The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:
When puzzling over the persistent gap in performance between students of color and white children, research consistently shows that the identity of the teacher at the head of the class matters.
Specifically, children of color do better when they are taught by educators who look like them.
Yet, while nearly half of all Washington students are Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American, 87 percent of teachers are white.
To right this imbalance, state Superintendent Chris Reykdal proposes the Legislature spend $216 million in the upcoming biennium to attract, mentor and retain more teachers of color.
It’s high time to do something. But results from Washington’s efforts to date, which Reykdal wants to expand, are mixed.
While the bulk of that money would fund an ambitious new teacher recruitment program, the state has no system to measure its outcomes. To that end, some of the proposed funding would improve data analysis at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. It’s high time for that too. As the saying goes, you can’t fix what you don’t measure.
What has been measured — extensively — is the positive correlation between teacher diversity and long-term outcomes for kids of color.
A 2017 study of 106,000 students in North Carolina found that when Black boys had a Black teacher in the third, fourth, or fifth grade, they were less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college.
The good news is that Washington’s teaching corps is slowly becoming more diverse. State data show that 23 percent of new teachers are people of color. “We want so very badly to be the teacher we didn’t have,” said Stacey Hardin, who is Black and an assistant dean at the University of Washington College of Education.
The crown jewel in Reykdal’s vision is his teacher residency program, modeled on physicians’ residencies. In it, educators-in-training would spend a year working in classrooms with mentor-teachers while being paid a living wage — contrary to the current norm in which trainees are expected to donate their services. Cindy Rockholt, the state’s chief officer in charge of educator development, calls it “indentured servitude.”
Reykdal’s solution would cost more than $700 million over the next four years. Expensive indeed.
But the reality of teaching 30 kids in a classroom is vastly different from learning how to do it while sitting in a lecture hall. That gut-check is part of the reason 20 percent of educators leave the job in less than five years. Such a residency program, if effective, could be a standard for all teachers-in-training.
“The only alternative,” Reykdal says, “is to maintain the status quo and continue taking incremental approaches.”
