We need more Black teachers. The proof is in the pudding: We have decades of research supporting the positive impact of Black teachers on Black students. Indeed, students of various racial and ethnic backgrounds have favorable perceptions of their Black teachers. However, recruiting and retaining Black teachers has long remained a challenge for schools.
According to a National Council on Teacher Quality report this winter, which surveyed about 1,500 teacher-prep programs, 4 in 10 programs are “actively making the workforce less diverse” by graduating classes that are less diverse than their state’s existing teacher workforce, which is itself less diverse than student bodies.
Yes, the graduates are more diverse than the existing teacher workforces at a national level, but that diversity is growing at a slower pace than the increasing racial diversity of college-educated adults, the report found. In my home state of Pennsylvania, for example, the share of working teachers from historically disadvantaged backgrounds lags behind the total share of working-age adults with degrees from similar backgrounds by 7.7 percentage points, according to the most recent data on NCTQ’s Teacher Diversity Dashboard.
This modest progress in increasing the number of Black teachers isn’t quite good enough—especially in a political climate hostile to even the word “diversity.” NCTQ’s report offers suggestions for improving teacher-prep-program recruitment and increasing the number of Black teachers as well as other candidates from other underrepresented backgrounds: Policymakers should raise salaries, prep programs should recruit prospective teachers from high school, universities should offer scholarships for students who wish to enter teaching, and initiatives should pay licensing and testing fees for prospective teachers. These are good suggestions, but they are missing one critical prescription: a genuine commitment to ending the racism that keeps Black teachers out of the workforce.
Today’s coordinated backlash against any initiative labeled “DEI” exists in a lineage that stretches back to the purge of Black educators after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. As detailed in Leslie Fenwick’s 2022 book, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership, Southern school districts illegally fired, demoted, or dismissed tens of thousands of highly credentialed Black teachers and principals to replace them with less qualified white educators in the decades following Brown. Fenwick, an education policy professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at Howard University, dove deep into the oft-ignored history of districts’ intense and concerted efforts to purge Black teachers and principals from their school systems.
Racism shows up in more nuanced ways now, often looking less like outright slurs and more like long-held stereotypes that persist throughout the teacher pipeline from a child’s first entry into the educational ecosystem. The disproportionate expulsion of Black students, the cost of higher education, and the economic barriers to the teacher-certification process all keep Black teachers out of the classroom. In my decades of working alongside Black prospective teachers, I’ve seen how these “neutral” hurdles land hardest on those already navigating the racial wealth gap. High tuition, unpaid student teaching, and costly licensure exams become predictable gatekeepers for those teachers who are more likely to have already had to take on significant debt, support extended family, and piece together multiple jobs. Education leaders and policymakers often overlook these subtler forms of discrimination, instead attributing the underrepresentation of Black people in the teaching profession to a combination of life choices and work ethic.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continually threatens school districts that attempt to diversify their workforce. While some courts have rejected this administration’s most aggressive and divisive policy initiatives, districts must find ways to avoid handing opponents an easy political target. To sidestep legal and political pitfalls, they should avoid hiring decisions based solely on race and instead invest in strategies that widen the pipeline through socioeconomic and place-based means that help all teachers facing barriers.
Socioeconomic solutions to remove barriers for prospective teachers include paid residencies, scholarships, debt relief, “grow your own” programs, and paraprofessional-to-teacher pathways for candidates priced out of the profession by cost. Where possible, housing or child-care supports can also make credentialing more feasible. Because Black candidates are more likely to come from households with far less wealth and to carry significantly higher student debt compared with their white peers, ostensibly race-blind investments in stipends, debt relief, and basic supports end up loosening the financial chokehold on so many aspiring Black teachers. In my own organization, we’ve built paid apprenticeships and fellowships to offset college costs, provide substantial stipends in the early years of teaching, and push back against the intergenerational wealth gap that makes it hardest for Black educators to choose and stay in this profession.
Place-based solutions, which target strategies to specific local contexts, mean recruiting future educators from hard-to-staff neighborhoods, rural communities, and underresourced school systems. Districts might partner with local colleges, community colleges, and nearby historically Black colleges and universities so candidates can train and teach close to home. Schools might also create incentives for the teachers who want to stay where they are most needed.
Districts should also build broad alliances—with teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, parent organizations, community-based nonprofits, higher education partners, peer districts, and state workforce boards—to provide wraparound supports for prospective teachers who face barriers in the profession. When framed as a cross-sector response to staffing shortages and student need rather than a symbolic political provocation, workforce diversification becomes harder to isolate and attack.
To add more Black teachers to the classroom—and keep them there—we need policymakers who are willing to use public policy to remove these deeply rooted racist policies, procedures, and postures. Without an explicit moral commitment to oppose racism, any efforts will always fall short. The recruitment of diverse teachers may increase, but so will their attrition.
It’ll take the combined effort of educators, policymakers, and even the courts to admit the truth of our education system’s systemic and institutional history of racist policy choices that deliberately expelled Black teachers from American classrooms.
