Minority Teacher Recruitment, Employment, and Retention: 1987 to 2013

• In Event: 16.039 - Teacher Shortages, Fact or Fiction? New Perspectives on Tracking Trends in the Teacher Workforce

Abstract

This presentation will draw from a larger report that examines national data on the recruitment, employment, and retention of minority teachers over the past quarter century.

The report addresses several questions: (1) What changes there have there been, if any, in the number of minority students and number of minority teachers, and how does this compare with non-minority students and teachers? (2) In what kinds of schools are minority teachers employed? (3) How does minority-teacher retention compare with that of non-minority teachers, and has it been going up or down? (4) What are the implications of the data for the prospects of increasing the number of minority teachers?

The data we analyzed for this study are from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), both administered by the National Center for Education Statistics in the US Department of Education. SASS is the largest and most-comprehensive data source available on teachers. There have been seven SASS cycles to date: 1987–88, 1990–91, 1993–94, 1999–00, 2003–04, 2007–08, and 2011–12. Our analyses use data from all 7 cycles of SASS/TFS covering the 25 year period from 1987 to 2013.

Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two and a half decades, the number of minority teachers has more than doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of non-minority teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful.

This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two and half decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among non-minority teachers. The factors most strongly related to minority teacher departures were the organizational and working conditions in their schools. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and non-minority teacher turnover. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were demographics, salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover.

Author

• Richard Ingersoll, University of Pennsylvania