Race-matching teachers to school demographics is segregation

I am a middle school teacher in a large left-leaning school district in the Pacific Northwest. The multilingual learner (ML) department recently moved about 12 teachers based on their “skill set” to better suit student needs. White teachers were moved to whiter schools. Hispanic teachers were moved to Hispanic-er schools.

The rationale is rooted “evidence.” According to NPR, one study found that “when students had teachers of the same race as them [sic], they reported feeling more cared for, more interested in their schoolwork and more confident in their teachers' abilities to communicate with them. These students also reported putting forth more effort in school and having higher college aspirations. When students had teachers who didn't look like them, the study found, they reported lower levels of these feelings and attitudes” (NPR).

My poor students. Not a single one of them looks like a middle-aged slightly balding white male.

But wait. There’s comfort in the fact that the authors of the study found “little convincing evidence of test score impacts associated with student/teacher demographic pairings.” In fact, what the study actually measured was what the authors call “non-cognitive outcomes” like social and emotional impacts, behaviors and mindsets. NPR still shamelessly claims in the headline, “If your teacher looks like you, you may do better in school” instead of, “you may feel better about yourself in school.” Just because students feel a bit better when they have teachers of the same color, does not necessarily mean they’ll have better test scores.

In an article titled, “Study finds students of all races prefer teachers of color,” NPR is at it again. The author of the study that NPR quotes this time, Sebastian Cherng, theorizes “that teachers of color score more highly because of their ability to draw on their own experiences to address issues of race and gender, which, he says, can be highly germane even to teaching subjects like math, especially in America's majority-minority public schools.”

So, white teachers have no experiences to draw on regarding race or gender? I’m offended by his anti-white microaggression, but um, oh yeah, I’m a man. Never mind.

If we dig deeper into the study from which NPR cherry-picked its information, we find that it only included Black, Latino and White teachers. Sorry Asians and Pacific Islanders. You’re not people of color for this study (but you are in other cases where the left needs to pad its numbers). No inclusion for you this time. So the headline should have read, “students prefer black and Latino teachers.”

But maybe I’m being nitpicky. Surely the preference for black and Latino teachers was extremely strong. Well, the study says that while the results do show that students have slightly more favorable perceptions (around .11 SD) of Black and Latino teachers compared to White teachers, “these patterns are likely shaped by characteristics of students, teachers, and schools.”

In my opinion, the truth is that teachers who have darker skin have a license to talk about race that whites don’t have. We are not allowed to defend ourselves withouth fear of repriasal. You would not believe what teachers say about white people to our students in public school.

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One Pacific Islander student came into my classroom and said, “Man, white people are so racist.” I asked, “What makes you say that?” She had just come from a social studies class where the teacher talked about slavery in America.

“They owned slaves and stuff,” she said.

“Um, your ancestors had slaves, too,” I said. “Are you racist?”

She was incredulous, but I proved to her that the chieftains of the island where her family is from held slaves up until the 20th century. Turns out, her grandfather had been a chief. She started to rethink her ideas about white people and we developed a really strong relationship, just two recovering racists whose ancestors held slaves. (Well, hers did anyway.)

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White educators need to call bs on the revisionist history of the woke educators.

Practicing what I preach, here’s me calling bs on the very first NPR article I mentioned above, titled “If your teacher looks like you…” The article focuses on the importance of having black and brown teachers but completely ignores one very important point of the study:

The negative effects of gender mismatches are generally of higher magnitude than race/ethnicity mismatches.

According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of all k-12 educators are FEMALE. Since gender mismatches are of “a higher magnitude than race/ethnicity matches” why aren’t we focused on attracting more men to the teaching profession? Is it not egregious that only 23% of teachers are men? Having too many female teachers is a more significant problem than not having enough black or Hispanic teachers.

But NPR is like shingles: “Shingles doesn’t care…[about reality].”

White conservative-leaning teachers must realize they have the same protections as their black (and white liberal female) colleagues regarding free speech in the classroom. They must hold all students to high standards and not be afraid to address issues that they are uncomfortable talking about.

Only then will they be as respected as black and Latino teachers. Whites, especially white male teachers, may be less-preferred because we are not allowed to be our authentic selves. We self-censor for fear of recrimination by woke administrators who live and breathe white-people-bad theory. We must stand up and teach the truth. Teach kids to think critically about everything and show them that evil has no monopoly on any race. It cares nothing about skin color and victimizes all equally. Like shingles.

One big Nothingburger

You can look at some more of the studies that have been done on the importance of race-matching teachers with their students, but I’m not sure there’s much need to. It’s common sense that students feel more comfortable, and sometimes might even do better, when they are in schools with students and teachers who predominately look like them.

I once dug into stats from my own school district regarding race and independently concluded that students graduate at higher rates when they attend schools that have a student population that predominately looks like them. Blacks graduated at higher rates when they attended schools where blacks were the majority. Whites graduated at higher rates when they attended schools where whites were a majority, etc.

Moving teachers around based on demographic matches does nothing to strengthen diversity. In fact, it robs kids in predominately Hispanic and black schools of exposure to good white role models. And it robs students in predominately white schools of good black role models, for instance.

Leftists don’t really care much about diversity like they say. All they really want is to have teachers who look like the student population. That’s not diversity. That’s segregation, and unfortunately, segregation is human nature.

In an op-ed from over 22 years ago titled “People Like Us,” David Brooks (a regular commentator on NPR) criticizes this hypocrisy in educational institutions:

It’s striking that the institutions that talk the most about diversity often practice it the least. For example, no group of people sings the diversity anthem more frequently and fervently than administrators at just such elite universities [and I’ll add at public schools1]. But elite universities are amazingly undiverse in their values, politics, and mores. Professors in particular are drawn from a rather narrow segment of the population. If faculties reflected the general population, 32 percent of professors would be registered Democrats and 31 percent would be registered Republicans. Forty percent would be evangelical Christians. But a recent study of several universities by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the American Enterprise Institute found that roughly 90 percent of those professors in the arts and sciences who had registered with a political party had registered Democratic. Fifty-seven professors at Brown were found on the voter-registration rolls. Of those, 54 were Democrats. Of the 42 professors in the English, history, sociology, and political science departments, all were Democrats. The results at Harvard, Penn State, Maryland, and the University of California at Santa Barbara were similar to the results at Brown.

Brooks concludes that “what we are looking at here is human nature. People want to be around others who are roughly like themselves. That’s called community.”

The question is, can we have both diversity AND community?

If in fact students do better with students who look like them, why don’t we move students, not just teachers, to match student demographics. In other words, why don’t we re-segregate our schools? That’s the logic of the left followed to its logical conclusion.

In education we have some serious soul-searching to do. Are we really dedicated to diversity? If so, we need to stop the push to segregate teachers with students who look like them. Hire more BIPOC, especially male, educators, but don’t force them to only work with kids who look like them.