Two struggling urban districts in upstate New York—Rochester and Buffalo—are looking to shrink the racial gap between teachers and students in hopes that doing so will improve outcomes for their mostly black and Latino student bodies.
To find a more diverse teacher-applicant pool, the districts will partner and travel to the South, especially to historically black colleges and universities, and Puerto Rico, according to WHEC, the NBC-affiliated television station in Rochester.
While white students make up just 10 percent of Rochester’s enrollment, 80 percent of the district’s educators are white. Despite years of efforts to diversify the nation’s teaching force, the percentage of nonwhite teachers has hardly budged since 2000 when 84 percent of teachers identified as white. The share now is 82 percent.
