New Research Targets Teaching's Diversity Gap

Alternative-certification programs, including local "grow your own" efforts, are central to addressing shortages of minority teachers, according to researchers who spoke at a forum on the topic this week in Washington. The event was hosted by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank that has recently released two new papers on diversity in the teaching profession.

Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at CAP and author of the report " Teacher Diversity Matters: A State-by-State Analysis of Teachers of Color ," opened with some statistics about what he referred to as the "teacher diversity gap." While students of color make up 40 percent of the nation's public school population, teachers of color only make up 17 percent of the teacher workforce, he said. And each individual state is suffering from its own diversity gap—though, he said, the gap is broader in some states than others. (When comparing the ratios of nonwhite teachers to nonwhite students, California has the largest gap of any state, while majority-white Vermont and...