 Good afternoon. Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Denapoli, and I'm a senior policy advisor with the Learning Policy Institute. LPI is a non-profit and non-partisan organization that conducts independent, high-quality, educated-related research in the areas of educator quality, whole child education, early childhood education, equitable resource and access, and accountability and improvement. Part of our mission is to work with advocates and policymakers like you to bridge research and policy in ways that advance equitable and empowering learning for each and every child. I would like to thank everyone for attending today's briefing on supporting a well-prepared and diverse educator workforce. Thank you as well to our congressional co-host, Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey, Congressman Donald Norcross from New Jersey's first congressional district, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Thank you as well to their wonderful staffs for their ongoing efforts on this important issue. We would also like to recognize and thank our event co-sponsors, the Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity, the Center for American Progress, the National Black Child Development Institute, the Southern Education Foundation, Teach Plus, and Unitas U.S. Research tells us that all students benefit from having teachers of color, and we know that teachers of color help close achievement gaps for students of color, particularly in high-poverty environments. Yet, our teacher workforce does not reflect the growing diversity of our nation. Today, people of color represent about 40% of our nation's population and 50% of our nation's student body, but only 20% of our teacher workforce. We also know that teachers of color encounter unique barriers to entering the teaching profession and continuing to teach for the long haul. One of the barriers to entering the profession, and doing so through a high-quality pathway, is the barrier of college affordability. While the high cost of college discourages students in general from pursuing low-paying careers like education, research shows it's especially true for students of color who are more likely to report that student debt influences their career choices. Fortunately, a variety of federal and state policies, practices, and programs hold promise in supporting high-quality pathways into the teaching profession. These approaches include reducing the financial burden of post-secondary education so that teacher candidates can afford the rigorous teacher preparation programs that provide the extensive clinical experiences that improve teacher effectiveness, rent retention, especially in high-need schools. During this briefing, we will discuss the importance of a well-prepared and diverse teacher workforce, the impact of college affordability, on the diverse teacher workforce, high-quality pathways into the profession, and the federal and state policies that can support a well-prepared and diverse teacher workforce. We are honored to begin our briefing with opening remarks from Dr. Mark Tio, Senior National Director of Research and Knowledge for Teach Plus. Dr. Tio is a former high school history teacher having taught for six years in both Texas and Pennsylvania. He's also been a district administrator working in the human resources and academic departments of the Boston Public Schools and serving as the Executive Director of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Development in Seattle Public Schools. Last month, Teach Plus and the Education Trust released the report, If You Listen, We Will Say, Why Teachers of Color Leave and How to Disrupt Teacher Turnover. Dr. Tio, his research partners at the Education Trust and those who contributed to the research and the teacher leaders from Teach Plus are giving us a better understanding of what schools, districts, and states can do to better support and retain teachers of color. Please welcome Dr. Tio. Thank you, Michael, and thank you to our congressional sponsors, Senator Booker and Congressman Norcross, and to all of our cohorts, co-hosts, particularly the Learning Policy Institute, who brought us together and are doing field-leading work to extend the research and knowledge base for improving policy and practice. Today, we have the opportunity to discuss and learn from one another why and what we can, and frankly should, be doing to provide all of our children with a high quality education and ensure that they have access to great teachers. Research affirms what we know to be true about the importance of a teacher in a child's education and growth. The research and practice communities are also amassing compelling evidence that shows that a high quality teaching workforce is a diverse one. So let's talk about what that workforce looks like. While our children, our students, reflect the diversity that is our country, our teachers do not. In our schools today, students of color make up a little more than half of all students, and yet just one in five teachers identifies as a person of color. We've observed over the past decade that the percent of teachers of color in our schools has been slowly rising, but we also know that teachers of color are more likely to leave teaching when compared to their white counterparts. What's contributing to this persistent lack of diversity among our teachers? I encourage you to read LPI's research, which details the systemic and personal barriers that serve as deterrence for more people of color from entering into teaching, to illustrate. Teachers of color face unique barriers to entering and staying in the profession. Teachers of color are more likely to enter teaching through alternative pathways due to the high cost of traditional teacher preparation programs and the debt burden faced by college students of color. Lower quality pathways can result in less teacher effectiveness and high turnover rates. Research shows that candidates who receive comprehensive preparation are two to three times more likely to stay in teaching than those who receive little training. Policymakers need to have a dual focus on recruitment and retention of teachers of color and college affordability and loan burdens play a large role in both. Why does preparation support and retention matter? Constantly replacing teachers reduces continuity in the classroom and especially in high turnover schools, filling empty slots with inexperienced or underqualified teachers has a negative impact on student learning. Research shows that teachers who go through high quality pathways are more effective and stay in the profession longer. There are a number of solutions that we're going to hear about today. A number of them will focus on barriers to entry into the profession, including through high quality pathways. Solutions such as loan forgiveness and service scholarships can support the training of diverse school leaders who can implement the structures and cultures that are necessary to support teachers of color. Although diversifying the profession through college affordability and high quality pathways are the main focus of this briefing it is important to note that these efforts should be paired with retention efforts. Teach Plus in partnership with the education trust recently released a report if you listen we will stay why teachers of color leave and how to disrupt teacher turnover. To better understand teacher of color turnover we talked to 88 teachers of color across the country and conducted case studies with schools and districts that have created school cultures practices and policies that support teachers of color. We have been learning that there are practices and policies that if enacted can support retaining a diverse educator workforce such as creating culturally affirming school environments ensuring school policies that affirm teachers humanity and racial identities. Supporting empowering and investing in teachers this includes new teacher mentorship that intentionally focuses on the teacher of color experience and having school and district and state priorities that are reflected in the hiring compensation and and incentive practices of their agencies. Changing and improving school culture is difficult no doubt about it. It takes time leadership resources and collective will but what we observed in our case studies is that it is absolutely and unequivocally it can be done. What does this look like? As one school leader said told me schools need to be made safe and welcoming environments for teachers of color. That clearly has plenty of implications that we've shared in our research. We can also be paying attention to district and state policies and practices that if addressed could support a more diverse workforce. Here is an easy to do for those of you who are interested in the state and district piece of this work. Go visit your state education agency's website or your district's website if you will. Find out where they report on teacher retention rates. Find out if they report on the retention of teachers of color. If this is so important to policymakers and educational leaders shouldn't we be measuring it and reporting on it? Think about what school district and state leaders can learn if they had a robust system to collect school climate survey data, exit interviews and surveys and state and district reports on teacher retention. Think about what we'd learn if that information was disaggregated by race and ethnicity or other measures of teacher diversity. Culture is hard work. Some of these data and reporting practices can be in comparison low hanging fruit and easy first steps to take and can be powerful tools for crafting future policies and practices. Today, Congress has a unique opportunity to directly support a well-prepared and diverse educator workforce through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Several federal policy levers could address many of the barriers to entry that are widely recognized as contributing to this lack of diversity in our teaching workforce. Desiree and the panel will discuss these opportunities including service scholarships and loan forgiveness, teacher residencies, grow your own programs, inclusive admissions policies, course articulation agreements and ongoing mentorship and support. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. I would now like to welcome my colleague Desiree Carver-Thomas, research and policy analyst for the Learning Policy Institute for a presentation on how supporting a well-prepared and diverse educator workforce. Desiree is the author of the report diversifying the teacher profession how to recruit and retain teachers of color, which you will shortly learn more about in her presentation. Desiree is also a former educator having taught in New York City public schools for five years. As a graduate student, she consulted with the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department on strategies for diverting recidivism and with the West Cotra-Consta Unified School District on implementing a full service community schools initiative. She also conducted similar work with the City of Richmond. Please welcome Desiree. Thank you, Michael. So good afternoon, everyone. As Michael said today, I'll be talking about the report that I authored called diversifying the teacher, the teaching profession, how to recruit and retain teachers of color. In recent years, there have been a host of studies on teacher diversity and what this report attempted to do was to summarize some of those key findings. So today I'll start with an overview of what the teacher workforce looks like and why teacher diversity matters. I'll talk about the barriers to recruiting and retaining teachers of color and finally some solutions that can help to mitigate those barriers. So what do we know about teachers of color in the workforce? Based on a nationally representative survey, the schools and staffing survey, we see that teachers of color have increased from 12 percent to 20 percent of the teaching profession between 1987 and 2015. While the overall proportion of teachers of color is increasing, we can also see that the proportion of Native American and African American teachers is in decline. Some promising news is that one in four new teachers is a teacher of color compared to just 10 percent of those teachers in 1987. However, high turnover rates can undermine that growth, which I will talk about soon. So this this matters because all students benefit from a racially diverse teacher workforce. Teachers of color fill hard to staff positions. Three in four teachers of color teach in the schools serving the most students of color. Schools that tend to be under resourced and where shortages can be ongoing. They also boost academic performance. We see higher math and reading scores, higher graduation rates among students of color who've had a teacher of color. We see improved attendance rates, such as lower chronic absenteeism. And teachers of color influence school climate. We see lower rates of suspensions and expulsions. There's research that suggests that teachers of color can improve the satisfaction of other teachers of color. So that having a more diverse workforce in a school setting can lower turnover rates among teachers of color and improve school stability for students. And finally, teachers of color offer benefits to all students in a school. There's research showing that students, regardless of race, are more likely to report feeling cared for and academically challenged when they've had a teacher of color. And all students can benefit from developing the dispositions to live and work in a global and diverse society when they've had diverse role models in childhood. However, there are barriers to recruiting and retaining teachers of color, which is what I'll talk about next. First up is the cost of college. About two-thirds, more than two-thirds of individuals entering the teaching profession borrow money in order to pay for their higher education, which amounts to an average debt load of about $20,000 for those with a bachelor's degree and $50,000 for those with a master's. And as Michael stated earlier, the rising cost of college discourages students, college students in general, from pursuing lower paying careers like teaching. But this is especially true for college students of color who are more likely to report that their college debt influenced their career and education choices. This graph shows the proportion of undergraduates and graduate students who are borrowing $30,000 or more for an undergraduate degree, $50,000 or more for a master's degree. And as you can see, African-American college students are far more likely to borrow at those high levels. And these debts balloon over time. So black college students owe far more at graduation, but then even more years after graduation, almost $25,000 more four years after graduation, more than $43,000 more than white college students 12 years after graduation. Latino students borrow about the same as white college students, but their loan default rates are about twice as high, suggesting that even the same debt amount represents a greater relative burden. So it's not hard to imagine that college students of color might be pursuing better paying job opportunities when this is the debt that they're leaving school with, especially considering that beginning teachers nationally earn 20% less than college graduates in other fields and 30% less by mid-career. The Teach Grant program is one tool that can be used to address the college cost barrier. It offers scholarships of $4,000 per year for undergraduates and graduates who will teach a high-need subject in a high-poverty school for four years. So this graph shows that the Teach Grant award has remained constant at $4,000 per year since the grants inception in 2008. That's the solid blue line. However, the value of that grant amount has actually degraded over time, and there are two reasons for that. One is that that $4,000 award has not kept up with inflation, and two is that because of federal budget cuts, that $4,000 amount hasn't always been available. In fact, in some years, eligible candidates have received hundreds of dollars less than that $4,000 amount. Meanwhile, you can see that college costs are steadily increasing. That is the cost of tuition, fees, room, and board, even after accounting for the average grant amount that candidates or applicants would be receiving. And let's remember that black college students are borrowing far more than the average, so this gap between the award and the costs could be even greater for those students. So another note to make is that research shows that scholarships like this are most effective when they cover a substantial portion of the cost of preparation, which the Teach Grant doesn't currently do and is actually getting further away from. So here's the thing. High debt load can prevent a student from entering teaching even if they had intended to do so when they entered college. This is especially true for candidates of color. It's especially true for those who would go into a higher need school. So higher debt is a barrier to entering teaching, but that combination of higher debt and lower salaries, especially in higher need schools, is a barrier to teaching in those schools. There are also obstacles to completing college in preparation. Only about 40 percent of college students nationally finish their degrees within four years, but this is even lower for black, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Native American college students. And scholars cite several reasons for this. Among them, again, college costs and having to work while completing your degree. Also, transportation difficulties, having family responsibilities, experiencing dissatisfaction with the lack of faculty diversity or with curriculum. Teacher licensure exams can also be a barrier to completing preparation. In evaluation of the praxis, which is a commonly used preparation or teacher evaluation, finds gaps in pass rates as high as 38 percent by race. And what's important about this is that there's little evidence that these kinds of exams accurately and consistently predict teacher effectiveness, which is what we really care about. So they're keeping teachers of color out of the field, but they're not really telling us anything about how effective those teachers will be. Other kinds of evaluations like performance assessments, the PPAT, the edTPA, the CalTPA in California, these can be more accurate predictors of teacher effectiveness without those same kinds of disparate outcomes and pass rates. Next, I'd like to talk about insufficient preparation. So we know that comprehensive preparation matters. Teachers who enter the field with little preparation are two to three times more likely to leave teaching than those who enter with comprehensive preparation. And what do I mean by that? Comprehensive preparation refers to those teachers who have experienced observing teaching, they have student taught for at least a full semester, they've received feedback, they've taken courses in learning theory and teaching methods. But again, given the cost of college, it's no surprise that teachers of color might opt for a cheaper option like alternative certification. So we see higher alternative certification rates among teachers of color. One in four enter through these pathways, which is twice the rate of white teachers. And turnover rates are higher with these pathways, 25% higher according to recent research. I'd like to note that there is variation in the quality of alternative certification programs, but on average, these programs tend to offer less coursework and student teaching, if any, before candidates begin being responsible for their own students. Other programs like teacher residencies can help districts to fill critical shortage needs without compromising on teacher preparation. Residents spend an entire year teaching in a high need school under the guidance of a master teacher before they ever become responsible for their own class. Historically, black colleges and universities and minority serving institutions also play an important role in providing high quality teacher preparation to candidates of color. They confer about 12% of bachelors of education degrees nationally and produce an especially high proportion of those degrees among candidates of color. So once a teacher of color has made it into the profession, challenging teaching conditions can push them out of it. So teachers of color note accountability pressures, lack of resources and support in their schools. There's research showing that teachers of color who experience a lack of classroom autonomy or school influence are more likely to leave teaching in their schools. They report experiencing racial discrimination and stereotyping, which can affect the kinds of job assignments and workloads that they are tasked with, things like being pigeonholed as the disciplinarian or as the language translator. Fortunately, there are some promising practices that address these barriers that I'd like to talk about next. And the first set of solutions I'd like to talk about are high-retention pathways into teaching. So not just recruiting more teachers of color into the profession, but ensuring that they have the preparation they need to be successful and stay for the long haul. So first up are service scholarships and loan forgiveness, like the Teach Grant program. A recent correlation study found that in districts where these programs were available, those districts had 25% more teachers of color. Teacher residencies, again, residents' apprentices with a master teacher for an entire school year while they complete their degree at a partnering university. About more than 50% of residents are people of color. They also tend to have much higher retention rates than their peers and are found to be effective teachers. And what's great about these programs is that they often include a stipend, so that helps to address that college cost barrier. Grow your own programs, recruit high school students, paraprofessionals, afterschool program staff and other community members into teaching. Inclusive admissions policies can include conditional admissions. So in Rhode Island, they allow teacher preparation programs to use a holistic set of criteria to admit applicants who may not have met the GPA or standardized test requirements, but those programs commit to providing those candidates with the supports that they'll need to be effective teachers. Course articulation agreements, or what are often called two-plus-two programs are partnerships between community colleges and four-year institutions. Candidates can earn their degree and credential with considerable savings by entering through these kinds of pathways. These can also be great at helping rural communities to grow their teacher workforces. Finally, ongoing mentorship and support can help to address some of those barriers to completing college by offering things like peer supports, career advisement, tutoring, covering the cost of exam fees, offering test preparation, and so on. And I'd like to offer an example of Leeward Community College, which is in O'ahu. It serves the largest native Hawaiian population of all University of Hawaii community colleges. And at Leeward, there are two-plus-two programs that partners with Hawaii universities. They say this, we understand that life gets in the way sometimes, especially for students from hard-to-serve communities. We don't water down anything that we do, but we do provide safety nets. So at Leeward, these safety nets include peer mentors, dedicated counselors, and more. So in addition to high retention pathways, there are a few other policies I'd like to note briefly. First up are data and licensure policies. By monitoring the diversity of teacher prep programs, that can help to incentivize those programs to better recruit and support their candidates of color. The Tennessee Report Card is a good example of this. States can also revisit their licensure policies in order to use more accurate performance assessments like the edTPA, which has not been shown to have the kind of disparate outcomes and test scores as the traditional pencil and paper exams. There are at least 18 states that currently require the use of a performance assessment for licensure, such as or including the edTPA, and many more states are exploring this option. Districts have a role to play in hiring. They can move their hiring timelines earlier, which is associated with recruiting more teachers of color. They can also partner with minority serving institutions to recruit more teachers. They can offer comprehensive induction, which research has shown is associated with higher retention rates. And finally, school teaching conditions have a critical role in teacher retention, and school leaders in particular have a significant role to play in setting those conditions. So states and districts can take advantage of federal funds to better recruit, prepare, provide induction and development supports for new school leaders and all school leaders. There are more details on everything that I have talked about today in our report, which you can find on our website. And now I'll hand it back to Michael, who will be introducing our panel. Thank you. Thank you, Desiree, for sharing your research with us today. It's now my pleasure to welcome our panelists and moderator for a discussion on why a well prepared and diverse educator workforce matters and the program's policies and practices that can support state and local efforts. Lenea Austin is an English teacher and gate coordinator at Humanities and Arts Academy of Los Angeles or HEARTS in the Los Angeles Unified School District. In addition to teaching English for 15 years, she holds leadership positions at HEARTS, including working as a member of the Instructional Committee, a senior class advisor, and as a proud sponsor of the Dream Club and Black Student Union. Ms. Austin is also a social justice leader whose work in education advocacy began as a Teach Plus Teaching Fellow. Ms. Austin, contribute to the report. If you listen, we will stay and as a National Writing Project Fellow. Kalila M. Harris is the Managing Director of K-12 Policy at the Center for American Progress. Prior to her role at CAP, Ms. Harris founded a Baltimore City School focused on social justice and co-founded a local community collaborative called the Coalition of Black Leaders in Education. She organizes nationally with the Edu Color Movement and served as the first deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. While working under the Obama Administration, Harris also managed the Diversity and Inclusion in Government Council and implemented the first White House Summit on Diversity and Inclusion in Government. Dr. Cassandra Herring is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity, or BranchED. BranchED is a national effort to maximize programming and drive innovation to prepare highly effective diverse educators for all learners. Prior to leading BranchED, Dr. Herring served as the Dean of the School of Education and Human Development at Hampton University, where she transformed struggling education programs. Dr. Herring has also served on national and international boards, including serving as Chair of the HBCU Academic Deans of Education Council and as a member of both Deans for Impact and the Advisory Board for the John Dris Center for Innovation Higher Education. Our moderator, Amelia Chamorro, is the Associate Director of Education Policy at the Educ- She is the Associate Director of the Education Policy Project at UNITUS-US. In this role, she leads UNITUS-US's education policy work, where she focuses on closing achievement gaps and advancing equity for Latino students and English language learners. She's a former English language learner and a daughter of two public school teachers. Prior to joining UNITUS-US, Amelia was Vice President of Public Policy at United Way Bay Area and served in governmental and legislative affairs roles for the California Restaurant Association and the University of California Student Association. Please welcome our moderator and panel. Hopefully, everyone enjoyed your lunch and you're not getting that after-lunch lol, but I'm here to moderate a conversation with our esteemed panel and I really want to thank LPI for not only putting together a very diverse panel on the topic of teacher diversity, but also for bringing you all together to engage with us on to elevate this important topic and how not only does it affect teachers and future teachers, but also students in the classroom. And so we are going to have some time at the end for some Q&A. So as you hear from our panelists, and you know, and you get an idea for a question, write it down, because we'll definitely want to make time for you to be able to engage with our speakers. So with that, we're going to get started. And my first question is actually going to be for Lynne, to my left. Okay. All right. Is that working? Yeah, I think it's working. All right. So we know that the research tells us how important it is to have a diverse teaching workforce for academic achievement for students. But we also know as we heard from Desiree's presentation and from Mark Tao, that the rising cost of college tuition also discourages college students in general from pursuing lower paying careers like teaching. And it also shows that this is especially true for students of color who are more likely to report that student debt influences their their career choices and their interest and ability to be actually able to go into the teaching profession. Further, as a report that you helped to write, if you listen, we will stay, rightly points out, we live in a country of wealth and equality that cuts across racial lines. In your work as a high school English teacher, and thank you for the work that you do and for staying in the teaching profession and sponsor of the Dream Club, which we'd love to hear more about, whose focus is community service. Do you have students who have expressed interest in teaching but are concerned that the high college cost would prevent them from going into that career choice with the amount of loan debt that they would have to take on? So in my experience working with students, really what they consider when they go into teaching is their experiences that they have had as students. So many of them don't select careers in teaching because they've had to deal with with a range of issues being students, not only income gaps but achievement gaps. And a lot of these have affected their outlook on the career as a whole. So with the students that I teach, which are predominantly Black, Latino, or students in the Latinx community and Pacific Islander students, many of them, they want to get into education in order to change the status quo. They've experienced systemic racism, they've experienced racial animus, they've experienced just all the prejudices that go along with that. And so they want to make a better reality for other students in the future. I have a student, Ivory, who recently shared with me that she wanted to go to college and become a teacher. And she asked me, well, what should I major in if I want to become a teacher? And in California, you can't major in your undergraduate studies in teaching. So I said, well, what are you interested in? What are you interested in studying? And she said, well, I think I want to teach history because I didn't learn a lot about my own history as a student in high school. She said, I didn't learn about what it was like to be a Chicana in America. And so I want to teach students like me so I can give them that experience that I didn't have. So that's what I mainly hear from students in my position. So I think in my work with Teach Plus, I have had the pleasure of hearing presentations about pathway programs, such as the ones that Desiree talked about. And I think that those would be beneficial to helping support our students whose mindframes are not always on how much money is this career is going to pay because really they just want to be change agents. But they definitely will need that financial support getting through college programs because it's very difficult to take a year off to study to be a teacher when you have a family or when you have to support yourself through college. And could you just tell us a little bit about the Dream Club and how that ties into the work that you do and supporting students and their aspirations? Oh, so the Dream Club is a community service club that is mostly student-led. So students like ivory who want to have opportunities to look better for colleges. So it's mostly me facilitating work that they are doing themselves in their own community. Great. Well, thank you for not only being a teacher, but also being a club sponsor, right? We all always know that it's important to engage students beyond the classroom and other opportunities to engage. It is. So my next question is for Kalila. We're going to change it up a little bit in terms of order. So just piggybacking off, we know that student loan debt and college affordability is a barrier. We know that three and four teachers of color work in the quartile of school serving the most students of color nationally. So in addition to the student loan debt that they'll have to pay back, there are certainly equity issues in terms of pay. Since educators in general make 20% less than similar educated professionals. This was referenced in the previous presentations. And those gaps can be even higher and high need districts where we really need to invest in teacher diversity and teacher preparation. So how can the higher education act to reauthorization, which is we're living that in the moment right now, as Mark up was in the last couple of days and I think continuing on today. How can the AHA reauthorization help compensate for the unacceptable low pay of educators broadly and educators in high need schools specifically? Great. Thank you for that question and thank you to LPI for having me at the, okay, I'm going to use my cafeteria voice. Whenever I say that to people who have not been in the school, they're like, huh? People who have been in the school, they're like, I know, right? So thank you to LPI for inviting me here on behalf of the Center for American Progress. So HEEA has a number of provisions that could really target, as Desiree shared, a couple of things. One, there are entitled three grant programs that would strengthen our HBCUs, our minority serving institutions, HSIs, NFPs, all of those things. There are grants that would support students receiving funding to enter the teaching profession on the front end instead of incurring the debt that has been disproportionately impacting communities of color. We know there's a racial wealth gap in this country and what's challenging about that is when people hear the racial wealth gap of black families in the next 15 to 20 years, having $0 in wealth in comparison to somewhere around $150,000 in wealth for white families, people think that that is a mistake or there must be some caveat or give them some more context when, in fact, there has been an education debt in this country since enslavement, when people were stolen from their land and brought here, when people's lands were taken from them by the government and relegated to reservations, when people whose land was carved away from them and it was no longer called Mexico. All of these things have pervasive impact now when we see things like redlining, predatory lending, inadequate housing, jobs, transportation. So when we think about the racial wealth gap and we think about the concept of black families, Latinx families, indigenous families, different families from Asian American Pacific Islander and Pacific Islander communities, as well as Alaska Native, to ask families to take out a level of debt to achieve the American dream when there's an education debt owed to those families is very nefarious. And to ask them to take out the debt and then say, we are then on the back end going to forgive your loans is challenging. So within HEA, we can both make sizable and exponential increases for the support of our minority serving institutions, giving grants to young people to enter the teaching profession. I think it goes without saying, and thank you for saying this, Lene, about the experiences students have had in schools. There's a reason why students still flock to minority serving institutions as a place of safety, right? Not only have there been racial aggression and issues around class, but there have also been issues where families have not been welcomed into those institutions historically. And so then to turn around and not have your family support to go into teaching, not only because you won't be paid, the conditions may be dire because there's lack of investment. In fact, there are communities. My team was just in Alabama, a state where school segregation is still the law. It's still a part of a constitution of Alabama. And the millage contribution of property tax to schools is probably the lowest in the country. And, you know, we visited a school that looks like there was no touch of education reforms of the last two to three decades. Not a single reform has shown up in that school. But you ask those families to turn around and commit to support their child getting a degree in education, sometimes at institutions that also don't necessarily want to welcome them. So you need to pour support into the institutions that are producing the highest number of students of color. The idea that you can't find the teachers is nonsensical. You didn't go get the teachers. Have a colleague here from Baltimore when I was running that social justice school. If you came in my school, and this was typically with Morgan State University students, if you came into the school and you were on the step team, or you were the mentor for the step team, you were the mentor for, or the advisor for the girls mentoring club, and you were an undergraduate, I didn't care if you were a teacher, I'd tap you on the shoulder and say, don't you want to teach when you graduate? And we recruited teachers. We had a high number of black teachers because we invited them into the building when they did not think that that was going to be their profession. So I'm approaching this from a very authentic space as opposed to just let's go to Congress, let's go look at the markup and see what we can do. The Hawkins Centers in the HEA have not been fully funded. The support money for our MSIs have not been fully funded. And these are things that we can demand and put pressure on to legislators to make sure those things pass. Instead of, you know, well, let's talk about accountability, let's talk about that, you know, okay, if people don't even get into college or their institutions are starved of resources. And again, I live in Baltimore, we have four HBCUs that are fighting the state to get adequate funding. Those things can be ameliorated by HEA. And it's important for us to look at not only state and local policy, but national policy and how those things string together. So those are ways that HEA can support. But also we have to remember the conditions realistically that teachers of colors are coming from. And when we create policy solutions, they can only be at the 30,000 foot level of, okay, we'll give you a grant. It's also how are we creating the conditions in those schools? Our team at the Center for American Progress, in addition to a recent report that we share called a quality education for every child, which asks policymakers to apply an explicit racial equity lens to policymaking. We also talk about modernizing and elevating the teaching profession. And so it cannot be that you put golden handcuffs on a teacher and pay them more and send them into a school house where they have class sizes of 35 plus. Or you send them into Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, Alabama, where there's paint peeling off the walls, the roof is coming in, and students are saying we don't have enough laptops. Or this is the first year in six years that we got new textbooks. And we don't have enough to take them home to do our homework. Right? This is not pie in the sky. This is what was told to us when we visited Lanier last week. So those things have to go together. It's really cute when presidential candidates say things like, I'm going to pay teachers $10,000 more. Great. And you're going to send them into conditions where they'll be gone in a couple of years. Those things have to come together. You can't just pay people more. Lock them into a situation where this is the career I'm going for, but my mental health, my family's health are being impacted. And I really wanted to make change. And you gave me more money making me believe you were investing in me, only to see I have to use this extra money to pay for my classroom supplies. I have to use this extra money because nobody starts to make sure there's a washer and dryer in school. So I'm taking kids clothes home to wash and make sure they have a sense of self-esteem about them. So all of those things need to go together. Thank you so much. And I think that just elevates the importance of not only focusing on the pay, on the affordability and the access, but also as we talk about whole child, also talking about whole teachers and the supports that they need and the conditions that they need to actually be able to be successful and support their students in the schools that they study. And if I'll add, so H.E.A. is a single thing and oftentimes we look for silver bullet answers to the challenges in education. The challenges children are in communities. They're not just in individual schoolhouses. And so that needs to couple with things like Wiyowa and other legislations that are important to building strong communities. Because again, if you modernize the building and families don't have access to that building, it's not a community school and families don't have access to food. Families don't have access to housing, to jobs, to transportation. You are continuing a cycle where you're expecting teachers to be social workers. We talk about whole child, but there are things that should not be the teacher's responsibility. And then you ding them on the back end and say, but your outcomes are not strong. Get your scores up. And those things contradict. So modernizing and teaching, modernizing the teaching profession and elevating the teaching profession also requires deep investment in communities that have been historically divested in. And so this next question is for Dr. Herring. Welcome. And so just following up on Kalila put an emphasis on the importance of investing in minority serving institutions, MSIs. We know that the research tells us that teachers of color who attend MSIs are more likely to graduate with a BA from a school or department of education compared to teachers of color who attend the predominantly white institutions. And that MSIs produce more teacher candidates of color than other colleges. The data also tells us that MSIs serve high percentages of low income students. And we know that the Pell Grant only covers about 28% of the cost of attending a four-year public college. Can you speak to how an increased Teach Grant award could be coupled with a Pell Grant to help MSIs remove the affordability barrier for prospective teachers that are of color and from a low income family? Absolutely. So I appreciate the opportunity to be on this panel. And I have to say that as a dean at a historically black university's College of Education for 10 years prior to coming to branch alliance for educator diversity, it's so refreshing that minority serving institutions have had such a platform in this conversation already. As you know or you may know branch alliance for educator diversity is the only nonprofit organization in our country that has a singular focus on strengthening, growing, and amplifying the impact of minority serving institutions, particularly around educator preparation. There are 290 MSIs that offer educator preparation programs. That's about 13% of all teacher prep providers in our country. And they prepare 44% of our teachers of color. So when we talk about a disproportionate impact that these institutions have on diversifying the teacher workforce, that is the statistic that we talk about. Branch Ed's network is broad, but it's really common coming together around one vision of quality, a re-envisioning of what do we mean by high quality educator preparation in our schools. And from an institutional perspective in terms of your question, traditional university-based teacher preparation that is high quality is expensive. It's expensive. There are alternative routes that are cheaper, faster, but the bottom line is the investments that we make in high quality university teacher preparation pays dividends beyond the costs. In terms of the number of teachers that are produced, still the lion's share of our teachers in our country are produced in traditional university based teacher preparation. And they tend to persist in the profession longer. We know for minority serving institutions, teachers prepared in those pathways persist in the profession longer than teachers of color prepared in other pathways. So making investments in high quality university-based teacher preparation is an equity strategy in our country, particularly when you focus those investments on institutions that are doing a great job of preparing highly effective teachers that happen to be teachers of color and that may come from low income backgrounds. It's well documented that our nation's minority serving institutions are such places in the landscape of higher education. They tend to be lesser resourced as institutions and they tend to enroll and educate greater numbers of low income students. And despite all of this, they prepare a disproportionate number of teachers of color for America's classrooms. If we shift to the student perspective, again the cost of pursuing an education or teacher credential is expensive. It includes more than the average college students expenses in tuition and fees, housing and the like. Candidates in our teacher prep programs have to pay for licensure exams. They have to engage in student teaching and or residency, an assignment that can be anywhere from one semester all the way up to a full year and oftentimes they don't have the opportunity to work while they're engaged in those activities. But they still have to pay tuition. They still have to take care of families. They have to figure out transportation to their school sites and the like. And in reference to teach grants, currently teach grants can only be used to offset tuition, right? So while the combination of teach grants and Pell grants is promising for candidates, such support needs to be seen in light of these expanded costs of what it takes to become a teacher. Increasing the amount of the teach grant awards would certainly be helpful in terms of keeping up with college costs, a case I think that does already clearly laid out for us. But even perhaps thinking more broadly about how those funds can be used to support the full cost of what it takes to become a teacher. In short, I think we need to look more holistically, right, about the financial support needed, especially for first-gen college students and low-income students and others from under-resourced backgrounds to get prospective teachers from college into classrooms. Thank you so much. And I also want to make sure that we give you all equal time and opportunity as we're talking about equity to continue to share with the audience and then also give an audience an opportunity to ask questions. So with that, I'm going to ask you all to pop corn in your answers just in terms of, you know, anything that you may want to highlight from your practice or the reports that you have helped to inform and shape, you know, that you haven't had a chance to share with us yet in terms of, you know, in your experience, you know, and when we're thinking about preparing and developing leaders to support a more diverse teacher workforce, you know, why is it important or how can from your experience and your research and your findings, what would you like to share with the audience? If I can add, one thing that could also come from H.E.A. and again when you think about making schools that have been traditionally under resource or school districts that are impacted by low property tax, a low property tax base, something that is really small, that could really be helpful from that grant are bridge funds. So typically you have young people coming from, excuse me, you have adults graduating from college who this is their first job. I talked about the racial wealth gap. They come out of college and they do not have the money to live between starting working in a school system and their first paycheck. And so you have teachers who are supposed to be pouring into our kids eating ramen noodles or couch surfing because they don't have the down payment for their first apartment and those are hidden costs that you don't necessarily see but you want to make a smooth pathway into teaching. And so when we talk about making certain schools, conditions, such high quality like I want to go work in Baltimore City because I know I'm going to get a bridge grant, I'm going to get a mentor, I'm going to have a base salary of somewhere between $55,000 and $65,000. My class sizes are going to be smaller. All of those things will go together but there are some really small things that can either come from H.E.A. or states can do. So in addition to teach grants and Pell grants, states can take leadership on doing several things including changing the way property taxes are used to fund schools and moving away from that because there is disparate impact that we see in terms of the $23 billion dollar gap between school districts that are predominantly white and school districts that are predominantly non-white. So you look at the Rodriguez case and use the Powell exception to say okay we see a racial disparity and we need to stop using property taxes in that way but also grant funds for teachers to come to their school districts could be expanded at the state level to make sure that teachers have a smooth on ramp into teaching and that they do have residency opportunities which you know when we think about also especially the Latinx community the highest increase in teachers of color has been the Latinx community and so we need to recognize that means a lot of different things in different places. I'm Latina, my family's Costa Rican, people don't look at me and see that if you're in New York City most Latinx teachers are black right and so we need to think about how those numbers what it means for new Americans and people who are coming to this country to be able to teach them what they they need what the messages are from their families. If I may add I think I'm plus one everything that you said and and I think the important element that we can't forget here is that high quality educator preparation matters right. I think people use the term residency to mean several different things and I think the one theme that is consistent across all of those different definitions is a clinically rich high quality educator preparation program that's co-designed and co-implemented between the ed prep provider and the K-12 district that partnership is critical it's important it's giving candidates the ability to try out teaching the work of teaching not just reading about it or looking at case studies but actually the doing of teaching and I think that's critically important and then we can't underestimate the importance of that in-service educator that is also serving as the mentor teacher for that candidate that that is critically important that that person not only be accomplished themselves but that they have really intentional training on what does it mean to mentor a pre-service teacher and then putting all of those elements together making sure that we're looking at models that are not just about post-graduate or graduate level but also reaching down into undergraduate teacher prep programs to ensure that we have a robust practice-based model that's applicable really to all teacher prep programs and not just those that are labeled residency what I think we need to have in general is a focus on what is high quality clinically rich preparation look like that can touch a multitude of university models great and final word to Lynne from the teacher perspective if you I was just going to add so following the report if you listen we will stay I did work with some teacher leaders in in LA Unified School District and we we just really wanted to have our voices heard I think in all of this teacher voice is very important which is sort of a theme in the title of the report how will anyone know all of these hardships and experiences that that we're having if we're not heard and typically we're in the classroom we're inundated we're not at we're not at the table at the board meetings superintendents don't know who we are so part of it is just getting those people to listen those people who are supposed to be representing us at the city and state levels so so with that we we plan like a focus group just with our superintendent so he can hear our voices around teacher recruitment and retention and that one meeting sort of ballooned into a monthly occurrence where we go and and they just listen to us and and then our voices are what we say turns into action so one of the actions I know that we are working on now is can how do we make sure that administration administrators in schools understand what teachers of color are experiencing how do we make sure that in their preparation in inspiring administrator programs they are understanding the teacher voice and what diversity should look like and what a culturally affirming environment is so currently in LA we they have a 10 module program so we've been able to give input into one of those modules we're producing a video to have people listen to teachers talk about their experiences profiling teachers saying these are the things that happen to us in the workplace this is how this is why it's difficult for me to focus on my students when I'm struggling to to eat at night myself or why so many of us teachers of color pay a silent tax so if you are in the Latinx community or you're a bilingual teacher you're doing translation services and you're not being compensated or appreciated or in any way sort of professionally acknowledge for those extra services and you're not even they're not even monetized so I think our voices are important and having people listen and understand what we're experiencing can really help so that's what our work is we hear your voice and thank you for for coming here all the way from the west coast so before I turn it over to the audience for some q&a I first want to invite Michael ready from senator booker's office to join us at the table and he's going to have a few remarks but I want to introduce Michael as he makes his way over so Michael works on education and children's policy issues for senator booker and who is also our briefing co-sponsor senator booker from new jersey Michael was a third grade teacher so also an educator at kip spark academy in new work new jersey and worked as an associate director for achievement first schools in new haven canada cut so please welcome michael son okay hello i'm michael ready from the office of senator booker first i want to thank all of you for coming today thank you so much to lti and the organizations that are co-hosting this briefing thank you also so much the panelists for making the time i firstly just wanted to touch on some things that really resonated for me as a former teacher and someone who works for senator booker lene something that you brought up was just the reasons that you feel that so many people that you know that are teaching especially people of color that go into the classroom you know that commitment to push back against the systemic forces of oppression like racism like inequality and to to work in schools for kids right and that commitment is what inspired me to become a teacher and to do this work too when i was a senior in college senator booker actually then he was mayor booker came to visit my university and made a speech and he said you are the physical manifestation of a conspiracy of love that people whose names you don't even know who struggled for you who fought for you who sweated for you who volunteered for you you are here because of them do not forget that and that really spoke to me and so i ended up signing up to teach in newark and as an aside those of you who are considering your futures today i definitely encourage you to consider teaching new jersey is a great place to teach but i was i was lucky enough to be able to become a teacher and i was really grateful to be in the school that i was in and working with the people that i was working with in the families but for many of the people that came from low income families that were first in their families to go and graduate from college people of color teaching was not an option for them because they needed to pay their college bills and they needed to be able to support their families to get out of poverty and so so many of my friends could not enter teaching because of those barriers so that really resonated for me and another thing that you said kalila about you know the teaching conditions i mean teachers need to go to the bathroom during the day and and get mental health services and to be able to pay their bills and not have lead paint on their walls in their classroom so you know that really resonated for me and resonates for the people of newark and new jersey and so thank you so much for saying that um so today's briefing today touched on both the barriers to diversifying the educator workforce and the solutions that can be implemented at every level of policymaker making we know that obstacles to completing college including cost lack of access to high quality preparation and challenging teaching conditions all present barriers to diversifying the teaching profession we also know that there are a number of solutions to remove the barriers that stand in the way of a diverse educator workforce these include implementing policies and programs that provide access to high quality teacher preparation programs service scholarship and loan forgiveness programs are solutions to removing the barrier of college affordability these programs incentivize students to go into teaching and allow them to afford the high quality pathways necessary to be fully prepared and teach for the long haul by underwriting the cost of college this week the house committee on education and labor is debating the college affordability act their proposal to update the higher education act astronomical college costs and the debt that millions of students are burdened with upon graduation dissuade too many highly qualified graduates of color from entering the teaching profession senator booker's bill the strive act has a number of provisions to address college affordability and support high quality teacher education pathways first we have a number of administrative fixes that will improve administration of the nation service scholarship for prospective teachers that commit to teaching in under resourced schools in high need fields the teach grant as noted earlier since this program was created in 2007 the maximum award amount of four thousand dollars a year has not been increased and since 2013 the amount of money that people have been getting the teachers have been getting has actually been going down at a time when the cost of a four-year public college in state students has increased by three thousand dollars since the year 2007 and the amount of outstanding student loan debt has increased by nearly a trillion dollars in the same period it is necessary to increase the teach grant so it can support well-prepared and a diverse teacher workforce coupled with the need to increase the teach grant our bill also overhaul student loan forgiveness for teachers by providing incremental loan forgiveness for each year as a teacher serves in an under resourced school after seven years all remaining debt is completely canceled another important feature of senator booker's strive act is its support for the high quality and diverse preparation pathways of teacher residency programs it accomplishes this support by increasing funding for the teacher quality partnership grant program to 350 million dollars a year our bill ensures that early educators can access this program and other programs entitled to of the higher education act additionally the strive act increases funding allocated to the gustus f gusts hawkins centers of excellence program which serves to expand and support teacher preparation programs at msi's this is an important strategy to diversifying the educator workforce as has been previously noted msi's produce more teacher candidates of color than other colleges and as an aside i'll also encourage you all to go back to your bosses and talk to them about the future act as we know msi's including hbcu's really need funding that the federal government is not providing right now and there was an article in the new york times this week saying that many hbcu's are literally on the brink of financial ruin so please encourage the people you know to support the future act so msi's can get that funding as far as i know i think half of hbcu's or hbcu's prepare half of america's black teachers um finally the bill encourages diversity in the teaching profession by subsidizing teacher licensing and certification fees for low income teachers um again i'd like to thank our briefings participants lpi the co-host the co-sponsors um and i'd like to turn it back to amalia uh for questions from the audience well thank you so much and thank you for being a teacher and now bringing your teacher voice here to the to the capital thank you so i want to um ask michael denapoli uh to join me uh help me facilitate the q and a we have some mics in the audience so i'm i see the first hand in the back right there i figure we get right to it with time um so hi i'm andy um you all mentioned quite a few strategies that address um the leakages in the teacher pipeline from recruitment uh teacher prep retention um just put on like a state policy hat for a second if you had a magic wand um and maybe i shouldn't say magic but if you had a wand and you could pick one strategy that focuses on attracting teachers teacher prep and retention of teachers those three pieces together um because we know that you know we can focus on one area but we lose teachers elsewhere so if you could put if you could pick one strategy from each of those three buckets what would they be for you and and there's no right answer but i'm really curious as to how you would braid those three pieces looks like we have a taker go for it well i would say that the focus has to be on teacher preparation teacher preparation working with its k-12 partners to turn mid middle school and high school teachers on to teaching to get them college ready to get them into preparation programs that that's a critical part of the partnership between ed prep programs and k-12 that i don't think we talk about a lot how do we begin there um feeding more candidates into the pathway we've already talked a lot about teacher preparation how can we make sure that teacher preparation is equity oriented that it's inclusive so that candidates teacher candidates of color come into preparation programs for all of the reasons that we heard about and are actually equipped and empowered to make a difference in schools once they become teachers and then i was a dean for 10 years i always said that teacher preparation doesn't stop at graduation we need to be working with districts to make sure that there's a strong bridge from preparation into in service with all of those induction supports and mentoring supports again in partnerships with our district so that we set new teachers up for success over the long haul if i can add to that i would say um leadership certification and evaluation in terms of inspecting what you expect around cultural relevance the way you teach the way the way you prepare teachers the way you retain teachers um all our skin folk in our kinfolk and just having a policy of we need numbers of teachers of color and not quality piggybacking on my sister's statements about you can't just have um teacher preparation that stops when students graduate or stops when the residency is over or um recruitment of the right types of faculty if if i have a black woman from Beverly Hills that's been living a high life and drop her into Flatbush Brooklyn it's going to be a no-go right and so it's not okay just to put a face in front of the children who really don't have the pedagogical skills um to understand how to support those kids so the leadership is a critical critical component that spans all of those things principals are responsible for supporting students who want to become teachers into programs like pathways to teaching out of colorado which recruits a number of latinx and black students in the colorado school systems they are responsible for identifying quality teachers they're responsible for ongoing professional development of them and so state level policymakers um would do a disservice by not addressing that single population if there was no other legislation they could pass in their next session tightening their leadership certification ongoing professional development of school leaders and also evaluation of school leaders and superintendents through a lens of race equity through a lens of um culturally responsive and sustaining practice all right did you want to respond do we have other hands up any other questions hi hello my name is Dijon Verlana i work for senator shots um i had a quick question and dr herring this is i think primarily for you um but what are some of the ways that teacher programs or colleges are innovating teacher preparation or teacher prep programs so there are a number of different things that are being innovated including new models for the delivery of preparation in partnership with k-12 partners residency is almost a it's no longer a new concept but there are programs that are trying to think of how do we take some of the the best learnings that we have out of a residency model a clinical rich model and embed that within a program even if we don't have resources to pay residents right how can we ensure that the program is giving candidates those opportunities in authentic environments with live children so simulation is definitely a way to get candidates ready to be in the field with real students how can we make sure that those experiences are diverse and we're building sort of their cultural dexterity not taking for granted what the candidates look like but understanding that every single teacher needs to be prepared and culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy understanding how to access the knowledge within communities and really bring that to bear on teaching and learning in a way that's asset based right not deficit based programs are doing interesting things in partnership with communities so we always hear about ed prep programs working with k-12 partners they're bringing in community organizations and community voices to help fill that gap in terms of how do we connect with families how do we understand in parts of california what it means to be a migrant family and how does that how does that characteristic enter into the the teaching and learning environment or we even work in in parts of texas where being bicultural and binational is a factor that teachers need to understand and leverage in in the classroom so there are a number of innovative models going on and i think it's really about making sure that teachers are equipped sort of moving away from the model of of culture blind race blind language blind teacher prep and really saying no diversity has a place in education how can we begin to prepare teachers to leverage diversity as an asset i think we have a question over there and michael are we gonna have time i know we're coming to the end last this is the last question all right oh you got the last word all right hello i'm taylor where i'm a cbcf fellow actually on the ed and labor committee that might be a good or a bad thing right now um wanted to know your thoughts about how we get more minority students access to the teach grants i know that the amount is exceedingly low but also um black candidates are only five percent of all teach grant recipients so how do we put those grants into the hands of recipients if we are able to raise the funds i want a tough question i want to share the airtime but okay so um okay um so first and foremost information is key and again that's what goes to leadership development but also um our deans in colleges of education making sure that they have that information branched is an excellent organization to make sure information is being dispersed to candidates um i would also say we need to be mindful about what we legislate and what we put regulations around right now we have student loan forgiveness for teachers and it is a woefully inadequate problematic system that is working for just about no one yet we committed to teachers that they would you know work through for 10 years pay that coin back and then we're gonna forgive like two dollars of your hundred thousand dollar loan so not only increasing access to teach grants and combining with Pell grants but also at the state level instead of instead of focusing on the forgiveness front loading um either front loading forgiveness or front loading grant opportunities because asking people to slog through um becoming a quality teacher it doesn't happen in year one year two or year three um and then having a family and then starting to send your own kids to school and then you get loan forgiveness and you only had that four thousand dollar teach plus grant and even if it goes up to five or six it's really not a way to communicate to people that you're invested in them and so in addition to it sizably increasing increasing the grants making sure information is getting spread in a systematic way um you also need to think about what other levers you have to make sure teachers are being valued on the front end so so finances and mental health are not the biggest stress factor for them and instead is I know I have to pour in these children I have everything else what I need and the children are my focus well with that I'm going to turn to Michael to do the closing there you are I just wanted to thank everyone so much for coming to today's briefing and I really want to thank our amazing speakers um I'd like to thank Amalia Desiree Cassandra Linnae Kalila Mark and Michael and many thanks again to our co-host Senator Cory Booker and Congressman Donald Norcross and the House Tricoccus and of course to our wonderful co-sponsors the Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity the Center for American Progress the National Black Child Development Institute the Southern Education Foundation Teach Plus and You Need Us US and I just want to remind folks on your way out if you didn't grab materials on the way in it'll be on the table right that you walked past when you came in and in a week please less than a week please check our website we'll have today's entire event on our website and please do share it with your friends who are unable to make it today thanks again and have a great day