Teaching Degree Minority Enrollment Lags, Study Shows - NYTimes.com: Despite major changes in the racial makeup of American public school students, the people training to be teachers are still predominantly white.
According to a study being released Wednesday by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, which represents colleges and universities with teacher certification programs, 82 percent of candidates who received bachelor’s degrees in education in 2009-10 and 2010-11 were white.
By contrast, census figures show that close to half of all children under 5 in 2008 were members of a racial or ethnic minority.
“We’re finding that college-bound minority students have so many career options,” said Sharon P. Robinson, the president of the association. “We have to develop some specific recruitment strategies to attract our share of those students into those teacher education programs.”
Even in programs that award teaching certificates to candidates who do not obtain full education degrees, 76 percent of the students are white.
