 Welcome. We're going to go ahead and get started. I'm sure that people will just flood in as we get rolling but we've got a live stream going so we want to make sure that we're not keeping those people hanging. This is such an important topic I know the room is going to fill to capacity because this is one of the most important issues in our society if not the most important. As I always say teachers are the only people the only profession that touches every other profession and so we don't care about who our teachers are and and how they're educating our children we're in trouble as a society. But before I you know get up on my soapbox I guess I should introduce myself I'm Elizabeth Burr-Moji I am the Dean of the School of Education and it is my pleasure to be asked to give a few remarks to introduce our panelists. I'm delighted to welcome you to this event that we're hosting we're co-hosting with the Education Policy Initiative and the Ford School of Public Policy. Oh and the Center for Racial Justice in the Ford School of Public Policy. This is why I have notes I'm not just riffing it so I don't forget any of the sponsors. Now tonight's event as you can see focuses on teacher diversity and its importance in education and particularly in student success. Even prior to the pandemic schools of education like ours here at the University of Michigan recognized the critical need to think innovatively about ways to attract individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds into the education profession. I don't know if you realize this and our panelists will I think underscore this for us but study after study over the course of many years has made clear that teachers who represent the identities of the students they teach and who know the communities in which they're teaching make a powerful difference in student learning even measured on standardized tests and in the well-being of their students. But unfortunately this research-based evidence is not has not translated easily into practice and I think our panelists are going to share some of the reasons why that is. Now today the need is of even greater importance as states districts and schools across the country are struggling with profound teacher shortages so this was already a problem and now we're struggling to get anyone into classrooms to teach and so this is compounding the problem and this disproportionately affects our nation's urban school districts. There and of course we know that our urban school districts are much more likely to serve black and indigenous students and that really creates a bigger problem for us as we think about our goal of achieving racial and ethnic equity. So with this in mind we're honored to be joined by and I'm going to have you wave your hands as I say your names Dr. Seth Gershenson from American University, Constance Lindsey from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Michael Hansen from the Brookings Institute who and I think as a collective recently published a book on this very important topic. Now in the book Teacher Diversity and Student Success Why Racial Representation Matters in the Classroom they argue that teacher diversity should be seen as an element of teacher quality. I love this point this is really really important point not just a nice thing to diversify but this is about teacher quality and that policies focus on improving teacher quality need to explicitly take race into consideration. The authors address the historic and contemporary factors that have kept people of color out of teaching and highlight emerging research showing the significant long lasting impact of same race teacher exposures particularly for black and Latino students. We're very excited to have these three esteemed scholars with us here in person today and we're thrilled that there are people joining us live stream but we're sad for you that you don't get to meet these folks in person. Now as many of you are aware and maybe even came for this reason Matt Truett Dr. Matt Ron felt associate professor of the University of Michigan School of Education was originally scheduled to moderate the Q&A portion of today's event. Unfortunately he's unable to attend in person due to illness he might be out there live streaming but we want to acknowledge all the work he put into help organizing the event. Fortunately in his place we have the esteemed Dr. Christina Wyland who will moderate on the fly she's done this put this all together. She is an associate professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan School of Education and has a courtesy appointment here in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She's also the faculty co-director of the Education Policy Initiative which you know is what happens to you when you're the co-director you become the moderator at the last minute. Her incredible research focuses on the effects of early childhood interventions and public policies on children's development especially on children from low income families. Dr. Wyland was named in both the 2022 and 2023 RHSU, Edges Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Don't anybody ask what RHSU stands for because it's not in my notes which is an annual list by Education Week that ranks the university based scholars in the United States who did the most in the previous year to shape educational practice and policy. And I know firsthand that Chris has like traveled across the country trying to help our policy makers understand the importance of universal preschool or early childhood education. So we're very grateful for her grateful for Matt if you're watching at home and really grateful to our three panelists who I think know that they're going to come up to the chairs here and I'm going to turn it over to them as you listen please know there will be time for questions at the end note cards are being distributed where's Nicole where's Nicole Wagner there she is she by the way should get a shout out she helped to write these remarks so she didn't give herself a shout out but let's everybody give round of applause for Nicole so it's amazing and and does such detailed work to put these events together so she probably has the note cards right and or someone has the note cards and they're distributed so please write your questions down we want to make sure you know we keep you orderly and pass them to the center aisle and then those who are tuning in virtually can type your questions into the chat and somebody will be monitoring those and we are fortunate to have students who are going to help us with Q&A tonight each of whom is studying various aspects of the teacher pipeline and like many of you care deeply about ensuring that all students have access to high quality teachers could we have those students raise their hands just yeah oh there oh so Matt Truett came for more than just you know to visit with Matt Ronfell so without further ado I welcome our presenters and I think we're going to have Seth Gershenson help us get started thank you so much for the kind introduction and for the great hospitality from the Ford School and the Ed School here at Michigan really is an honor to be here talking about our book and I want to get started by showing an updated figure this has some I think two years of new data that was not in our book with updated NAEP math scores that are nationally representative test scores I just picked an age group at random it's given for different subjects in different grades but this is the age nine math scores and the darkest blue dots are the average the national average for white students and the the middle two shades of blue are the averages for black and for Hispanic students and what you see is that as far back as the NAEP was administered in 1978 there's a noticeable achievement gap between black and Hispanic and black and white students and the gaps narrowed a little bit in the 80s and 90s but it stayed pretty sizable and robust over time and then at the very end you see the first ever decline for all groups in NAEP scores in 2022 and that is the much much discussed and much fussed about learning loss during COVID and even though all groups were affected if you squint a little bit you'll see that the black and Hispanic trends are a little bit of a steeper decline than for white students so not only did did all students lose a little bit of learning during the COVID and school closures but this decline was greater for some groups that that widened the black white and black Hispanic achievement gaps and so this gap has been well known all the way back since the Coleman report and a lot of effort and attention and money and resources have gone into addressing the gap and and that's part of what motivates our book the other thing I think that motivates our our folks on education is just that access to quality human educated sorry access to quality education is a human right and and it's important because it facilitates upward socioeconomic mobility it facilitates the American dream and moreover it benefits society as a whole there's what economists will call positive externalities of a highly educated society other people benefit as well so these persistent disparities are are troubling for these reasons and the fact that they exist still suggests that we're systematically preventing or depriving certain groups from reaching their potential and and so squandering that potential is a real problem and our thesis then which which the dean alluded to you know being teachers are being very important we strongly believe and and I think the research supports that all students should have access to effective schools effective teachers are a necessary condition for having effective schools not the only necessary condition but but a necessary condition and then what is really new and and is the thesis of our book is that if we're going to talk about have a uni universally effective teaching force well that means that the teaching force has to be effective for all students not just some students and all students need access to that effective teaching force and if the teaching force is truly going to be universally effective then it must be diverse and representative of the student body it serves so I I want to provide some definitions then about what we mean that these terms representative and and diverse sometimes get thrown around interchangeably but I do think there's a subtle difference that that's worth making even if we sometimes use them interchange interchangeably in the book so when we talk about representation or having a representative teaching force what we mean is that the socio demographics of the teaching force resemble that of the student body now that's subtly different from talking about a diverse teaching force or diversity in general in the sense that diversity just means that there's a variety of socio demographic backgrounds represented and and I truly believe that both things are important a lot of the the race match effects that we'll talk about in a bit have to do with representation but diversity is important as well and something we we argue in the book that I think it's overlooked in these broader debates about teacher diversity sometimes is that white students also benefit tremendously from exposure to teachers of different backgrounds and different ethnicities and things like that and then a side pet peeve I guess is that an individual can't be diverse diverse is referring to the teaching force as a whole so those are some some definitions to sort of frame our conversation today now I showed you one graph with the achievement gap over time that's one motivating factor another motivating factor is that like why did we write this book well the teaching force is not at all representative and and in some ways it's sort of gotten less representative over time as the student body has grown more diverse so these data from 2015 and this is the figure in the book if you look at more recent data white students actually no longer constitute a majority in US public schools it actually dipped a little bit below 50% however the teaching force is right around 80% white and so right there you see this lack of representation there's this disconnect between teachers backgrounds and the students and then the background of the students that they are teaching on the other hand black teachers Hispanic teachers and to a lesser extent Asian teachers are all underrepresented relative to the to the student body okay so there are some teachers of color though and and for sort of setting the the background for a lot of the policies we're gonna talk about in the second half of the talk it's worth noting where do teachers of color work first thing to note is that generally they are not evenly distributed by any means across schools or across districts or across the country in fact almost a third of schools literally have zero teachers of color that is not true of students a lot of these schools that have zero teachers of color do have students of color another dimension of where teachers of color tend to work is in the characteristics and the resources of the school itself and I could have picked a lot of different numbers to sort of make this point but just for the side I'll show the percentage of the student body in the school that's eligible for free or reduced price lunch it's kind of a crude marker for the income level or socioeconomic status of the neighborhood the schools in and the student body that it serves on average teachers of color are teaching in schools where the student body is more than 70 percent free or reduced price lunch eligible again that's a measure of poverty or socioeconomic status alternatively for white teachers the average white teacher is in a school where only 50 percent of the student are eligible for free or reduced price lunch so a pretty sizable difference there and and this again this is a proxy for school resources school needs resources in the neighborhood things like that it's also a proxy though for the working conditions in the school and and a lot of these schools have higher teacher turnover for reasons that are related to funding resources etc. and Matt brought France not here today but he's written one of the famous studies about the consequences of high teacher turnover high teacher turnover is problematic for everybody it harms students and student achievement but it also has not gone affects to other teachers because when a teacher leaves you know earlier than expected or something like that well then that puts a burden on other teachers in the school to pick up the slack whether that means changing the grade level of teaching to fill a hole or you know taking over a mentoring role or some other job it just sort of creates chaos and and extra work in the school and because of this if you look at the raw data and this is another sort of common misconception that we try to address in the book if you look at the raw data teacher turnover rates or teacher attrition from the profession is higher for black teachers than for white teachers for example however this is a misleading statistic because the second that you adjust for school resources and school composition and the actual schools teachers are working in that difference goes away so in other words if you make within school comparisons of teacher turnover there's no difference between white teachers and teachers of color in those turnover rates okay so Constance and Mike will talk a little bit more about sort of why this unequal sorting happens but for now I'll just say to sort of you know what your appetite for that discussion that there's at least two different things happening one of them is arguably positive which which you might call the draw of home there's some papers that use that in the title that teachers like to teach near or in the districts they grew up in whether it's to be close to family or because they want to give back to the community or whatever that's a choice that they make a selection choice they make however we also know and talk in the book quite a bit about the documented discrimination in the teacher labor market both in the hiring process retention process etc that also contributes to this pattern okay so you know we need why do we need a policy roadmap well a few reasons and and again my colleagues will get into some of the specific policy implications but at a general level a lot of current policy and a lot of current discussion gets tripped up by what we consider to be sort of common but not common-sense pitfalls and I'll and I'll give you three here and and again sort of think about these as we go through our conversation but one is that a lot of times we aim for the wrong goal or what we call an incomplete goal and an example of this is that the goals not diversity for diversity's sake right diversity again is a necessary but not sufficient condition to getting to where we want to go so you know one way that that could play out is that if you if you were to hire a few more teachers of color or something an increased teacher diversity but they are all going to the same school well that might be good for that particular school but for the broader labor market it's making no difference and it might even be bad if you're poaching people away from other districts furthering the lack of representation there and concentrating it in a handful of places another challenging part of this policy discussion is that for the pipeline reasons that we're going to talk about the timeline here for a lot of a lot of our goals is a very long-ranging long-run time horizon so this is a marathon not a sprint and it's easy to get discouraged if you don't get those objectives right away and so we need to have that mindset that that a lot of this is a marathon that will take a while because to become a teacher you have to major in education to major in education you have to enroll in college to enroll in college you have to graduate high school and there's a chicken and egg problem here with a lot of the stuff given what we know about the impacts of access to racial representation in the classroom which I'll summarize on the next slide before I turn this over to Constance and then the other thing is that a lot of times and related to the issue of diversity not being the goal for for diversity's sake is that sometimes policies can possibly be good for one school but bad for the field as a whole or bad for the profession as a whole and I mentioned sort of poaching candidates from one district to another district and not only is this possibly wasting resources and sort of inefficient but it's also probably taking teachers of color away from the places where their most value-add is or the biggest value-add is because they are moving away from places where they're underrepresented and these are some examples of sort of common mistakes that we observed out in the wild and we thought that sort of the time is right and the energy and the interest is right to provide a sort of non-technical hopefully intuitive and broad overview of all this stuff in one place packaging it with clear policy directions for for interested parties at all levels from from the federal level to the local level parents to principles and so on so we'll give you a little bit overview of the book now and you know and then I look forward to conversation and Q&A but chapter one talks about just the empirical evidence on representation and its impacts on students and the three of us have have contributed a little bit to this academic literature Consis and I have a well-known paper about the long run effects of having a same-race teacher in kindergarten actually influencing high school graduation rates ten years later and college enrollment ten years later and that paper it's it's good timing it just came out a couple months ago in the American Economic Journal of Economic Policy A.J. policy and there we use two different data sets one of them is the experimental data from the Tennessee star class size experiment we also use administrative data from North Carolina totally replicate the findings in both data sets that they're very similar and and there's this really robust result that even one exposure even early in elementary school has these really important long run effects effects on the stuff that we ultimately care about high school graduation college enrollment and so those long run effects are there and it's also there for all the intermediate steps along the way along the way access to a same-race teacher particularly for black students reduces absences reduces chronic absenteeism reduces suspensions Consis Lindsey and Cassie Hart have a nice paper about that suspensions obviously the several sites that show that they boost test scores and then there's other sort of softer type stuff that you might not even think about like it increases students own expectations of what they're capable of doing it changes their perceptions of whether or not their teacher cares about them things that are so vital to having a good student teacher relationship and what leads to good teaching right is good relationships and trust and and other sort of practical decisions like assignments a special ed education class or assignments a gifted and talented classes and things like that so so these evidence this evidence on race match effects or same-race teacher effects or whatever you want to call them are well documented in many different data sets for all these different outcomes across the spectrum of things that we care about and even though our book is focused on K-12 education I also want to point out that it's not limited the K-12 the same thing as seen in university professors same thing is seen in law school professors same thing is seen in pre-k classrooms attributing misbehavior to students and it's it's not just education NBA referees give more fouls there are mortality effects of representation in emergency rooms and medical clinics and law enforcement and all these different settings so this idea that a part of part of what makes a workforce a quality workforce is diversity and representation and yes our focus on teachers but but I think it's worth making the point that this is bigger than just K-12 teachers so with that I want to turn it over to Constance thanks I won't stand fully back here can't see me so so what we're really trying to say here is that we have to think about this very quickly right we have to increase exposures to teachers of color so not just thinking about necessarily the number the numbers that are attributed to a particular group but making sure that students of color actually have teachers of color and they have the opportunity to be exposed to those teachers and so basically what this graph is showing here on my left hand side is the chances that students of color have sort of over the course of kindergarten to third grade to actually experience a teacher of color right and so this sort of underscores this point that it's not just necessarily diversity there's also representation and how we distribute teachers and so for example in the North Carolina data that we use in a couple of our papers over half of the black students never have an opportunity to have a black teacher even though in some places in North Carolina the the teacher workforce is very diverse and so so focusing simply on diversity isn't enough we can increase representation that's one avenue but one of the things that we do in the book is we also talk about other ways to hit these goals as well and Seth sort of alluded to this but you know at its heart this is really a K-12 access issue right there are racialized gaps in academic achievement that happen early in students careers that then prevent them themselves from becoming teachers and so this really is a cycle that is going to take some policy action and some strategies to fix so one of the things that we want to underscore is how diversity benefits students and we'd love to sort of expand further upon this when we have our discussion but we identify sort of three broad buckets of mechanisms that that sort of sort of demonstrate why having a teacher of color for students of color and for all students makes a difference in their outcomes so the first is raising teachers expectations of students abilities and success and Seth alluded to some of his work on that but basically teachers of color in particular expect more and predict higher you know future outcomes for students there's also this sort of role for culturally responsive pedagogies right offering more inclusive and relevant content and instruction there's some there's a really nice RCT about culturally responsive pedagogies for Latinx students but there's plenty of qualitative evidence sort of around this idea that you need culturally responsive pedagogies the third sort of bucket is just potentially providing a role model or authority figure who looks like them perhaps that can provide you with exposure to different careers or other opportunities that you might not have conceived for yourself before that's also true when we think about women and stem and gender so we think these are mechanisms that sort of the buckets of the literature fall into right but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive but sort of depending on what you want to attack there's different policy implications right you can think about how you might design and think about different policies based on which of these sort of mechanisms you want to approach and here we also want to underscore that diversity also benefits white students which is super relevant right for our current political moment but you know students show more empathy more tolerance for people of color white students and for folks of other backgrounds when they have the opportunity to be experienced to experience diverse teachers and diverse colleagues and counterparts so we also wanted to sort of take a step back and think about some of the unique histories in the United States that have led to the current the current situation with regard to the workforce so you know a lot of the data that we look at is sort of a snapshot of what's currently happening with the workforce but it is the sort of accumulation of policies and practices over time that have led us led us to where we are today and so it's really important to acknowledge and it kind of varies in terms of what particular which particular groups you're talking about there's been a lot written on what happened to black teachers after Brown versus board where you have you know this policy of integration that has this well depends on how you think about this unintended or intended consequence of getting rid of all the black teachers right and so that that that removes some social capital in the community from teachers who then beget teachers right and there's similar or parallel histories for other groups you can think about Asian and Latinx segregation in the Southwestern US and then the really unfortunate history of Native American boarding schools where students are removed from their homes and then there isn't a role for Native American teachers and so so again it's teacher diversity today is just dependent on non-white students prior access to quality schooling and integration policies that would you know allow them both to see teachers that look like them but also to develop the skills to access college to actually enter the teacher workforce themselves and so this is the history is really important when we start to think about sort of this pipeline into teaching right and we know that there are leaks along that that pipeline so again you have the sort of K-12 college access issue which leads to lower graduation rates lower college enrollment lower lower college completion we also see differences in terms of the number of education majors of color there's documented work and research on racial disparities disparities in licensure testing and sort of connecting that to the history around Brown versus Board licensure testing was used to exclude black teachers some of the you know progenitors of the current current licensure tests when it gets to graduates who enter teaching they are less diverse than the folks who majored in education so there's some attrition happening there and then like we talked about when you look at the raw data there's differential attrition for teachers of color before I was at UNC I spent a couple of years at the Urban Institute we put together a data there's a couple of data visualizations on teacher diversity that you can look up but one we did was we looked at the relative whiteness of schools of education with regard to the overall university populations right so it is the case that in most places predominantly white institutions have school school of education schools of education have less diverse student bodies in the universities they're housed in so I went ahead and pulled up University of Michigan turns out the school award the school of public policy though so that's okay we're at the school event not super diverse but not it's not super diverse but representation you're kind of okay okay all right well it's been too much time on that you can go it's iPad data we'll just skip right over that you can look at that in your there's a couple of graphs you can play around with on that data but the point is is that in terms of this stage of the pipeline the the the universities and colleges that are producing the teachers of color are the nation's minority serving institutions so the HBCU's tribal colleges hispanic serving institutions are at this point producing more than their fair share of our teacher of color workforce and from there Mike is going to talk you through the rest of the pipeline thank you Constance so so what we've just described what Constance has very aptly described is this this history of of discrimination in public schools and exclusion which leads to a lower supply of teachers and then also the description of the leaky pipeline what this sort of what this amounts to is that when we put all these pieces together is we see a picture of of slow but you know there is some steady progress but it's you know over the course of about 30 odd years somewhat disconcerting process on the diversity of the workforce and this this rep this is the diversity share in the teacher workforce the this is by different non-white groups so whites are excluded because they would be at the very high end but the the green triangles across the top here these are this is a declining trend among black teacher representation and so the purple squares that are slowly heading up this is Latino share growth and so that's the largest improvement in representation that we're seeing over the years and in recent years we do have increasing two or more race representation so biracial teachers so that's really the only major points of growth throughout this 30 30 year period so overall the teacher workforce is diversifying but it's at a a fairly slow rate and part of our thesis is to raise awareness of the fact that we're really quite there we're too slow and that we do we need to be doing a lot more to really get to where we need to be and so what we argue is that we need to be making diversity a major policy priority and the way that we do this in our book is that we frame we feel that we must frame teacher diversity as an element of teacher quality okay and an important thing here is that we don't see we do see having diversity and being culturally competent we do see these as important elements of teacher quality it's not the only thing that's important about teachers and teacher quality there's of course other things that we do care about content knowledge we do care about instruction but we do care and the the research backs this up that we do that having diverse teachers does make a long-term impact on students as well okay and so what we argue that we should be doing is that we should be promoting and tracking diversity among both teachers and students and that that should be a a tangible way that that states and districts are are following and trying to and trying to do something about about diversity in their workforce and creating exposures for their students okay we also feel that this is an important that this that making diversity is important and specifically this framing of diversity of diversity being an element of teacher quality this is an important framing because it is useful to unite these disparate interests in education policy and reform to try to take advantage of a policy window here we feel that our work is is an attempt to try to synthesize two disparate pieces of literature one that really has heavily emphasized teacher diversity for diversity's sake and another that has you know heavily relied on promoting teacher quality and and oftentimes these two camps are seen as adversarial and that and that are working at odds and it's often portrayed as a trade-off our argument is that this is not a trade-off but that these things are complementary and that we should be looking to form an alliance here and an alliance built around diversity being an element of quality i think we feel is both empirically supported and is one that could help sort of bring the individual groups resources together to create some real policy change also there is a discussion in the book where we do highlight some of the legal constraints on policy action with teacher race sort of a very short summary there is that whenever whenever there are high stakes employment decisions that are being made there are understandably some some greater legal i guess legal jeopardy that we need to think about also thinking about potentially looking at an end of affirmative action and similar kinds of uses of race in in decisions that could potentially put some jeopardy on some of these policies however they're as we're going to describe this is the employment decisions themselves are only a small share of all of the policies that we are advancing in this discussion and so there's we have a lot of different policies that focus on how are we deploying teachers how are we creating and engineering more opportunities for exposures to happen and our argument is that those kinds of decisions aren't going to be aren't going to face that same type of legal jeopardy for in classrooms and in schools okay in chapter six is really our the the forward-looking chapter and really trying to make sense of how we can promote use use what we know about teacher diversity to promote well-grounded policy responses to address these issues and we put these three we bucket these things into these three categories number one we argue that we need to open the tap on bringing more teachers of color into schools number two we argue that we should be doing more to engineer opportunities for exposures to teachers of color and number three is we want to develop more cultural competency among white teachers who are the dominant teachers in the workforce in terms of numbers all of these three things are things that we should be doing some things from everything now we don't expect every single school or every district to be doing everything simultaneously but we do encourage you know school leaders we encourage teacher training programs to look at the various lists of things that we've put together and try to identify things that they can do to move the ball forward and often times when we have made discussions about teacher diversity usually a lot of the focus is really right here on this first bucket this is an important thing this is an important element and this is increasing diversity and inclusion that's all it's all very good and necessary however we also feel as Seth has mentioned earlier this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve many of the things that we feel like are possible by utilizing the evidence to really inform our practices here and so we really feel that numbers two and three are really where we should also have a lot more policy focus and policy conversations i mean we still need to keep the conversations going on bucket number one but two and three are also critical there as well a couple of exemplars that we want to put up is that this is the first was an executive order from the state of north carolina a couple years back that talks about establishing a task force to promote more diversity and inclusion among teachers there here on the on the district side we have this dream program this is a district level grow your own program in north carolina focused on latino teachers and this is these are a couple of different policies that are being implemented that are trying to raise awareness of the necessity of of a diverse teacher workforce and these are of course not the only ones out there there are there are many education trust just recently put out a a study that highlights i think it was about eight or so states that are they're calling their their leaders in in educator diversity now what we can do to be taking action here is we're trying to think of different policy levers that we can do and right here just very quickly i'm just putting a very short illustrative list of goals and ways to make progress on these on the teacher diversity so first off the three there are the three things that we list here are reversing trends in teacher prep enrollment of course many in this room may be aware that we've had declines in teacher teacher training programs over the last couple of decades and that's something that's very worrying it's contributing to teacher shortages and those are the types of things we want to reverse those trends in and at the same time we also want to increase the representation of of non-white teachers in the workforce as well or in that candidate pipeline to become teachers later we also want to decrease turnover among teachers of color through improved working conditions through additional support through additional mentoring onboarding etc we also want to include diversity and overall teacher workforce strategies an example here is one coming from pennsylvania that looks at the diversity of the workforce as something that is integral and just as important as having a qualified teacher workforce that's just as important as making sure that all schools all schools even in your disadvantaged areas are having quality teachers in their staffing those classrooms and finally on the tracking progress side what can we be doing to make sure that we're that we're moving towards these goals is making data available on teacher representation publishing them putting them and not just sort of at a high aggregate level but also at these finer more granular more granular points so looking at school districts and even into individual schools that would be very valuable college prep scorecards an important element is teacher tracking teacher diversity from a student's perspective so not just looking at how many how many teachers of color do we have in a classroom but but also looking at for each student how frequently are is each individual student having an opportunity to have an exposure to to teachers of color and so and that's not just necessarily for students of color that's for all students our argument is that all students have can benefit from this and so in conclusion our thesis is that teacher diversity is a key to promoting more equitable education here in the United States representation is is part of a healthy democracy those political scientists in the room they know about representative political you know political bureaucracies and we are and our argument is that public schools should be part of that is part of the bureaucratic system here in the U.S. they should be part of reflecting back the diversity of of the constituents and the citizens that they serve also more diverse school systems are going to be different school systems because they are going to be more attuned to the different interests of the of the stakeholders that they are serving and and finally we have reason to believe that as we as we pull the lever on diversity there are good reasons to believe that diversity teacher diversity can help promote diversity among school leaders that can also help promote diversity among among policymakers school board members it also helps and which also helps to promote more equitable allocations of resources for example across different school and school communities it helps to empower different marginalized communities we feel like there's that that pulling on the lever for teacher diversity is just one step in a in a multifaceted process that can help open up opportunities and and lower inequalities for communities across the country and with that we will say thank you for inviting us out we are we're very pleased to be here and we'll move forward to the to the panel discussion Chris thank you what i really love about this book is how it brings together so many different disciplines and perspectives so we get a sense of teacher perspectives we get kids families we get economics political science get qualitative education research in the book and so i guess to kick off our moderated q and a session one thing i wanted to hear more about is what it would look like practically when i am a parent and i go to a website and i'm trying to learn about a district what would it look like to see information about this and i will turn to let's um so go ahead if you want to take it uh well i think that i think generally figures are better than numbers and i think that the work that Constance led at the urban institute while she was there for those dashboards with like universities and colleges of education i think a similar dashboard could be created at the at the k-12 level both for districts and for individual elementary schools and i also wonder i mean the districts could do it themselves if they are slow to do it i also wonder if there's a private sector market for that the way that there's a private sector market for like ranking school quality and things like that based on publicly available information because a lot of this information is publicly available at places like the common core of data national center for education statistics and at other places and you were doing this at the urban institute Constance so what did you what were some of the thoughts around audience for that work that you were yeah that's that's a really good question so so a lot of that data is like national data and i was trying to put together a few different data sources to to to make things more transparent but districts could really do a lot of very creative stuff here because they already have to do report cards right and so it's it shouldn't be that much to add it as a metric that can be on a report card how diverse is your you know your faculty in comparison to you know the neighboring community or the students that are at your school or whatever the case may be i would say that a lot of the research that we do in this area comes from personnel files so the information is there it's just a question of making it publicly available for folks to use i also wanted to hear a little bit more about mechanisms and you talked about several around why you think teachers of color are having effects both on kids of color as well as on white students and i'm going to add a little bit of something i'm not sure i saw in the book which is do you think it's different based on the age of the child so it's pre-k different than the 11th grade in terms of what the mechanisms are whoever wants to i'll lead off but i know that this is an area that seth is very very passionate about so first to to your well as i think it was constants she described the the slide where there are sort of three general buckets of mechanisms one is the sort of the role modeling effect that is if i see a person that looks like me in a in a position of authority that helps me to realize that that's a position that potentially i could aspire to in the future then there is the cultural cultural competency or you know the culturally responsive pedagogy that is we're going to tailor our messaging or offer some you know sort of offering or reaching kids in a way that sort of speaks to the kind of background knowledge that they're more comfortable with and more familiar with in order to effectively teach this lesson to them and then the third is based on teacher expectations and so teacher expectations is you know sort of the the pigmalion the the pigmalion effect where um if i believe that you're going to aspire well and i treat you like you're going to aspire well you rise to meet those expectations i think there's there's good reason to believe that all three of these these mechanisms are playing a role there's a a recent study that david blazer published that was a randomized control trial in some fourth and fifth grade classrooms etc the evidence that he puts forward i think what i felt found pretty compelling and his argument is that a lot of this came down to he did find these role modeling he did find these excuse me the gender matching or excuse me the racial matching effects but most of these were mediated through actual differences in practices and differences in things like growth mindset among teachers to me that feels like this is on those two ladder buckets so it's not necessarily the the role model of the person in front of you which i do think does matter but but perhaps the largest effects in in my view seem to be coming from those two ladder buckets especially in and to answer your first question you're that your second part of your question about do they differ by age and i think my my sense is that the role modeling and this is perhaps just sort of me my interpretation of the evidence i think the role modeling effects are probably most consequential on sort of the initial exposure to a role model but not necessarily sort of ongoing whereas i feel like the teacher expectations effects i feel like the differential practices and tailoring instruction effects i feel like those are more permanent they make more of a difference over time i don't know if that directly answers your question but i feel like that's helps a little bit uh-huh yeah no it does i think um just we don't have evidence on some of these pieces as a as an early childhood researcher that to me was one of the questions as we work in places like boston around the country they have a diverse teacher workforce you know what exactly are the mechanisms we wanted to to push um could i just add one small thing i think mike answered the the main part of it but this thing about like at what grade level are they most important i almost wonder if if that's missing a bigger point which is that even kid by kid different mechanisms are going to be more important for one student than another because of what's happening at home or because of their prior experiences at school or things like that so you know for for someone who truly lacks college role models outside of school well that's going to be even more important school because that's the main the teacher's the main potential role model um whereas another student who does have role models at home but has had trust issues with teachers say well then some of the other channels might be more important right so um it it might vary across grades but i think even within grades it varies across students certainly yeah i think it also practically comes into play when you think about if i'm a principal and this person could teach first grade or third grade who am i putting where and why um around deployment yeah and i'll just add to that too it also you'd also to think about the outcomes that we're trying to impact right so to that first or third grade question if it is the case that at third grade you get placed into a special ed or get placed into gifted and we know that black teachers serve um you know are less likely to assign students to maybe stigmatized disabilities or whatever the case is it might be that third grade decision-making point that might be more important um so i think it depends also to one the outcomes that we're thinking about um talk to us a little bit also about um interaction between race and gender so as we're thinking about individual students um to to Seth's point what do we know about how this matters differentially um for girls and boys so i can start and then i think i probably have some thoughts on that too um so i'll say in in if in the studies like the few studies that we have where we use um the administrative data from north carolina um one of the groups that experiences the largest benefits um from having a same race teacher not necessarily same gender but same race um are persistently low income black boys and so um cassie heart cassie heart and i have a paper where we look at discipline and we find that the the huge effects for reduced rates of exclusionary discipline are for those black boys who um experience uh who have who are designated as free and reduced price lunch the entire time they're in um they're in elementary school so i don't know what kathrin nicole moors here her her measure of poverty um and we see that we see outsize effects in the long term paper and then we have another working paper and so um we don't have the power to look at that in terms of uh a race and gender match but my sense is that um for those uh boys in particular who we might consider um especially disadvantaged um being matched to a same race teacher has outsize effects and you know black men um only make up two percent of of um educators so the gaps are even you are very large yes um talk to us too about what teacher education programs can do i think that's something that obviously we have the dean of um school education here where we'd love to hear your thoughts um more on what uh institutions like ours can do yeah so i think there's a couple of things so i think um one um to focus on strategies just to diversify the folks who come in the door um i think that could be done both through the diversity of faculty but also through um uh offering more diverse curriculum so you know to the extent that some students of color want to go into teaching it's for you know social justice reasons and so you would hope that that would be reflected in the curriculum that's offered um i also think another promising area are these grow your own programs that are partnerships um with districts you know districts know what they need and i've seen ones that aren't even necessarily focused on teacher diversity but they end up being very diverse so you know maybe they're focused on developing special educators or you know well bilingual teachers or something like that so really partnering with districts to sort of capture and train people for what they actually need i think is super important and working to uh to make it easy to be a teacher so like even simple things like uh maybe offering classes off campus say you know using a high school in the evening or something uh that make the commute easier for people that are also working um and just sort of like lowering the barriers to entry um in general one thing i i want to briefly highlight is is i think there's an opportunity with student teaching that often goes under appreciated um uh some work from dan goldhaver and co-authors um they've looked at the role of student teaching and how it influences um you know where teachers get jobs etc one of the things they highlight is that um many teachers or many student teachers they are much more likely to teach in more affluent settings they are much more likely to um and sort of comparing sort of student teaching placements in you know visa v the first job placements there's usually a pretty significant reduction in uh poverty levels a significant um excuse me increase in poverty levels and um other markers of that type and so um i i in my view um especially considering that many of these teachers that are coming specifically out of formal teacher training programs they are just you know heavily white so 85 90 percent in uh in many places um that we should be looking at that student teaching opportunity as an opportunity for them to be trained in settings that they're more likely to be teaching in or even if they're not going to be teaching in those types of settings at least give them an opportunity that this is an opportunity where you can work with um different groups of students that you have uh different students from different backgrounds english learners um students of color etc and that you can use that as an opportunity while they're you know while they're student teaching while they're still teachers in training while they have support staff um to to use that as an opportunity to increase their their um you know their capacity to work with students of diverse backgrounds because i think oftentimes that is a real missed opportunity talk to us a little bit about lowering the barriers and the kind of political arguments against it right so what would you say to someone who says uh if you take away the teacher certification exams which by the way i know some states did in the pandemic so it's already happening um but if you do that uh the quality of the workforce um will decline and students won't benefit well i uh mike has a a paper on this that i think shows that and maybe he should answer this because he wrote the paper but uh my reading of it is that for uh for black teachers that might have a couple points lower of a licensure score their black students actually do better in the classroom than similar students with a white teacher at a few points better and this comes back sort of full circle to the argument that racial representation is part of quality right we're not saying that licensure doesn't matter or that experience doesn't matter or the content knowledge doesn't matter all these things matter right but the thing is they matter in similar ways and so that you know five point boost on the test from from having a same-race teacher actually makes up for or more than makes up for you know the effect of a few points lower on a licensure score um so i think that's the the simplest argument is that um even if you aren't trading off a tiny bit you're more than making up for it by the gains you get from diversity um and then the the second point is that in some sense and this i think builds on on the paper in mike's uh built on the result in mike's papers that one or two points doesn't matter if anything just like like driver's license and stuff like that we're using these tests to keep the absolute worst drivers off the road right we're not trying to like grade who the best driver is you're trying to keep the absolute worst driver off the road and you can still use these licensure tests to keep someone who's going to be a wreck in the classroom out of the classroom and if by lowering the threshold a few points is going to increase diversity by getting uh some more teachers of color above that threshold but you're still keeping the really really bad teachers out then it seems like a no-brainer um to to lower the threshold a little bit yeah thank you seth and and also um part of it is that these tests have various components to them you know like there's multiple choice pieces there's more of an instructional pedagogy piece and and in some states it so states are all over the map and how you know where their threshold in order to qualify for licensure is in this particular state and so so there isn't a lot of consistency there's you know sort of no established like best practice of what is of what should be the threshold and um and it's also very very true that based on the evidence that we saw using in our study is that each of these components you know whether it's the multiple choice content piece versus the pedagogy piece they actually signal they can signal signal effectiveness in slightly different ways for different test populations and so for example the the one area that was most weighted heavily this was using North Carolina data the one that was weighted most heavily and and skewed in terms of awarding teachers and weren't in helping teachers to actually be licensed that was that had a much higher distribution of test scores among white teacher applicants whereas the one that had whereas the one that was sort of down weighted in North Carolina's policies it had a more equitable distribution between white and black teacher teacher candidates and so i'm not sure if that was intentional probably probably more likely it was an accident of just input policy implementation but but we can look at these these different these different test components in various ways like if we look at the what are the effects of these test components and why not just sort of allow a high score on one component to actually compensate for a low score on another area that's one way to do it potentially we could you know sort of use these licensure tests potentially as one way of getting to a license getting to a teaching license maybe another way of getting to it is having two or three years as a teacher's aid or as a substitute teacher maybe that's an alternate way around or maybe another way around maybe to have some kind of college transcript audit and if you have a sufficient number of of you know credit bearing courses in you know education pedagogy cultural studies etc maybe that's another way around it and so i don't think that i don't see any reason to believe that ETS and the praxis exam or the ed tpa or whatever whatever licensure exam that we're doing i don't see a reason to put sort of all of our eggs in that one basket when i think there's many different ways that we can look at and signal teacher quality and that's really what we care about yeah and just to put a little cap on that a lot of those things don't predict effectiveness so you know one of the things we talk about in the book is this in an industrial psychology or organization whatever it is they call it the diversity validity dilemma so you know a lot of times if you do have an interest entrance exam in an industry it will exhibit achievement gaps but those entrance exams actually predict performance so that's a whole different question in teaching these things don't necessarily tell us who's going to be effective so do we need them at all so that's a little bit more on the radical side but if they actually did predict who's going to be a good teacher then we would be losing more but i'm not convinced that they do predict who's going to be good so we're losing a lot i think yeah i'm on this validity diversity dilemma if you don't mind me jumping in just real quickly this is the same thing of what has happened among like armed forces and as they've diversified and tried to encourage more women recruits into the into military service they've had to also change physical standards for the physical fitness tests or whatever they're called and some have decried that we are lowering standards because they you women don't do as many pull-ups and the question is is does is pull-ups actually a great predictor of you know military performance or what we care about and i mean i'm not i'm not in the position to make a statement about that but i think it's a valid question and but it's also a valid question is like how predicted like how do we really care about you know pull-ups or do we care more about you know competencies and being able to execute on the battlefield this is an analogous argument is happening here in the classroom let me get research in here while we're still in this mode and just say we have a lot of students in the room obviously you're doing a lot of the leading work in this area among the three of you but what would you say the agenda really looks like for education researchers who are interested in the argument you're putting forward i think some of the lowest hanging fruit is evaluating the different programs that are currently being initiated at the end there was a few examples of some of the grow your own programs and teacher residency programs and university district partnerships and and things like that and there's there's so many opportunities out there of these programs that have just been initiated in the last few years or so and they should all be evaluated rigorously and carefully and a lot of districts don't have the resources or the technical expertise to do those analyses and you know that could be a great dissertation chapter for for a you know well-trained U of M student that wants to go out and you know trade expertise for data and and help districts analyze these things so i think that's one of the more the more obvious ones i think the other area is is studying the mechanisms better and i mean even the question you asked about like what grade level are the mechanisms most important or least important um i think that's still there's a lot to learn there about mechanisms and heterogeneity and mechanisms and things like that so those would be two areas i would i would think yeah i would say um and you know exploit some of the natural experiments created by the pandemic so like for example in road island they're experimenting with paraprofessionals coming into or you know training them to be teachers while they're on the job and you know paraprofessionals tend to be more diverse so there might be some interesting studies there i would also say mechanisms and then the other piece of it too is that you know a lot of the the studies that we cite a lot and that we've done use data from the southeast and so that's really it's like in north carolina we can't there's a rapidly growing population of latinx students but there's not enough latinx teachers for us to do the matching so we have a paper from texas but this deserves to be studied in other contexts where you know there's different communities and lots of different ways to interact and conceive of what exposure looks like so maybe trying to you know test or replicate the effects in different settings and more current times would be a good idea so i think broadly obviously covid changed a lot of stuff in our lives and it changed schools a lot too and for for those of you in the room who are teaching you might have even noticed like some of your students i feel like some of my students are different than they were pre-covid just different priorities different attitudes stuff like that so um more broadly than just the teacher diversity stuff i think a lot of educational research is probably based on studies that were done pre-covid and maybe even more than 10 15 years ago and replicating a lot of this stuff is probably useful and i think there's i know sometimes people are sort of shy about a replication study because it's not as exciting as a new study but there's real value in in replication and and just analyzing you know old stuff with new updated data and we can learn a lot and trends change and mechanisms change and so there's always always something to do the key is to call it a replication and an extension um that's wonderful so i think we're at the point where i'm supposed to stop asking you all of these questions i've had for years as i've been reading your work and give the audience a chance so folks are in the room there are no cards and pencils and you okay folks have those okay and so you can pass them to the front as you have questions folks online you can enter your questions into the chat and i'm going to turn it over to shakaina alvin and matt tritt who are all doctoral students here at the university of michigan who are interested in research in this area great thanks so much thanks for a great discussion so far we have some really great conversations and questions that are coming from the audience that we're going to share up here and i'm going to start with this first one that said the policy recommendations spoke a lot about teacher prep and this audience member was curious about the role that administrator prep programs have in addressing the pipeline given that administrators about the school and district level are responsible for hiring or attention decisions and also establishing the working conditions that make teachers want to stay and so how do you see admin prep programs playing a role in addressing issues of teacher diversity and representation yeah that's a great question so along with uh jason grissom and anna galate we put out a report on principles with the wallace foundation and so yeah so in terms of principal prep so i think there's a couple of mechanisms when it comes to teacher diversity so one thinking about principles is hiring managers right because ultimately they're the people who make the sort of last step decision to to get teachers in the classroom so they need to both understand and want to hire teachers of color and deploy them strategically within the school i think two one of the things that we sort of discuss in that report is that principles have to be equity focused or have an equity lens as they're approaching all their different duties whether it's managerial or you know whatever the case may be so yeah so i think you know in some there's a a tremendous role for principals and administrators to play in all of this and they also we sort of also need to think about the pipeline into the principal ship as an extension of the lack or the lack of diversity at the teacher level and also think about the ways to train principles to both be sort of managers and supporters of teachers of color and they should read our book in the programs and and there's some practical things too that i think is related to this which is like we've said a few times that a lot of this a lot of these effects are driven by even one exposure to a same-race teacher and so like something principals can do that is very easy for them to do and it doesn't cost a lot of money is to just be thoughtful and strategic in how they make assignments and not even teaching assignments but even something like who are they bringing in for the assembly for the scholar who are they bringing in for the performing arts program or who are they bringing in for the guest lecturer guest speaker they can be very thoughtful in who they bring in from the community and again not necessarily a teacher but a professional and artist whatever and then with the teachers too teachers can make guest lectures in each other's classes and you don't have to call it a guest lecture if it's in second grade but like a you know a special lesson little crossover and you can create those exposures where one wouldn't otherwise have happened and so that's like a that's something school leaders can do that's that's pretty low cost and pretty easy and the other the hiring the hiring thing like you you can imagine something like the Rooney role in the NFL that sort of sets parameters about who gets interviewed and and who gets considered and again this comes full circle to our thesis about representation is a measure of quality because if you're blindly focusing on quality as the prestige of the undergrad that they graduated from well then you're going to get a whiter pool that's focusing that that's pulling from more primarily white institutions and so if you broaden that definition of of quality then you can conceptualize a pool of high quality applicants that is also a more diverse pool of applicants cool so someone was interested in some of the other same-race impacts outside of K to 12 they were wondering if you could talk a little bit about the research of same-race impacts in higher education like for example are there impacts on withdrawal rates and things like that yeah so so i co-authored a study with a former student that you chris birdsall and raise uniga that looks at a top 100 law school and if you if anyone's familiar with law schools it's a pretty good setting to study this because the first year class assignments are basically random and also a lot of the grading is blind and so we looked at a variety of outcomes including did you pass the course did you choose to focus in the topic taught by that that particular professor and also the grade in the course and across the board we find pretty notable uh effects and you know the the legal profession uh is important for a lot of reasons in in terms of society and equity and and different outcomes and things so that's pretty notable i think and then there was just in the past month or so um rodney andrews who might be a u of m alum maybe i don't know you think i'm not sure maybe not uh but he's at ut dallas and and he has this data set on all the all the public universities in texas and he and a group of of authors reviewed the representativeness of the professoriate in texas public institutions and found that the numbers are not great and and they look a lot like what the the k-12 teaching force does so not only are the uh representation problems also present in higher ed but these race match effects are there as well and given that many of you are teaching assistants and graduate assistants there's also a nice study by scott correll that shows that in the uc system having a same race uh recitation leader in undergraduate has big effects on class attendance on grades on visiting office hours and all sorts of engagement type measures um so again you know higher ed yes graduate school yes but it's not even just professors right it's the the whole gamut of inputs including the the ga's and the graduate assistants um so how do you encourage more black college students or other students of color to become education majors um and then pursue careers in education um given student loans and like considerations of having to pay off loans especially when these populations might face higher like debt levels yeah that's a a great question so um uh dominique baker and i have a paper um that's in the parking lot right now but um basically where we're looking at uh debt burdens and um uh college students of color and so basically what we find is that um college students of color generally need to access loans or need to get loans to access college but once it gets over a tipping point they're less likely to enter into the teaching force and so um i think there if there's you know reform to be done around student debt obviously that would make things better uh for you know it would that would lower the barrier to get folks in the classroom um the other piece too though with that is that there needs to be some work around sort of expanding that pipeline um you know my sense now is that you know you have different industries sort of fighting over the same sets of students and so um i think when we think about who interests into teacher prep and who enters into education we need to be a little bit more um expansive so if that means reaching farther down and maybe connecting with students um earlier on so some of the work that the Center for Black Educator Black Educators is doing with um Sharif El-Meki in Pennsylvania they're trying to convince basically high school students um to you know stick you know get into teaching um but it's also uh a part of it is encouraging students who wouldn't necessarily have attended college to come into college so thinking about expanding that pipeline but yet for sure for debt is a is a huge issue here so i think that's pretty straightforward and it's somewhat not flipping but might sound flip and answer to the so the question is no uh i wouldn't necessarily try to convince a u of m engineering undergrad to switch to teaching um it's very similar to the problem we talked about earlier with districts trying to hire away teachers of color from neighboring districts they're just shifting the the lack of diversity lack of representation from one district to another here you're switching it from one field to another there's a real diversity problem in engineering and computer science and all these other fields that you know also are higher paying and we were joking when we were talking at lunch uh or maybe on the way to lunch about well what if you just paid all teachers a six-figure salary then a lot of these problems go away um but but short of that i think it's really hard to should try to talk someone out of a high paying major that does have representation issues in that field itself uh and might have a high debt load and might have other family obligations etc etc um i don't think that that's the solution i think what constants relate the nail in the head which is it's not about changing people's choice of major it's bringing in a broader pool of people altogether a rising tide lifts all votes in the sense that all these majors get more representation and diversity in students of color i think we have time for just one more yeah so last question um and this question is about a mechanism that uh you all didn't explicitly mention um and this audience member was kind of surprised that one of the things that wasn't directly mentioned was the explicit role of racism and how same race teachers might potentially mitigate the racism that students of color face particularly in terms of discipline grading practices etc um and how you all see that kind of fitting in as a potential mechanism so i yeah i i guess we didn't use the word uh racism or implicit bias but it implicitly i think that's part of the the mechanism that that i think of as expectations and part of that is that you know our the study about showing that when a white and a black teacher assess the exact same student the exact same time the white teacher has a systematically lower expectation and whether you chalk that up to explicit overt racism or implicit bias the end result is similar in that is that in that uh those students are experiencing lower expectations that creates a chain reaction of self-fulfilling prophecies and so on so um yeah and and that's what when we talked about like providing professional development to white teachers a lot of that is like empathy interventions and and implicit bias training and things like that that that addressed that channel but i think you're absolutely right um that that is part of that is part that is that mechanism and i think also it's worth saying we don't generally lead by calling it racism just simply because you know especially if we're talking to a group of educators who are predominantly white nobody wants to hear that they're being racist and if we create you know i think labeling labeling things racism could potentially draw some backfire and resistance to what otherwise they may be receptive to hearing and hearing that oh you know what maybe i could you know maybe some of my thinking could be updated and so um i think that's also something that we you know what we want to encourage but we don't necessarily want to you know undermine our our good intentions otherwise i'm going to leave it that um this is um been a really great panel thank you so much for coming all the way here especially on the eve of a snow storm and we'll talk about that at dinner a little bit you really shed a lot of light on some critical and complex issues that have just taken on more urgency particularly in the pandemic so i want to thank you guys again for coming and to thank everybody who was involved in making this panel happen today there were a lot of staff members in particular across the education policy initiative the ford school center for racial justice the school of education who were critical and who spent the day kind of running around and doing all the things that it takes to make one of these events happen and thank you to our students Shakaina Alvin and Matt for your thoughtful moderation today and thanks to all of you in the audience both here in person and online who are able to join um please do pick up a copy of the book i'll show it again here i'm going to get mine signed in a few minutes and um i think you those of you who are in the room the three of them can hang out for a little bit um to take more yeah happy to learn able to get to thank you again