This important, timely, and provocative book explores the recruitment and retention of Black female teachers in the United States. There are over 3 million public school teachers in the US, African American teachers only comprise approximately 8 percent of the workforce. Contributions consider the implicit nuances that these teachers experience.
Teachers play a critical role in the success of their students, both academically and in regard to long term outcomes such as higher education participation and economic attainment. Expectations for teachers are increasing due to changing learning standards and a rapidly diversifying student population. At the same time, there are perceptions that the teaching workforce may be shifting toward a younger and less experienced demographic. These actual and perceived changes raise important questions about the ways teacher education may need to evolve in order to ensure that educators are able to meet the needs of students and provide them with classroom experiences that will put them on the path to future success. Changing Expectations for the K-12 Teacher Workforce: Policies, Preservice Education, Professional Development, and the Workplace explores the impact of the changing landscape of K-12 education and the potential for expansion of effective models, programs, and practices for teacher education. This report explores factors that contribute to understanding the current teacher workforce, changing expectations for teaching and learning, trends and developments in the teacher labor market, preservice teacher education, and opportunities for learning in the workplace and in-service professional development.
Teacher Diversity and Student Success makes a powerful case for diversifying the teaching force as an important policy lever for closing achievement gaps and moving schools closer to equity goals. Written by three leading scholars, the book provides nuanced solutions on how to diversify the teaching force, increase student exposures to same-race teachers, and improve teacher training for a culturally diverse student body. They argue that teacher diversity should be seen as one element of teacher quality, and policies focused on improving teacher quality should take race explicitly into consideration. The authors also address the historic and contemporary factors that have kept people of color out of teaching and highlight emerging research showing the significant, long-lasting impact of same-race teacher exposures, particularly for Black and Latino students. This timely book is a call to action for building teacher diversity to ensure student success.
This edited volume offers sound suggestions for advancing diversity in the teaching profession. It provides teacher education programs with needed training materials to accommodate Black male students, and school district administrators and leaders with information to help recruit and retain Black male teachers.
Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers are underrepresented in public schools across the United States of America, with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color making up roughly 37% of the adult population and 50% of children, but just 19% of the teaching force. Yet research over decades has indicated their positive impact on student learning and social and emotional development, particularly for Students of Color and Indigenous Students. A first of its kind, the Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers addresses key issues and obstacles to ethnoracial diversity across the life course of teachers’ careers, such as recruitment and retention, professional development, and the role of minority-serving institutions. Including chapters from leading researchers and policy makers, the Handbook is designed to be an important resource to help bridge the gap between scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. In doing so, this research will serve as a launching pad for discussion and change at this critical moment in our country’s history. The volume’s goal is to drive conversations around the issue of ethnoracial teacher diversity and to provide concrete practices for policy makers and practitioners to enable them to make evidence-based decisions for supporting an ethnoracially diverse educator workforce, now and in the future.
Diversifying the Teacher Workforce critically examines efforts to diversify the teaching force and narrow the demographic gap between who teaches and who populates U.S. classrooms. While the demographic gap is often invoked to provide a needed rationale for preparing all teachers, and especially White teachers, to work with students of color, it is far less often invoked in an effort to examine why the teaching force remains predominantly White in the first place. Based on work the National Association for Multicultural Education is engaged in on this phenomenon, this edited collection brings together leading scholars to look closely at this problem. They examine why the teaching force is predominantly White from historical as well as contemporary perspectives, showcase and report available data on a variety of ways this problem is being tackled at the pre-service and teacher credentialing levels, and examine how a diverse and high-quality teaching force can be retained and thrive. This book is an essential resource for any educator interested in exploring race within the context of today’s urban schools.
Diversifying the Teacher Workforce critically examines efforts to diversify the teaching force and narrow the demographic gap between who teaches and who populates U.S. classrooms. While the demographic gap is often invoked to provide a needed rationale for preparing all teachers, and especially White teachers, to work with students of color, it is far less often invoked in an effort to examine why the teaching force remains predominantly White in the first place. Based on work the National Association for Multicultural Education is engaged in on this phenomenon, this edited collection brings together leading scholars to look closely at this problem. They examine why the teaching force is predominantly White from historical as well as contemporary perspectives, showcase and report available data on a variety of ways this problem is being tackled at the pre-service and teacher credentialing levels, and examine how a diverse and high-quality teaching force can be retained and thrive. This book is an essential resource for any educator interested in exploring race within the context of today’s urban schools.
Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.
In Blaming Teachers, Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz reveals that historical professionalization reforms subverted public school teachers' professional legitimacy. Policymakers and school leaders understood teacher professionalization initiatives as efficient ways to bolster the bureaucratic order of the schools rather than as means to amplify teachers' authority and credibility.
Fueled largely by significant increases in the Latino population, the racial, ethnic, and linguistic texture of the United States is changing rapidly. Nowhere is this 'Latinisation' of America more evident than in schools. The dramatic population growth among Latinos in the United States has not been accompanied by gains in academic achievement. Estimates suggest that approximately half of Latino students fail to complete high school, and few enroll in and complete college. The Latinization of U.S. Schools centres on the voices of Latino youth. It examines how the students themselves make meaning of the policies and practices within schools. The student voices expose an inequitable opportunity structure that results in depressed academic performance for many Latino youth. Each chapter concludes with empirically based recommendations for educators seeking to improve their practice with Latino youth, stemming from a multiyear participatory action research project conducted by Irizarry and the student contributors to the text.
