Declining Enrollments in Teacher Education Programs Part IV: Adding Race to the Conversation by Megan Lynch and Holly Klock

This manuscript builds on the arguments presented in the May and June 2019 Declining Enrollments in Teacher Education Programs series (Rutten, Cunningham, & Woo, 2019) published in the AJE Forum. While Logan Rutten, Azaria Cunningham, and Hansol Woo have each contributed important remarks on reasons for and solutions to the declining enrollments, we, as the authors, believe that race has been notably absent from the discussion and offer our perspective as an additional “Part IV” to the discussion.

As noted across the field of education, enrollment in teacher education programs (TEPs) has seen a drastic decline in the past several years. According to the U.S. Department of Education (2018) Title II report on Higher Education, the total enrollment in traditional and alternative-certification TEPs has decreased from 683,903 in 2010-2011 to 444,244 in 2016-2017. The declining enrollments have been so substantial that they have created a shortage of teachers such that not every classroom is staffed with a high-quality, certified teacher. In the state of Pennsylvania alone, enrollment in traditional TEPs from 2009-2010 to 2015-2016 has decreased sharply by 65% while there has been a 100% increase in the number of emergency permits¹ issued in schools facing shortages (Saunders, Kini, & Darling-Hammond, 2018). Across the country, estimated projections predict a significant increase in the gap between the demand for new hires and the projected teaching supply (see Figure 1).

A Learning Policy Institute (LPI) report details five factors that influence entering (and staying, and/or exiting) the teaching profession (Podolsky, Kini, Bishop, & Darling-Hammond, 2016). They are 1) salaries and other compensation, 2) preparation and costs to entry, 3) hiring and personnel management, 4) induction and support for new teachers and 5) working conditions. Additionally, Milner (2013) includes the deprofessionalization² of the field as an influential factor in the decision to teach. These are all well-documented in the literature and echoed throughout reports on teacher shortages. In fact, several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have already added teacher salaries and loan forgiveness on their platforms.

Alongside the declining enrollments in TEPs, the lack of racial diversity in the teacher workforce is a rising discussion. The Center for American Progress (2014) report on teacher diversity finds that while nearly 50% of the public school population are Students of Color, only 18% of the teaching workforce in the United States are Teachers of Color. Between the years of 2010-2013 alone, the demographic divide between Students of Color and teachers increased by three percentage points (Boser, 2014). This is not projected to change in the upcoming years. As of 2016, only 25% of the students enrolled in colleges of education are People of Color (King, 2018). Additionally, in the same report, King (2018) notes that colleges of education remain one of the least racially diverse/representative colleges on university campuses, and while there are more People of Color in TEPs, this is because they are disproportionately represented in alternative certification programs.

Tackling Two Shortages with GYO Initiatives

As a means to simultaneously address teacher shortages and lack of racial diversity in teaching, TEPs have turned towards “urban teacher pipelines” and/or “grow your own” (or “GYO”) initiatives (Gist, Bianco, & Lynn, 2018). (As a note, Azaria Cunningham tells her personal journey in an urban teacher pipeline earlier in this series.) GYO initiatives are those that “often have an explicit commitment to Teachers of Color, and due to their commitments to recruit from communities of Color with rich cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and epistemological perspectives,” (Gist, 2019, p. 13). They recruit teachers in two primary groups: “(a) a community-driven focus to increase the number of teachers from the local geographic community (e.g., community activists, parents, and paraprofessionals) and (b) a precollegiate pipeline focus to increase the number of middle and high school Students of Color entering the teaching profession” (Gist, Bianco, & Lynn, 2018, p. 14). On the surface, this approach appears rational if institutions are only focusing on increasing Teachers of Color. However, the problem is by conflating the two issues, a lack of diversity in the workforce and the decline of enrollment in TEPs, institutions are conveniently using the shortage to answer the concern of diversity. This recent unwavering support for GYOs from schools, colleges, and departments of education, as well as other initiatives to “increase teacher diversity” in the face of declining enrollment in TEPs begs the question, why now? We, as the authors, question why Black, as well as other racially-minoritized groups, are now being targeted to staff classrooms, when it has been an unaddressed problem for the past 100 years.

Over a century ago, 5% of teachers in the United States were African American and the African American student population constituted 11% of the population at large (Kafka, 2016). In the decades following the landmark decision of Brown v Board of Education (1954), the racial makeup of the teaching force underwent significant changes. Upwards of a third of the Black teachers in the US were forced out of the profession; in some states and districts, over half were forced out (Ethridge, 1979). Quite simply, the majority of White parents did not want their children to go to integrated schools, much less be taught by Black teachers. As a result, Black teachers were replaced by White teachers, problem that persists. Today, the percent of teachers who identify as either Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaskan Native, or two or more races is at a combined national average of 20% (U.S. Department of Education, 2018). The proportion of teachers from varying racial backgrounds has remained stagnant, at best.

School-Based Inequities Obstruct Pipeline for Potential Teachers of Color

We first need to consider why there is such a low proportion of Teachers of Color. The underlying issues (i.e. systemic racism, achievement and attainment gaps, pervasive Eurocentric ideologies, conservative approaches to teaching “culturally and linguistically diverse students”) that have created the disparity are notably absent in policy reports by teacher education organizations and state and federal departments of education (e.g. Title II Issue Brief on Enrollment; LPI report for PA DOE). To start, society has been stratified in such a way that school has not afforded all students the same opportunities. By stratification, we interpret this to mean that not all students are provided opportunities to earn a high school diploma. There is need for skilled labor, for vocational work. Many have lamented the “oversaturation” of bachelor’s degrees and have compared earning bachelor’s degrees as the new high school diploma (though the literature does show that having a college degree provides more financial security and higher wages). And this notion has predominantly affected Students of Color, as their attainment rates are much lower than that of White students (King, 2018).

The scholarship from the late 1980s/1990s has attempted to address this in waves. All have fallen short. Each wave, like the one that precedes it, has ultimately fallen short. Gloria Ladson-Billings’ (1995) culturally relevant pedagogy was superseded by Geneva Gay’s (2000) culturally responsive teaching. Recently, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim (2017) offer a model of culturally sustaining pedagogy that is meant to fill in the gaps of culturally relevant pedagogy. At the same time, educational researchers have introduced and inundated the literature with terms such as anti-bias, equity, inclusivity, diversity, social justice, among others. Each term comes with different assumptions about how to address inequalities present inside and outside of schools. Yet the race-based inequalities still exist. Because it is not within the scope of this manuscript to argue a particular frame for addressing inequalities, we will only state that we ultimately agree that if the level of change remains at the individual or confined to individual classrooms, the institution of schooling will not change and inequalities will remain (Apple, 2004; Gorski, 2014).

If TEPs are concerned about increasing enrollment of Teachers of Color, they must recognize that the teacher candidate pool has already been filtered in such a way that racial-minoritized students have already been excluded from the possibility of teaching. Institutions cannot recruit more Teachers of Color until more racial-minoritized students attend postsecondary education programs, are supported in postsecondary education, select and graduate from colleges of education, acquire teaching positions, and remain supported in the field (U.S. Dept of Ed, 2016).

Coupling this with the notion that TEPs only select Teachers of Color from a very narrow pool of Students of Color that have had academic success, they aren’t addressing the root of the problem – that school-based inequities obstruct the educator pipeline for People of Color.

Declining Enrollments and Lack of Racial Diversity: More than Staffing Classrooms

 School is not “the great equalizer” and continues to maintain class and race-based inequalities and limited access to opportunities; thus, the teacher shortage and declining enrollments in TEPs reflect this. The concern from TEPs is not rooted in a moral obligation to do what is right and have equal representation in the teaching workforce. In reality, the teacher recruitment rhetoric from departments, schools, and colleges of education which advocates “increasing the number of minorities in the teaching profession” obscures TEPs’ ultimate concern of staffing classrooms. For instance, in the LPI’s report to the PA Department of Education, teacher diversity is posited as a two-for-one solution to the teacher shortage. The report states, “By investing in increasing teacher diversity, the state and districts can tackle at least two goals at once: addressing teacher shortages and increasing the number of Teachers of Color in the workforce” (Saunders, Kini, & Darling-Hammond, 2018, p. 10).

Instead, the institutions are playing a game of identity politics (Heyes, 2012) to drive up enrollment in teacher preparation programs by identifying groups to target to drum up enrollment instead of actually recognizing that the legacy and continuation of systemic racism has left potential Black and Hispanic teachers out of the conversation for decades. Now TEPs seem to pander to this demographic in response to a declining White, female teaching population.

We fully recognize that TEPs are reporting both declining enrollments and a lack of representation in the teacher workforce and that this is a threat to the future of education in the U.S. However, we want to make it clear that unless the conversation about declining enrollments expands beyond salary, workload, stress, and the social/professional status of teaching and includes explicit attention on historical and institutional schooling inequalities, the conversation about increasing “teacher diversity” is an empty promise. ¹ Teaching permit issued by a state department of education upon request from an employing public school when no qualified or properly certified applicants apply to an advertised teaching position.

¹ Teaching permit issued by a state department of education upon request from an employing public school when no qualified or properly certified applicants apply to an advertised teaching position.

² Bureaucratic structures that prevent teachers from being responsive to aspects of student development that go beyond student test score gains (Milner, 2013).

Holly Klock is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Supervision at Penn State University. Klock is a former intern in her alma mater’s Elementary Professional Development School Partnership. She has also been a supervising professional development associate in this setting during her graduate work. Prior to her graduate studies, Klock taught Kindergarten and Fourth grade in Fairfax County Public Schools. Her research interests involve preservice teacher learning in relation to identity, transformation, and social justice.

Megan E. Lynch is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Supervision at Penn State University. She has over 10 years of experience teaching emergent bilinguals both abroad and in the United States. Situating herself in Marxist and Vygotskian scholarship, Megan’s current research interests are in developing a socially just pedagogy in teachers, primarily within the contexts of professional development schools, instructional supervision, and preservice teacher education.

The first of the Declining Enrollments in Teacher Education Programs Series is Challenges and Promising Possibilities for Reversing the Trend by Logan Rutten and Azaria Cunningham. The second is Grow Your Own Initiative: A Journey on the Urban Teacher Pipeline by Azaria Cunningham. The third is Who Wants to Be a Teacher? Why? Underlying Causes of Declining Enrollments in Teacher Education Programs by Hansol Woo. We invite you to join our conversation by commenting below, engaging us on AJE’s social media platforms, or submitting an essay of your own.

References

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Ethridge, S. B. (1979). The impact of the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision on black educators. Negro Educational Review, 30, 217-232.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

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U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Policy and Program Studies Service, The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce, Washington, D.C. 2016. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf