Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage

This report by UPenn professors Richard Ingersoll and Henry May answers a touchy question in education reform: What causes the minority-teacher shortage? To this end, the authors compile data from all six cycles of the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its supplemental Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) (running from 1987-88 to 2007-08)—though they focus on the 2003-04 SASS and 2004-05 TFA. They find that the minority-teacher shortage does not arise from poor recruitment: Over the past two decades, the white teaching force has increased by 41 percent while the minority teaching force increased by 96 percent. (Interestingly, both the male and female minority teaching forces mushroomed in this manner.) Rather, our dearth of minority teachers comes from low rates of retention: For four of the six SASS cycles, minority-teacher turnover rates were significantly higher than those for white teachers. And this gap has widened in recent years. And don’t blame poverty rates for the turnovers. While minority teachers are more likely to work in low-income urban schools, neither factor (poverty rate or urban status) affected their mobility. Instead, Ingersoll and May find that minority educators in schools with the worst organizational conditions (lack of classroom autonomy, ineffectual administrations, and undisciplined students) were almost twice as likely to exit the profession as those in schools with the best organizational conditions. (Though white-teacher turnover was also influenced by these conditions, the affect was much less severe.) Can’t blame them.

“Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage,” by Richard Ingersoll and Henry May, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, September 2011.