It is no secret that the majority of teachers at schools across the nation are White. A Department of Education study from 2016 found that 82 percent of all public school teachers at the elementary and secondary level are White, quite a stark divide in an age where changes in racial demographics are moving the nation ever closer to a majority-minority future. According to the same study, the number of Black teachers has actually declined between 1987 and 2011, from 8 to 7 percent.
Popular wisdom attributes this state of affairs to a dearth of Black teachers, calling it a “supply” problem. Without enough Black teachers to fill open positions at schools, it makes sense that there would be more White teachers, or so conventional thinking goes. A new study published in the Harvard Educational Review, however, reveals that the situation might not be so cut-and-dried. Hiring practices at the district level may in fact be playing a role in artificially depressing racial representation in the classroom.
“There’s not a lot of Black folks working in schools right now as teachers and, for a long time, policymakers and researchers have defined that as a supply problem,” said Dr. Diana D’Amico, an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University (GMU).
Aware of disparities in racial representation, districts have implemented policies around recruitment and other initiatives intended to attract and retain Black teachers at schools. The data D’Amico and her colleagues analyzed suggested that, by focusing on recruitment, districts might in fact be addressing only the symptoms of a more deeply rooted problem.
D’Amico and a group of GMU professors took a deep look at hiring practices at a single, large school district. They found that, although Black teachers were applying, they were half as likely to be offered a job as their White counterparts. It was not clear why this was occurring — White and Black applicants were equally qualified, according to researchers, but Black applicants were less likely to get a job offer.
“When we looked at the applicant data, it was a very different story,” D’Amico said. “As it turns out, there was a sizable population of Black individuals who applied to teach in the district, but they just weren’t hired.”
Researchers also found that, when Black teachers were hired, they were segregated within the school district and placed at schools with large Black student populations. Teachers were not choosing to self-segregate. Under the HR practices of that particular district, applicants applied for generic positions and then were matched through an internal HR process with open positions at the districts’ schools. Prospective teachers had little say, in other words, over where they ended up, short of refusing a job offer from the district.
