In the final analysis, Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s decision to end educational grants that give a role to intentional diversification of the teaching profession can provide Louisiana with the chance to improve its training of future teachers.
Expressions of concern, if not outright apoplexy, ensued when the Trump Administration notified it would end hundreds of millions of dollars of grants that had components designed to give preference to racial minorities in teacher training. In Louisiana, under the Teacher Quality Partnerships Program it would appear three grantees with about $13 million in remaining budget authority were affected, and under Supporting Effective Educator Development grants it would appear one grant with $3 million in budget authority remaining was affected. All explicitly set as a goal preference to serving minority applicants in order to create a more racially diverse teacher workforce.
Complaints came from those involved in the grants as well as special interests who benefited from them, decrying the move as damaging to teacher recruitment generally but in particular towards creating a more racially diverse educator workforce. Yet the facts show such hand-wringing as misplaced.
The shibboleth that students, particularly minority students, perform better with a more diverse set of teachers has gained, with little merit, a great deal of currency among educrats and certain policy-makers. The problem with that argument is that so little evidence backs it. While a number of studies of matching teacher ethnicity to that of students claim meaningful performance gains among students, especially minorities, typically these observed effects are often quite small and more often observed on subjective measures like classroom behavior than on objective measures of academic achievement.
The most recent such confirms that for elementary education. Its authors do point out they can’t generalize their work to secondary education, as well as there could be a regional effect present such as in the south washed away in a national sample.
Yet by and large this means a better use of teacher training funds would be to channel these into programs not designed to favor applicants by race, adopting an approach the research would suggest would produce better outcomes for the money spent. There’s no reason why the canceled grantees can’t reformulate their proposals to exclude preference towards diversity and continue as before.
Whether they will have that chance is unknown, but if the programs continue to receive congressional funding, Louisiana teacher training initiatives, minus racial preferences, likely could score the same future dollars but can improve effectiveness by deploying these without diversion to the un- to little-productive diversity goal. After all, schools are there to teach and effectively so, not to engineer socially, in the construction of their teacher workforces.
Thus, by this move, grantees focusing on Louisiana have a better chance to produce more and better teachers through wiser use of funds, and they should pursue that.
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