Educator Diversity State Profiles

Research says that teacher diversity benefits all students, regardless of race or ethnicity. However, while the majority of students in the U.S. are of color, only about 20% of the US public school teacher workforce identify as teachers of color.—a number that hasn’t budged in decades. This needs to change to better reflect our multicultural society.

Increasing the racial and cultural diversity of the teacher workforce takes a statewide commitment. It involves collecting and analyzing educator workforce data and making targeted, data-informed efforts to develop policies that recruit, support, and retain a high-quality and diverse educator workforce. That’s why Ed Trust developed the 50 State Data and Policy Teacher Diversity Tool, which looks at each state’s efforts to increase the number of teachers of color to their workforce.

For certain states, Ed Trust takes a deeper dive and looks at the landscape of policies and practices to provide data analyses and criteria to measure and rank select state efforts in promoting teacher diversity. Listed here are several state briefs designed to help the advocates, educators, and policymakers who are leading this work compare best practices and make informed decisions at the state level.