Teacher Diversity and Student Success: Why Racial Representation Matters in the Classroom

Teacher Diversity and Student Success makes a powerful case for diversifying the teaching force as an important policy lever for closing achievement gaps and moving schools closer to equity goals.

Written by three leading scholars, the book provides nuanced solutions on how to diversify the teaching force, increase student exposures to same-race teachers, and improve teacher training for a culturally diverse student body. They argue that teacher diversity should be seen as one element of teacher quality, and policies focused on improving teacher quality should take race explicitly into consideration.

The authors also 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.

This timely book is a call to action for building teacher diversity to ensure student success.

Seth Gershenson is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University and a research fellow of the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Michael Hansen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy.

Constance A. Lindsay is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.