The Achievement Gap Before the Achievement Gap

Courtesy of the packet for the September Professional Educator Standards Board meeting, this is a graph that compares the passing rate on the WEST-B test of African-American students in teacher prep programs, to the passing rate of all students.  So not only are there less African-American students going into teaching, barely half of them are getting over this first bar.

A later slide says that of the 4,587 students who passed the WEST-B in 2010-2011, 75 of them were African American.

It's your classic chicken/egg question; if we had more teachers of color to inspire our students of color, more of them might go on to close the circle and become, themselves, teachers.  The question is how to get there, which is something the state has been struggling with for as long as I've been in teaching, and a societal issue that goes back to the sixties.

For more reading, try this article from the Huffington Post.