The Challenges and Possibilities of Staffing Diverse Districts in a Midwestern State

• In Event: Lessons From an Encompassing Teacher Preparation/Diversification Project

Abstract

Examining the comprehensive annual data aggregated and made public by the state department of education, this paper describes the state’s current teaching force, recent trends changing it, and the current and recent teacher demographics of the project’s five partner districts. The points are to offer a ‘state of the state’ report on the state’s teacher population including (in a localized echo of Ingersoll et al. [2021]) how it is and is not changing. The project partner district’s more local profiles will then be compared to the state averages. This includes noting that one of the partner districts, which had been part of a state department of education intervention, recently lost almost a third of its teaching force at the end of the most recent academic year. The broadest point is to rationalize the design of the bigger project, explaining how these districts have struggled to fully staff themselves with skilled instructors and, relatedly, explaining why these districts are particularly appropriate as sites for high school-level, new teacher-recruitment YPAR projects, plus college scholarships and support for new teacher induction. The paper also notes Meier and Stewart’s (1991) long-established point that students of color often fare better in school district’s with more diverse teaching staffs, a point that has continuously been found to hold in more recent studies (e.g., Achinstein & Aguirre, 2008; Carver-Thomas, 2018; Villegas, et al., 2012). Ultimately the paper juxtaposes what could and should be vis-à-vis a teacher staffing pipeline and what currently prevails.

Author

• Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska - Lincoln