Trends in the Recruitment, Employment, and Retention of Teachers From Underrepresented Racial-Ethnic Groups

• In Event: Retaining Teachers of Color: Major Considerations and Approaches

Abstract

This study examines and compares the recruitment, employment and retention of minority and non-minority teachers over the past three decades from 1987 to 2018. Our objective is to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey, its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey and their successor the National Teacher Principal Survey.

Our data analyses show that a gap persists 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 three 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.

However, the data also show that over past decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among non-minority teachers. Though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was strongly or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors.

In contrast, organizational and working conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and non-minority teacher turnover. While the number of minority teachers has ballooned, the schools in which they have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where non-minority teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. 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. Schools with more individual teacher classroom autonomy and schools with higher levels of school-wide faculty decision-making influence had far lower levels of turnover; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources.

Authors

• Richard Ingersoll, University of Pennsylvania

• Henry May, University of Delaware

• Gregory J. Collins, Muhlenberg College