Recruiting and retaining more teachers of color across Nebraska holds myriad benefits for students — including closing racial achievements gaps — a number of school officials told the Legislature's Education Committee on Thursday.
But obstacles — including certification and teacher pay — are driving disparities, said people invited to speak at a hearing on an interim study resolution from Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks to examine the issue.
The study outlined in LR157 explores how Nebraska schools can do more to recruit and retain teachers and administrators that better represent the number of students of color.
Having a diverse workforce has been shown to close achievement gaps among students of color, Pansing Brooks said, but Nebraska's teachers and school leaders are not as diverse as the children attending school.
A number of solutions put forward Thursday included offering scholarships and incentives to people of color, increasing teacher pay, eliminating burdensome certification hurdles — such as required Praxis exams — and recruiting out of state.
"The requirement of taking the Praxis again or paying a $500 fee does not say we want you in Nebraska," said Marian Holstein of the Nebraska Indian Education Association, who added that the number of Native teachers in the state does not match the need.
Students of color fare much better academically and are less likely to have behavioral problems if they have at least one teacher of color, said Vann Price, director of equity, diversity and inclusion at Lincoln Public Schools. White students also have improved problem-solving and critical thinking skills when they have diverse teachers, she said.
"Diversity benefits students," Price said.
At LPS, students of color graduate at a lower rate and are more likely to be suspended than their white peers, according to district data.
These achievement gaps — as much at 10%-20% — are driven in part by poor representation among teachers and students, said Thomas Christie, a former LPS teacher and administrator and current education chair for the NAACP of Lincoln.
And the numbers are stark, he said.
The population of students of color in Lincoln, for example, has increased by 30% in past years, but among teachers and administrators, that number is only 6%.
More than 93% of certified staff at LPS are white, compared with 64% of students. Latino teachers, on the other hand, make up only 2.9% of all certified staff compared with 15% of students.Â
The district has previously said it hopes to increase the percent of nonwhite certified staff — which stands at 6.5% — to 8.1% by 2024.Â
The need to diversify the state's teaching workforce is clear, said Sen. Lynne Walz of Fremont, who chairs the committee.
"The more that we do that, the more we learn about each other, the better we can become as a state," Walz said.
Sen. Terrell McKinney of Omaha, who serves on the committee and is Black, said he had few teachers that looked like him outside of coaches in high school.
McKinney, who signed onto the resolution along with Sen. Adam Morfeld of Lincoln, considered the issue a matter of pay. It's hard to convince somebody who grew up in an impoverished community, for example, to go to take on loans to go to college for a job without attractive pay, he said.Â
Another problem is certification, said Maddie Fennell, executive director of the Nebraska State Education Association.
Tests such as the Praxis, required for students entering education colleges and also when they are entering the workforce, aren't shown to correlate to teacher quality, she said, and other states have done away with them.
And the difficulty of those exams, especially for teachers with English as a second language, can prove prohibitive to recruiting a diverse workforce, Fennell added.
"(The Praxis) is obviously something that's now seen as a complete barrier," said Pansing Brooks, who indicated that changes in state law might be needed.
Sens. Morfeld and Lou Ann Linehan, who were in Omaha for hearings on redistricting, were not at the hearing.
Senators will use information from the interim study to determine any bills to introduce in the legislative session that begins in January.