Recruiting and Hiring Diverse Educators
Recruiting and hiring more educators of color is critical to increasing the diversity of our education workforce. If our system is able to recruit, train, and certify aspiring racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse teachers and leaders, it also needs to ensure that they are made aware of openings, feel welcome to apply, and have screening, interview, and job offer experiences that are inclusive.
The strategies listed below are derived from lessons learned and promising strategies now employed in districts that have successfully recruited and hired a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse educators. These strategies include examining the ways in which the district presents itself on websites and social media—the text used to describe its mission, vision, core values, and strategies along with the images it offers to paint a picture of its students, staff, and community. Examining how schools, districts, and organizations present themselves through the lens of race is an important first step. Other strategies include diversifying the hiring committee, dramatically expanding the means for advertising positions and for recruiting candidates, and closely examining and rethinking the questions asked and activities requested of interviewees.
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Promising Practices
Strategies to Consider
The strategies listed here are applicable to all stakeholders. For role or system-specific recommendations, please return to the table of contents and select a role under “Strategies for Leaders to Consider by Sector.”
- Subsidize moving expenses as assistance or incentive.
- Ensure all legislation has clear responsibilities for school boards and accountability mechanisms to ensure compliance. Pass specific legislation with hiring goals for educators and superintendents of color with clear and actionable accountability mechanisms for local districts to support compliance.
- Engage school boards in anti-bias training, rethinking hiring processes and procedures, and updating hiring policies.
- Collect and report on demographic information of hired candidates and retirees
- Encourage, incentivize, and require the creation of professional learning networks for people making hiring decisions; members of these networks should share ideas, strategies, resources, and support while also engaging in anti-bias education.
- Incentivize, support, and require districts to design and implement a hiring plan for diversifying the educator workforce. Provide resources and supports such as audit tools, sample policies, exemplars, templates, hiring guides, and retention recommendations.
- Create a position at the state education agency to support the diversification of the educator workforce, promote stronger collaboration across agencies, and support the development and sharing of resources.
- Partner with local associations to review collective bargaining agreements around changes to hiring practices and procedures to work toward alignment between the district’s codified hiring goals and the collective bargaining agreement.
- Expand the reach of job posting platforms, especially beyond smaller, boutique online platforms with limited geographic reach.
- Expand partnerships between institutions of higher education and districts to create more formal and informal ways to share the lived experience of working in specific districts. Develop resources and models for what this looks like in practice.
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