History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
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Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
The minority teacher shortage: Fact or fable?
- 09-02-2011
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Opinion by Richard M. Ingersoll and Henry May/Education Week (Phi Delta Kappan)
Richard M. Ingersoll is a professor of education and sociology, and Henry May is a senior researcher, both at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
For several decades, shortages of minority teachers have been a big issue for the nation’s schools. Policy makers and recent presidents have agreed that our elementary and secondary teaching force “should look like America.” But the conventional wisdom is that as the nation’s population and students have grown more diverse, the teaching force has done the opposite—grown more white and less diverse. The result, we are told, is that minority students in the nation’s schools increasingly lack minority adult role models, contact with teachers who understand their racial and cultural background, and often qualified teachers of any background, because white teachers eschew schools with large percentages of minorities. The minority teacher shortage in turn, we are told, is a major reason for the minority achievement gap and, ultimately, unequal occupational and life outcomes for disadvantaged students. (more...)
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