Recruiting, Retaining, and Rewarding a Representative Teacher Workforce

Abstract A declining number of college-bound students are selecting education as a major. In urban schools, not only is the teacher shortage an escalating issue, but recruiting teachers who are representative of the student body is increasingly difficult. According to 2021 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of racial and ethnically diverse teachers has not kept pace with increasingly diverse student bodies. Fewer than one-in-ten teachers were either Black (7%) or Hispanic (9%) by comparison to 47% of public elementary and secondary students who were identified as white and 27% Hispanic and 15% Black. Intentional and strategic recruitment efforts at earlier stages of a student’s educational journey was one district’s approach to increasing representation that more closely reflected their student body.