Teachers Union Accuses Boston Schools Of Too Little Diversity

BOSTON, MA — Together with a coalition of Boston organizations, the Boston Teachers Union released a report that accuses the school system of making too little progress in increasing teacher diversity in the district. According to the report, the district's teaching force is no more diverse today than it was a decade ago, despite the district's 2016 policy that aims to recruit and retain a teaching corps that reflects the demographics of the students, which are majority minority.

The report points to 37.97 percent teachers of color in the district in the school year 1993/94 compared with 36.6 in school year 2016/17. In the 2016/17 school year only some 13 percent of students were white, according to the data.

A federal desegregation court order in the 1970s set racial quotas for Boston's teaching corps. Under the order, at least 25 percent of the system’s teachers are supposed to be black. But the school system only briefly met that threshold in the late 1990s, early 2000s.

Matthew Cregor, education project director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, said the timing of the report was really in part because it's hiring season and because research about the benefits across the board for having teachers of color in classrooms has caught up with "best instincts" on this.

"There have been, undoubtedly, efforts that the district has undertaken recently to improve diversity. But what they're doing now is nowhere near what they were doing in the 1990s when this was squarely before court. And if we're going to see change on this, it's got to be tried, at the very least, in the court of public opinion."

The NAACP’s Boston chapter, the Massachusetts Asian American Educators Association, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, the Greater Boston Latino Network, the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, the Collaborative Parent Leadership Action Network, the Black Educators Alliance of Massachusetts, the Boston Teachers Union, and the Boston Network for Black Student Achievement all signed off in the report.

In the report, the groups write:

There is nothing magical behind the positive impact that teachers of color have on students of color. All students benefit from exposure to teachers of all races. And all teachers need support and professional development, particularly in developing culturally responsive practices for the multiracial classrooms they teach. It is time that Boston make its policies a reality, for the betterment of all of our youth.

The NAACP Boston branch has been at the forefront of this issue in Boston said, Tanisha Sullivan the president of the organization. "We've worked alongside the Black Educators Alliance for several decades to actively monitor Boston Public Schools as it relates to teacher diversity," she said. "This is not a new issue for us as an organization."

But she said what most concerned the group was what appears to be very incremental increases when it comes to the relative diversity for Asian and Latino educators, but also the decline of black educators in the system.

"We are looking to work with the district in a very intentional way to help turn that tide," she said adding, "There are certainly some practices that have been used in the past that have demonstrated efficacy with respect to moving the needle but O also think there's an opportunity to be more creative."

As such the report doesn't just point fingers, it offers a number of recommendations, including hiring recruiters to help bring the district into compliance with its desegregation order, something it said helped it once before.

It recommends expanding pipeline programs for BPS high school students, midcareer professionals, and paraprofessional educators, play a more central role in approving hires, work to eliminate implicit bias from the teacher evaluation process and offering "letters of reasonable assurance" and "letters of commitment" to proficient provisional teachers of color to inspire greater job security to them before they need to look for work elsewhere.

"Here's the big thing: There was a time when this district didn't make decisions without thinking through their impact on teacher diversity or other aspects that were closely monitored by the court. If we're going to seriously move the needle on teacher diversity, it's going to be because this is something we prioritize again," said Cregor.

He added that the district had received a copy but declined to say how the copy was met by those officials. Boston public school officials did not immediately return request for comment to Patch.

"We know this is a matter of concern for the district. It's fully reflected in their statements of the type of teaching force they want to achieve and their policy," he said. "The reason we put this out is so that those goals are met with action."

"The research has caught up to our best instincts on this that all school children benefit from a racially diverse teaching corps, particularly children who aren't used to seeing themselves reflected in the front of the room. With that kind of knowledge, it's high time we act on this priority," said Cregor.

Previously on Patch:

Boston Students Protest Lack Of Diversity

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