Racial Diversity in the Teacher Pipeline: Evidence from Massachusetts

Partly driven by increasing evidence that minority students benefit from having teachers of their same race, policymakers have developed an interest in how to make the teaching profession better refl ect the increasingly diverse student body of US public schools. Nationally, nearly half of the K-12 student population is non-White while only about 20 percent of teachers are non-White. Eleven percent of White college graduates become teachers, compared to only nine percent of Black and Hispanic college graduates. Coupled with racial gaps in college graduation, these gaps in teacher entry result in White adults becoming teachers at two to three times the rate (4.4 percent) as Black adults (1.8 percent) and Hispanic adults (1.5 percent).1 Prior studies have found that these racial gaps at the start of the teacher pipeline may be driven by barriers that disproportionately impact minority teachers, including certification assessments, GPA cutoff s for teacher certifi cation, and racial disparities in hiring and retention.