Pennsylvania Takes Valuable Steps Forward To Help Teachers Create Anti-Racist Classrooms
In the Bucks County Beacon, I take a look at some new standards from the Pennsylvania Department of Education aimed at adding culturally sensitive standards to the guidelines for teacher prep programs (and what the anti-”CRT” crowd is likely to think.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education has released standards for Culturally-Relevant and Sustaining Education. This will mark the first time that Pennsylvania has included these sorts of standards in its requirements for teacher preparation programs.
Tanya Garcia, deputy secretary for the department’s Office of Postsecondary and Higher Education, has noted that the standards are meant to address Pennsylvania’s changing demographics. In the 2020-21 school year, students of color were about 37 percent of the student population in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania faces unique challenges when it comes to diversity in schools. The nonpartisan group Research for Action found back in 2020 that Pennsylvania has the fourth-largest gap between students of color (SOC) and teachers of color (TOC). Nationally, the share of SOC was 2.5 times the share of TOC. But in Pennsylvania, the percentage of SOC was 6 times the percentage of TOC.
Of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts, RFA found that 184 employed zero teachers of color. Only around 25 districts in the state have staffs that are more than 5 percent TOC. By building it’s even more stunning; RFA found that of the 3,200 schools in Pennsylvania, 1,500 had all-white teaching staffs. A dozen schools in the state were 80 percent students of color and 0 percent teachers of color.
There are groups, like the Center for Black Educator Development, working to improve the pipeline for teachers of color. But in the meantime, Pennsylvania has a marked need for culturally sensitive teaching. At the same time, conservatives in Pennsylvania have made attempts to ban the teaching of divisive concepts that critics “trace to critical race theory,” and those folks are unlikely to give these new standards a warm greeting. Yet, these standards represent a real attempt to address the need to approach teaching from a more culturally responsive place.