A shakeup at Teach for America, the controversial nonprofit that places recent college graduates in low-income school districts across the country, will eliminate the organization’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer this fall. The announcement comes amid layoffs that will shrink the national staff about by 15 percent.
While Teach for America says the restructuring (first outlined in a blog post published by Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education who has been critical of the program) is an attempt to move the focus from central management to regional operations, the elimination of the diversity office is a particularly surprising turn for an organization that has prided itself on recruiting people of color to become teachers. While critics have blasted TFA for sending ill-prepared young people into schools that educate some of the nation’s neediest students, its ability to put instructors in classrooms who look like and share backgrounds with the nation’s increasingly diverse students has been one of its most-lauded accomplishments.
In 2014, children of color for the first time made up half of all public-school students. Yet a report that same year from the Center for American Progress found that more than 80 percent of the teachers serving them were white. Those figures are a red flag not only because, as the report’s lead author told me at the time, "There are additional benefits to teachers who are diverse and understand diverse backgrounds who can be cultural brokers for students who don't necessarily have role models in their lives,” but because studies suggest that diversifying the teaching pool would actually boost student performance.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Deruy, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...rsity-office/474735/]
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