The complexion of the ECE
teaching workforce remains unchanged, but the education of our state's workforce has been transformed.
Over the last decade, the size of
the teaching workforce remained relatively stable, ranging from 3.25 million to 3.4 million and growing at roughly the same pace as the student population.
Not exact matches
Although these results are based on a single state, they should encourage efforts to promote greater diversity in the
teaching workforce, which
remains overwhelmingly white.
And as the student population continues to grow more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse, the teacher
workforce remains overwhelmingly white.3 Research shows, however, that students of color benefit from having teachers with whom they share the same race or ethnicity, 4 and white students benefit from having nonwhite teachers as well.5 In order to increase the number of teacher candidates of color enrolling in and graduating from teacher preparation programs, several states are developing initiatives to intentionally recruit high - achieving people of color into the
teaching profession.
While retirement systems collect crucial information on investments, salaries, and retiree wealth, they also provides us with key information about the characteristics of the
teaching workforce: the expected number of teachers
remaining in the classroom versus the number of teachers leaving the profession.