Education Week - January 27, 2016 - S6

EDUCATION WEEK

■

January 27, 2016

Teacher-Recruitment Challenges

www.edweek.org/go/teacher-recruitment

By Ross Brenneman

In Recruitment, Some Groups Overlooked
Need seen for more
Asian and Pacific
Islander teachers

Percentage
Distribution of
Teachers in All U.S.
Schools, by Race/
Ethnicity, 2011-12
Asian: 1.8%
Multiracial: 1
American Indian: .5
Pacific Islander: .1

White
81.9

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics

arah Ha didn't have any
Asian-American teachers
growing up.
Ha was born in the United
States but moved to South
Korea when she was six
years old; she and her little
sister were left there for two
years while their parents established a life
in the United States. Enveloped by Korean
culture, Ha all but forgot the English she had
grown up learning.
When she returned to Worcester, Mass.,
Ha found herself isolated and bullied, an
English-language learner with no Asian
peers, teachers, or subject matter in school.
"When I went off to college, I realized much
of the curriculum I was exposed to or the educators that were in front of the classroom
did not reflect my identity, nor did they create
a space for dialogue in the classroom where I
felt as though I connected with those experiences," she said.
While the relative lack of racial diversity
within the teaching profession has been well
documented, diversity-centered recruitment
initiatives often target the two largest communities of people of color in the U.S.: African-Americans and Hispanics. But experiences like Ha's suggest that school recruiters
may need to focus greater attention on other
underrepresented ethnicities, including
Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.
"I think sometimes we're not seen as teachers of color or teachers not of color," said Alicia Johal, an 8th grade science teacher outside San Diego who is of East Indian descent.
"People, maybe they put us in a gray area,
when really we are teachers of color."
Although Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 5.1 percent of the U.S. population, census data show that the AAPI
community is the fastest-growing
ethnic group in the country.
Yet between 2000 and 2012,
Black
t here wa s v i r tua l ly no
6.8
change in the percentage
of AAPIs in the teachHispanic
ing profession. In 2012,
7.8
the year for which the
most recent information
is available, the National
Center for Education
Statistics found that
there were just under
66,000 U.S. public and
private school teachers
from the Asian community-about 1.8 percent
of the country's nearly
3.4 million teachers. In
2000, the percentage was
around 1.6.
A A PI enrollment in
teacher-preparation programs
mir rors the profession as a
whole. According to federal Title II

data, Asians make up less than 2 percent
of teacher-prep students in most states.
Ha is now the senior managing director
for Teach For America's Asian American
and Pacific Islander Initiative, launched in
May 2014 to improve outreach to prospective
AAPI teachers. As part of that effort, TFA
held four regional summits in 2015 specifically for AAPI undergraduate students.
Justin Tandingan, a director of the
TFA initiative, says the low percentage of
AAPI teachers in U.S. schools often surprises people.
"Whenever I drop that 1.8 percent statistic
on [my friends], and have them think about
how many AAPI teachers they had growing
up, and how that might have influenced them
growing up, it's a pretty significant moment,"
Tandingan said. "It's voided them of an educational experience that was relevant to their
own history."
Teach For America, like some other alternative-licensing programs, appears to be
ahead of the curve on recruitment of AAPI
teachers-6 percent of its current recruits
are AAPI. Ha suspects that the organization's recruitment in AAPI-dense areas and
the competitive nature of TFA may be factors.
But many traditional teacher-prep programs don't have distinct recruitment strategies for AAPI teachers.
"I think at this point [it's] working as a
bloc," said Rodrick Lucero, vice president
for member engagement and support at the
American Association of Colleges for Teacher
Education, suggesting that schools of education often lump teacher candidates of different non-white groups together under their
diversity efforts.
Johal said that education schools at universities need to take steps not to overlook AAPI
populations already in their midst.
"I was pretty involved on campus and I
had no idea that was something I could do at
school," she said.

Segmented Hiring
Experts who study teacher staffing often
point to a lack of diversity as a retention
issue, but while studies support that assertion for black and Hispanic teachers, there's
less evidence that it holds true for Asian educators. A September 2014 report from the
Institute for Education Sciences on teacher
retention offered sparse data on Asians and
Pacific Islanders, but what little it does suggest that Asians actually have one of the
highest retention rates.
Data from the NCES also show a surge in
the number of Asian teachers over the past
decade, but Tandingan says a portion of that
growth comes from greater reliance on foreign teachers used to help English-learners,
as opposed to in core academic courses.
Indeed, to the extent that recruitment
efforts focus on AAPI teachers, the need
for bilingual educators often plays a role,
likely as a ref lection of the particular
learning needs of many AAPI students.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, immigration accounted for 61 percent of the
growth in the U.S. Asian population in
2012-13, far more than for any other group.

As a result, recruitment of Asians and Pacific Islanders often prioritizes teachers
who can help English-learners.
Even federal initiatives to recruit AAPI
teachers tend to focus specifically on Englishlearning needs.
Under a 2009 executive order signed by
President Obama, each cabinet-level agency
was required to help improve the AAPI population's access to resources.
Among the many goals outlined by the
U.S. Education Department in its 2013 plan
under the order was to "increase the number
of AAPI teachers in schools as well as train
existing teachers to work with the language
needs of the AAPI community." But by the
time the department's 2014 plan came out,
there was no longer any mention of AAPI
teacher recruitment. The goal was modified
to "increase the number of teachers in schools
who have the language skills necessary to
address the needs of the AAPI community."
A spokesman for the department said the
change reflected a more "accurate and realistic" description of what could be achieved.
The department had aligned its goals under
the White House initiative with those of an
exisiting federal professional-development
grant program. Because of federal grant
rules prohibiting favoritism toward any one
ethnic or racial group in such programs,
progress in recruiting AAPI teachers more
generally became secondary.

Big-Picture Concerns
Although often lumped into two categories, the term "Asian American and Pacific
Islander" represents many subgroups: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, Indonesian, and Hawaiian are among the most
prominent. Disaggregating test data by
subgroup illuminates major achievement
variations within the catch-all AAPI demographic. Pacific Islanders performed much
lower on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example,
than Asians.
And academic achievement isn't the only
measure that matters, of course.
"Look at our suicide rates, and our bullying
rates. That measurement is not always taken
holistically," Tandingan said, alluding to research showing the nonacademic struggles of
AAPI students. "If we don't want that kind of
conversation, we're actually erasing the experiences of a lot of AAPI folks in education."
These nonacademic issues are the kinds of
factors that advocates say could be addressed
by increasing the presence of AAPI teachers
in the classroom.
And such issues can get glossed over because of Asian-American achievement on
standardized testing, leading to a stereotype
that Asian students are a "model minority"
to be emulated by lower-performing groups
of students of color.
"Because we don't hear someone asking
for help, it doesn't necessarily mean it's not
needed," Ha said. "And I think with a lot of
our AAPI students, that's very much the
case. If you even see students that might be
academically performing well, you might not
necessarily see the big picture."

http://www.edweek.org/go/teacher-recruitment

Education Week - January 27, 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 27, 2016