“Please Hire More Teachers of Color”: Challenging the “Good Enough” in Teacher Diversity Efforts

ABSTRACT

Policies and programs intended to increase the racial diversity of the US teaching population have failed to make meaningful inroads in an overwhelmingly white profession despite extensive research demonstrating the need for more teachers of color. This article explores teacher diversity efforts in one non-urban district through a qualitative case study grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT). In particular, CRT tenets of interest convergence and the ubiquitous presence of racism in society clarify ways that incremental approaches actually served to reinforce the status quo. Implications call for a radical rethinking of teacher diversity efforts by insisting on a holistic approach to teacher diversity that challenges norms and commonsense practices.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editors and anonymous reviewers of Equity & Excellence in Education for thoughtful and incisive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term “teachers of color” is used here in parallel to publicly available data about teacher demographics in Cliffton, including the categories used on the New York State Education Department (NYSED) website. NYSED uses the term “teachers of color” to refer to teachers who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, or multiracial.

2. Cliffton, NY, and CSD are pseudonyms used to reflect the agreement of anonymity between the researcher and school district.

3. All names included in this article are pseudonyms used to protect the anonymity of individual participants. In this table, the ways in which participants identified themselves in response to the question “How would you describe your racial identity?” is recorded in the participants’ terminology. Some participants used “white,” and some used “Caucasian.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Burns Thomas

Anne Burns Thomas is a professor in the Foundations and Social Advocacy Department at SUNY Cortland and is the Coordinator of Cortland’s Urban Recruitment of Educators Scholarship and Program. Her research interests are teacher diversity in policy and practice in teacher education and district contexts.