Ohio students are far more diverse than their teachers

Come mid-August, it’s a sure thing that the children sitting in classrooms across Ohio will be a much more diverse bunch than the adults teaching them.

More than 93 percent of Ohio’s teachers are white, 4 percent are black, 0.7 percent are Hispanic, 0.4 percent are Asian and 0.1 percent identify as multiracial. Meanwhile, of Ohio’s 1.2 million K-12 students, 71.1 percent are white, 16.5 percent are black, 5.2 percent are Hispanic, 2.2 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander and 4.8 percent are multiracial, according to 2015-16 statistics from the Ohio Department of Education.

This is a national issue, but Ohio’s school staffing is less diverse than in the nation overall. About 82 percent of American teachers are white, 6.8 percent are black, 7.8 percent are Hispanic, 1.8 percent are Asian and 1 percent are multiracial, according to the most recent figures available from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Nationally, minority teachers tend to go to urban districts, and that holds true in Ohio. About 61.5 percent of Ohio’s black teachers are found in 10 school districts: Dayton, Trotwood-Madison, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and Shaker Heights (in suburban Cleveland).

Some of the disparity goes back to job retention. In 201213, the annual turnover rate was 18.9 percent for minority teachers, and 15 percent for white teachers, according to federal education statistics.

Renee Middleton, dean of Ohio University’s Patton College of Education, said her college has made minority recruitment a priority and numbers are moving in the right direction. Minority students at Patton (not all of whom are going into teaching; Patton offers hospitality majors, too) have increased from 12 percent in 2010 to 18.6 percent for 2016; undergraduate students are 12.2 percent minority and graduate students are 30.5 percent minority.

Ohio State University’s education college is trying new ways to lure under-represented groups into teaching, said Noelle Arnold, an associate dean in charge of diversity.

One step was moving from a master’s degree-only program to a bachelor’s degree, to increase affordability and access, she said. The creation of the Early Childhood Educator Pipeline Scholarship is another way, intended to increase diversity among local early-childhood teachers who take care of low-income and minority children.

OSU’s education college also has paired up with the Fisher College of Business for the BRIGHT program to train school leaders who commit to becoming principals in high-poverty public schools. Arnold said it has significant minority enrollment.

Middleton said that in an era when Americans from different perspectives seem to have forgotten how to listen to each other and compromise, having a teacher of a different race or upbringing at the front of a classroom can be beneficial to democracy.