When the National Council for Teacher Quality decided to include a “strong design for diversity” component in its Teacher Prep Review, released this past June, the purpose was to show how well teacher prep programs were doing at recruiting racially and ethnically diverse candidates. NCTQ leaders say minority teachers can play a role in helping to raise minority student achievement.
“We know that kids of color can perform better in the classroom when they have teachers that match their race,” says Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ, citing research that has shown that Black students do better when assigned a Black teacher.
Despite the purported benefits of having a teacher of the same race, minority teachers remain woefully underrepresented in relation to the proportion of America’s minority students.
To encourage national recruitment efforts for minority teachers, NCTQ decided to acknowledge teacher prep programs that had what the organization considers noticeably higher proportions of candidates of color.
“We want to make sure that the profession is doing what it should be doing to attract high-quality candidates of color to the profession,” says Walsh.
If the purpose of NCTQ’s “strong design for diversity” component was to spark a conversation about the diversity—or lack thereof—in America’s traditional teacher education programs, then NCTQ has succeeded. The problem is that those in the field don’t have much good to say about the methodology that NCTQ employed in order to determine whether a particular teacher prep program was diverse.
