Research for Action has released a booklet, The Need for More Teachers of Color, as part of a Teach-In it hosted on April 23, 2022, in FDR Park in Philadelphia. The booklet provides highlights of findings from RFA’s past studies, newly updated with 2020 -21 data to provide the most recent analysis of the state of teacher diversity in Pennsylvania as a whole and specifically in Philadelphia. We also include several new analyses to fill in existing knowledge gaps, including examination of how teacher diversity has changed in Philadelphia over the past 20 years.
Among key findings are that Philadelphia public schools, district, and charter schools combined, employed nearly 1,200 fewer Black teachers in 2020-21 than they did 20 years ago, even as the number of teachers has increased for other race or ethnicity subgroups.
As with prior reports on teacher diversity, this project relied on data received via records requests from the Pennsylvania Department of Education that RFA cleaned and merged with publicly reported student data to calculate the percentages of teachers and students by race/ethnicity and gender at the state, county, district, and school levels for all Pennsylvania public schools. The full eight years of data RFA prepared is available for download here.
