Teacher Diversity in Pennsylvania from 2013-14 to 2019-20

The scarcity of teachers of color (TOCs) in Pennsylvania has been well-documented. In 2018, Research for Action (RFA) reviewed the literature on the benefits of teachers of color for all students and highlighted barriers, strategies, and initiatives in "Patching the Leaky Pipeline: Recruiting and Retaining Teachers of Color in Pennsylvania." Using national survey data from 2011-12, it was found that Pennsylvania's rate of disproportionality between students of color (SOCs) and TOCs is among the highest in the nation. Later that year, in collaboration with WHYY and the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, 2016-17 data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) was examined, finding that the majority of Pennsylvania schools and 37% of entire school districts employed only White teachers. A key observation in each of these studies was that, in contrast to widely available data on student race/ethnicity, there is no regular public reporting of teacher race/ethnicity in Pennsylvania. More than two years later, that is still the case. Recently, WHYY obtained seven years of teacher race/ethnicity data via records request from PDE, dating from 2013-14 through 2019-20 school years. RFA cleaned this data and merged it with student data to calculate the percentages of teachers and students by race/ethnicity at the state, county, district, and school levels for all Pennsylvania public schools. This brief presents descriptive findings of RFA's examination of this new data. The brief begins by updating prior analyses of the general distribution of teacher and student demographics across the Commonwealth. Next, the association between student and teacher demographics is examined. Finally, additional analyses are included to compare race/ethnicity between: (1) subgroups of full-time, part-time, and split-time teachers; (2) teachers of elementary, secondary, and ungraded classes, and; (3) teachers of different instructional subjects. An Appendix is included, with tables that identify schools and districts which have consistently employed the highest rates of TOCs and schools that have employed only white teachers over the past seven years, despite high rates of SOCs. [For "Patching the Leaky Pipeline: Recruiting and Retaining Teachers of Color in Pennsylvania. A PACER Policy Brief," see ED589381.]