TEACHER DIVERSITY

The proportion of Black new hires in district schools was consistently below (by 5-8 percentage points every
year) the proportion of Black teachers in the district workforce the previous year. Asians and Hispanics were
also underrepresented among new hires, but only modestly. By contrast, the share of new White teachers was
consistently higher (in most years, by more than 5 percentage points) than in the previous year’s teaching force.
5. ARE SECTOR LEAVING PATTERNS SERVING TO DIVERSIFY NEW YORK CITY’S PUBLIC SCHOOL
TEACHERS?
Teacher “leaver rates” (or, more accurately, “sector leaver rates”—see “About the City Profiles”) in New York
City district schools declined over the course of our study. Even so, between 2011 and 2012, more than 8 percent
of the city’s teachers in our dataset left the district. (Note that the rates in a given year express the proportion
of that year’s Black, White, Asian and Hispanic teachers who were not in the district in any subsequent year.)
Every year, schools must draw deeply into the pool of available candidates to fill these vacancies, which, depending
on the supply of qualified replacements, may hinder efforts to improve teacher diversity. To the extent
that teacher leaver rates are higher among underrepresented groups (in this case, Asians, Blacks and Hispanics),
the challenge is likely to be greater.
Leaver rates were generally higher among White teachers, compared with those among their Asian, Black and
Hispanic colleagues, but the differences were extremely small, particularly after 2009 (Figure NYC-7).
FIGURE NYC-7: SECTOR LEAVER RATES, BY RACE AND ETHNICITY, 2002–2011
25
District Schools
20
15
13.3
12.4
10
11.9
10.2
8.9
8.3
5
7.1
7.7
0
White Black Hispanic Asian
Figure notes: The year in this figure refers to the year before teachers left—e.g., the leaver rates for 2005 indicate teachers who were employed
in 2005-06 and left before 2006-07.
In Figure NYC-8, we present cumulative new-teacher leaver rates for the district sector, by race and ethnicity.
Note that, for ease of presentation, these rates are not disaggregated by cohort, which means that the bottommost
row of the table includes cumulative outcomes for one new-teacher cohort (the earliest one we can identify
in our dataset), the second from the bottom includes the first two new-teacher cohorts, the third up includes
the first three, and so on.
ALBERT SHANKER INSTITUTE 73 THE STATE OF TEACHER DIVERSITY