Efforts by Oregon education officials to make the diversity of the state’s teachers mirror that of students have paid off with modest progress in the last decade. But keeping ethnically and racially diverse teachers beyond the first five years of their careers remains a challenge in the state and nation.

The proportion of licensed Oregon teachers who identify as racially or ethnically diverse today has grown nearly 4% in the last decade, from about 10% of the teacher workforce to nearly 14%, according to the latest Oregon Educator Equity Report from the state’s Educator Advancement Council. The 21-member council, largely made up of teachers and administrators from around the state, has published the reports every two years since 2015.

In the latest analysis, council members credited school district investments in “grow-your-own” alternative teacher training programs with helping to get nonlicensed staff from diverse communities into teacher training programs. They credited state community college and university investments with diversifying teacher degree candidates. And they said the Oregon Legislature’s investment in scholarships and funding for diverse teacher recruitment, mentorship and apprenticeship programs had also helped diversify teaching staff. 

Grow-your-own programs have had great success in the Umatilla School District in eastern Oregon, which has one of the highest proportions of diverse students and teachers in the state. Nearly 76% of students identify as racially or ethnically diverse, as do nearly 26% of teachers. Superintendent Heidi Sipe said ensuring diversity among teachers is a priority for her in hiring, so every student in the system can feel connected and seen among their teachers. 

“We’ve developed pathways for people in our community who understand and represent our community, to become the teachers in our schools,” she said. “Our new principal is a Umatilla alumnus with experiences in multiple districts around the state, our new vice principal is a bilingual and bicultural educator who has taught for the past five years in our school system. Together, they’re a great combo to welcome students to the high school. Of the eleven teachers we’ve hired for this year, four have participated in our grow-your-own efforts, six are bilingual and six are educators of color,” Sipe said.

Still, the number of teachers in Oregon from communities of color – about 4,400 – pales in comparison to the proportion of diverse students in Oregon, who make up 42% – or more than 227,000 – of the state’s 547,000 enrolled students. The report defines “diverse teachers” as those who self-reported in a race and ethnicity survey from the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission as Asian, Black, Latino, Hispanic, Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawiian or Pacific Islander or reported two or more races. 

All kids benefit from having diverse teachers in school, research shows. Decades of data shows that schools with a higher proportion of diverse teachers have lower absentee rates and fewer discipline disparities. Students of color also experience major benefits. In one study, Black students were more likely to graduate high school and more likely to attend college if they’d been taught by a Black teacher at least once between third and fifth grade. Black students are also more likely to take advanced courses and to reach graduation if they’ve had a Black teacher. 

The problem of retention

The greatest progress in growing teacher diversity in Oregon has been in the proportion of first-year teachers who identify as racially or ethnically diverse. That figure doubled from 9% in 2012 to more than 21% in 2022, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine, who contributed to the report. 

“Compared to states like Maryland, Washington and Massachusetts, which have also established grow your own initiatives and pursued strategies to diversify the workforce, Oregon has done as well as or better at increasing the racial/ethnic diversity of its entering teachers,” they wrote. 

But teacher retention remains a challenge. 

The number of racially and ethnically diverse teachers with five or fewer years of experience has tripled over the past decade, according to the Oregon Department of Education, and nearly half of all racially and ethnically diverse teachers in the 2023-24 school year were in the first five years of their teaching career. Getting more diverse teachers to stay beyond that is a problem across the U.S., where nearly half of teachers leave their job or the profession entirely within the first five years, according to research from University of Pennsylvania Professor Richard Ingersoll. 

About nine out of 10 teachers hired in schools across the U.S. are hired to replace a teacher who has left the profession, according to research from the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization based in D.C., and most of those teachers aren’t leaving to retire, they found.

UC Irvine research found that many of Oregon’s new and diverse teachers were placed in schools with difficult working conditions that had high turnover among teachers and administrators.

“Together, these analyses suggest that while Oregon has successfully recruited more diverse teachers into the workforce, the school environments they are placed into may be contributing to their turnover, hampering the progress that can be realized.”

Council members recommended getting early career teachers into supportive schools with resources and veteran teachers to mentor them and also to recruit teachers from existing staff and help them obtain their license. The council also said making educator preparation programs at state universities and community colleges more affordable and accessible would go a long way toward increasing teacher diversity in Oregon schools. 

The report suggested that institutions of higher education need to create pathways for nontraditional students, such as older students who are working and have families, to become teachers and appealing to those hoping to make a career switch. 

And finally, the council recommended more robust data collection and sharing across state agencies and districts, so schools and education officials can exchange more information about the state of the teacher workforce and needs.