Review of Two Texas Counties Shows Gap in Teacher/Student Diversity

The racial and ethnic diversity of the nation’s 6.6 million teachers has increased since 1990 but has not caught up with the diversity of their students, according to a U.S. Census Bureau analysis of employment and population data.

About one quarter of all teachers — who represented about 4% of U.S. workers — were non-White and 9.4% were Hispanic or Latino, compared with 16% and 4%, respectively, three decades ago.

In this story, we refer to diversity as the racial and ethnic composition of the populations described.

The elementary, middle and high school teacher workforce in Harris County and the city of Houston was not as racially diverse as the population of students they served.

The recently released 2014-2018 Equal Employment Opportunity Tabulation (EEO Tabulation) offers demographic and employment characteristics of 236 occupations, including teachers, at many levels of geography.

The new data help illustrate changes in racial and ethnic diversity among specific teaching occupations at all levels of education from preschool to college. It also allows us to compare teacher diversity to the diversity of students in the grades that they teach.

Three Decades of Teacher Diversity

Nationally, the percentage of teachers who were Asian, Black or African American, or Hispanic or Latino increased across all teaching occupations since 1990, according to the analysis.

Among preschool and kindergarten teachers, the share increased by 15.6 percentage points between 1990 and the 2014-2018 period (Figure 1).

Similarly, the percentage of Hispanic or Latino elementary and middle school teachers more than doubled from 4.3% in 1990 to 9.5% during the 2014-2018 period.

Clayton Gumber is a survey statistician in the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division.

Julia Beckhusen is a senior economist in the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division.

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