities have to play a crucial role in this process,” Cooper said. “We need every one of those campuses having teaching fellows coming from these campuses.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 11:10 AM with the headline "Most NC teachers are white. Here’s why the state wants to get more minority teachers.."
