Educators of color make students’ lives better. All students’ lives, not only the students who look like the educators at the front of the class.
Don’t take our word for it. Educator Garris Stroud wrote a recent piece for the Minnesota Reformer on the direct impacts educators of color bring to learning achievement.
For one example, he looked at the benefits Black educators bring to Black students. The results are beyond encouraging:
The research is clear. Educators of color are more likely to use effective, culturally relevant teaching methods in their classrooms, leading to stronger relationships with kids. One study shows that Black students are 13 percent more likely to enroll in college by having just one Black teacher in elementary school. For Black male students, the impact is even more pronounced — it reduces the odds that they will drop out by almost 40 percent.
As our districts look to actually improve their residents’ lives by involving those residents in decision-making, teacher diversity measures must be included. Even if we didn’t have the hard data backing up the impact of such an investment, it would be a moral imperative.
So read the rest of Stroud’s piece and let’s brainstorm some ways to scale up these teacher diversity measures. Let’s give kids more role models, multiple options to model what it means to live decent lives.
