UCLA’s Dr. Kai Mathews on Using New Funds to Prioritize Educator Diversity in California – Part 1
Kai Mathews:
Invest in your students by investing in your teachers. And we have so many initiatives that are dedicated to these specialized populations, like low income students, Black and Brown students, students foster and homeless students. But I think that in order to, the most significant impact that you can have is putting a teacher in there that can mirror their experiences and that can represent them in ways that aren’t possible through the curriculum, through pedagogical practices. And so, making sure that you’re not just spending time and having programming, but actually spending money on diverse populations that you can staff your workforce to be more representative of your school climate, in your school, in your students in general. So, I think that’s the most important thing is having representation across the board that our students can look up to in their classrooms. And having someone in the front of the classroom that looks like our students.
And that requires investment, strategic investment, meaningful investment, and a monetary investment, and these are ways that you can do that. Of what we do know is that there’s a historic amount of funding that’s gonna be available for this year and next year for K-12 education. And couple that with what we have right now is a massive amount of teacher shortage. And how can we use this funding to prioritize not only the retention and support of individual teachers, but specifically individuals of color. In California in particular, we know that there’s a disproportionate amount of teachers of color compared to our students of color. So 77% of our student population are individuals of color, of our student population are individuals of color, and then only 37% of our teachers are teachers of color. And so, in order to address that disparity and address that diversity gap, we need to be having intentional funding and initiatives around recruitment support and retention of individuals of color.
So, I think that now is the time to do it with this historic amount of funding and with the dire need that we’re seeing across the board in our state. I think data-driven decision making is super important in general. And so, for LEAs to go back and to look at some of their efforts, their priorities, their initiatives, and to really consider what has been the output, what has been the outcome of those efforts in past years, and what has been the cost benefit analysis that you’ve seen from implementing to see whether or not these funds can either double down or you can create new funding streams, not new funding streams, but new programs, initiatives that can better attend to the goals that you’re trying to meet and accomplish.