Strategies to Increase the Number of Minority Teachers in the Public Schools

There can be very little argument that in recent years the teaching profession has become whiter and whiter as fewer minorities and people of color have entered and remained in the teaching profession, and as such, the percentage of white Americans in the field has continued to increase. Out of the approximately 2.3 million K-12 teachers in 1987, only 10.3 percent were minority group members. Current estimates report that by the mid 1990s this number will be further reduced to about five percent.[1] If this trend is not reversed, the teaching profession will be close to being entirely white by early in the twenty-first century. The fact that this is occurring at a time when minority populations of students in these same schools are dramatically increasing makes this situation even more confounding. Table 1 illustrates the relative populations by ethnicity of students and teachers in the public schools today.[2] As can be seen from this table, the relative population of the teaching force is not even close to being representative of the composition of the student body in terms of ethnicity.