To thrive in an increasingly diverse world and workforce, young people need to learn in multicultural environments led by effective and diverse educators. All dimensions of diversity are valuable, and a vital demographic to hone in on is race.
The research is clear—all students benefit from having access to educators of color, and students of color, in particular, achieve at higher levels and are less likely to be suspended or drop out of school. Nonetheless, only 22 percent of teachers and 23 percent of principals across the nation identify as a person of color. And in 23 percent of all public schools, students do not have a single teacher of color.
Do you know how your school district stacks up? How about your state? The first step to increasing educator diversity is to know your current demographics. TNTP’s new, publicly accessible National K-12 Teacher & Student Demographic Dashboards provide you with that data.
These dashboards represent TNTP’s efforts to aggregate student-teacher data over time from states where teacher demographic data is collected. Free and accessible to everyone, our dashboards enable policymakers, educators, researchers, journalists, and the general public to stay informed and understand student-teacher racial diversity trends in their district or state.
The data is sourced from state departments of education, through their websites or public records requests. Our database includes racial data on more than 98 percent of the teachers in the U.S.
What makes TNTP’s dashboards unique?
- Our data is local. We collected data at the most local level possible: 94 percent of all school districts and 64 percent of all schools nationwide.
- Our data is current. 43 of the 47 states and D.C. contain data through the 2022-23 school year.
- We collected data over time. There are 11 years of historical data, on average, across the states where data is available.
- We collected disaggregated data by race/ethnicity. For nearly all states, we have data broken down into seven race/ethnicity categories standardized by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
- We plan to keep the data updated. We created systems to collect and process new teacher race and ethnicity data so we can update the data dashboards when more data becomes available in the spring of 2025. We’re also exploring additional ways we can potentially expand the data and demographics included in the dashboards.
Using the Dashboards
TNTP’s dashboards provide valuable, up-to-date teacher and student demographics data that policymakers, educators, and other decision makers can use to inform their planning and priorities for years to come.
Providing publicly available, user-friendly teacher and student racial demographics data is a foundational step to broadening and strengthening our nation’s educator workforce. Through the data provided in our dashboards, stakeholders will be able to:
- Set clear, numeric goals for increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce that are measurable, publicly available, and time bound; and
- Develop a task force, advisory group, priority area, or role, such as within a state and/or local education agency, to examine, create, and monitor strategies to increase the racial diversity of the teacher workforce.
Beyond the Dashboards: TNTP’s Work on Educator Diversity
Increasing the diversity of our nation’s educator workforce is a key lever for TNTP’s new North Star of academic, economic, and social mobility for all. Our mission is to ensure race and zip code are eradicated as predictors of poverty, and that all young people have access to multiple pathways to thriving lives.
TNTP centers educator diversity in our work not only because the research shows the positive impact educators of color have on student outcomes, but also because educator diversity offers a two-generational workforce solution that draws from the untapped talent in local communities.
From programming like the Black Educator Excellence Cohort and The Village, to our leadership within system-change efforts like the One Million Teachers of Color (1MToC) campaign, TNTP understands that if we aim to catalyze a movement to redesign America’s public education system so that it meets the expectations of tomorrow, then educator diversity must be an essential component of our efforts today.
We encourage you to check out our new dashboards. Our hope is that stakeholders leverage this resource to strive towards a future in which public school students across the country are led by excellent and well-supported teachers who reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.
