The Superintendent’s folks also do not give us a turnover number for teachers of color; how many teachers of color left the building over the same period of time?  What is the net gain (or loss) of teachers of color over the same period?  The marketing-minded folks putting together this slide show also fail to tell us what the current minority teaching staff is as a percentage of all teachers.  Why hide data and tell us half the story? 

Doing some searching, we find a March 31, 2021 Teaching and Learning Committee  meeting (video not available), where the district disclosed that between SY 18-9 and SY 20-21, the number of new minority hires by HPS was 227 (SY 21-22 number is unavailable).  Which means that since SY 2018-19, HPS has hired at least 483 minority teachers, which would put the total number of minority teachers in HPS at around 28%.  Which means HPS is killing it in the teacher diversity hiring field.  However, this is the rate with 0% turnover, which does not happen, even on “Abbot Elementary.”

In 2015, the Albert Shanker Institute, with an endowment from the American Federation of Teachers, said in a report entitled, “The State of Teacher Diversity in American Education,”  that “comparatively little attention” has been paid to the state of teacher diversity in America, while showing the bulk of research on the topic coming  in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Today, folks are much more aware of the issue as the 1980’s television sitcom “Saved by the Bell” has been replaced by “Abbot Elementary.

While real-time advances have been made in diversifying America’s teacher workforce, most recent U.S. Department of Education statistics show that only 20% of U.S. teachers were non-white, with only 7% identifying as black, while more than 50% of the student population is non-white. 

In 2020, The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a perennial $300k bottom-feeding non-profit hired by Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez and Hartford Public Schools without any obvious benefit to the Hartford Public Schools student body, showed in a report entitled, “A Broken Pipeline,” that 20% of America’s teachers identify as non-white.

However, further knocking the wind out of the Superintendent’s “people of color” as new hires table, research suggests that “many of our schools struggle less with recruiting diverse educators than retaining them.”  Between 1988 and 2018, the number of new teachers of color hired across the nation increased at a faster rate than the number of white teachers, however, they also exited the building at a faster rate as well.

The Education Trust and Educators for Excellence joined in a 2022 report which showed that 86 percent of teachers nationally said that they would spend their entire career in a classroom.  However, when they looked at only responses from teachers of color, that number dropped to 52%.

It appears that the marketing message to be given is more important than giving parents and the community the whole factual story.  Who benefits most from this strategy?