Teacher Diversity and Student Success
Why Racial Representation Matters in the Classroom
Seth Gershenson, Michael Hansen, and Constance A. Lindsay
paper, 216 Pages
Pub. Date: March 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-68253-580-6
Price: $34.00
Add to Cart
cloth, 216 Pages
Pub. Date: March 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-68253-581-3
Price: $60.00
Add to Cart
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.
Praise
This text is a must-read for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers seeking to understand the underrepresentation of teachers of color in US public schools. Equally important, Gershenson, Hansen, and Lindsay provide clear state and local policy prescriptions to increase the ethnoracial diversity of America’s teachers.
— Travis J. Bristol, assistant professor, University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education
The relevance of teacher diversity, particularly for students of color, has recently emerged as one of the most well-established findings in all of education research. This important and timely book, written by leading researchers on this topic, both summarizes that body of research and provides a thoughtful and multi-faceted guide to action for practitioners and policymakers.
— Thomas S. Dee, Barnett Family Professor, Stanford University
More
Less
About the Authors
Seth Gershenson is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University and a research fellow of the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
Michael Hansen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy.
Constance A. Lindsay is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.