Access to a racially and culturally diverse teacher workforce is beneficial for all P-12 students, particularly for students of color, who often thrive in classrooms led by teachers who share their racial and cultural background. Unfortunately, the diversity of the national public school teacher workforce does not reflect the diversity of the student population—the majority of which are of color. For many states, the lack of diversity means that most of its students attend schools and districts that do not have a single teacher of color on staff.

Increasing the racial and cultural diversity of the teacher workforce takes a statewide commitment to collecting and analyzing educator workforce data and leading targeted, data-informed efforts to develop policies that recruit, support, and retain a high-quality and diverse educator workforce. This 50-state data and policy scan is designed to support these efforts by providing data analyses and a landscape of policies and practices in each state for advocates, educators, and policymakers leading this work at the state level.

Use the tool below to learn about promising educator diversity policy practices across the country, review each state’s educator diversity data and policy profile, and see how your state rates against other state profiles. Read more on how certain states are supporting SEAD.

See How Your State Is Doing

About This Analysis

The Education Trust analyzed school-level data in states where it was available and rated state policies and practices in five categories. For each category, states were rated on 4 to 5 policies within each category. Policies that earned a green or “Meets criteria” were given a 3. Policies that earned a yellow or “Partially meets” were given a 2. Policies that earned a red or “does not meet” earned a 1. Those scores were averaged to give a rating for each category. A 2.5 average or above for each category earned a green. Averages from 1.6-2.4 earned a yellow. Averages of 1.5 or lower earned a red.