Here is a very long and very interesting article about the disparity between the racial diversity of teachers compared to students. The data and challenges are interesting, but this part troubles me:

Students benefit when they have teachers who look like them

 

[…]

 

When she got to middle school, Lor noticed teachers who looked like her for the first time. She wasn’t placed in their classrooms, but she wished she would have been; wished she would have had teachers she could relate to in that way.

 

[…]

 

“Having a diverse teacher in your classroom helps you realize that you can also become a teacher, you can become a doctor, you can do whatever you want,” she said.

I do think that diversity in teaching is important. I wish that we would take a more expansive approach to diversity to include things like ideology, sex, and background instead of just race. As a boy, I rarely – RARELY – had a teacher that “looked like me.” Since I went to school in Texas and Saudi, my teachers were overwhelmingly women, but were more racially diverse than in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, teachers are overwhelmingly white, middle class, liberal, and female.

BUT, while diversity is an important and laudable goal, we must purge this notion that kids can only learn, or learn best, from teachers that “look like them.” We are reinforcing that expectation in our kids, and it is damaging their ability to learn. If it is wrong to say that I learn better from white men (it is), then it is wrong to tell an Asian girl that she would learn better from Asian women. Teachers are individuals and should be treated as such.

Instead, we should be reinforcing the ethics of acceptance and respect for authority with our kids. We should be teaching them that they can learn just as much irrespective of the physical appearance of the teacher. By telling kids that they need teachers to look like them in order to learn, we are teaching them racism and bigotry.

Let’s continue to encourage racial minorities, conservatives, and men to join the ranks of teachers so that our kids will benefit from a broad experience, but let’s stop teaching kids that they should judge the quality of their teacher by the color of their skin.