Center For American Progress demands Sustainable Racism in education

Via Terry

 Look, I can point.......

As this year is the 60^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in schools based on the “separate but equal” doctrine we will undoubtedly see a bumper crop of pleas for Sustainable Racism.

An early entrant is a report from the left wing Center for American Progress called Teacher Diversity Matters: A State-by-State Analysis of Teachers of Color.
The thesis of the report is:

At some point over the next 10 to 12 years, the nation’s public school student body will have no one clear racial or ethnic majority.In other words, students of color—students who are not classified as non-Hispanic whites, for purposes of this analysis—will constitute more than half of our primary and secondary students. This demographic trend is already manifest in some of the nation’s most populous states, including California and Texas, where the majority of students are students of color.

But the makeup of the nation’s teacher workforce force has not kept up with these changing demographics. At the national level, students of color make up more than 40 percent of the public school population. In contrast, teachers of color—teachers who are not non-Hispanic white—are only 17 percent of the teaching force.

This is a problem for students, schools, and the public at large. Teachers of color serve as role models for students, giving them a clear and concrete sense of what diversity in education—and in our society—looks like. A recent review of empirical studies also shows that students of color do better on a variety of academic outcomes if they’re taught by teachers of color.

There are two questions here. First, do minority students in elementary and secondary schools perform better by any measure when they are taught by teachers from their same racial or ethnic group? The corollary question here would be “so what?” because hiring and assigning employees based on race is pretty much against the law everywhere.

The second question would be how does the author’s “diversity index” stack up against something more tangible… like performance?

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