Just 5.6 percent of Pennsylvania’s teachers are persons of color, compared to 33.1 percent of its students.
The data also show that 55 percent of the state’s public schools and 38 percent of its school districts employed only white teachers. Among the districts in the Philadelphia suburbs, more than half have no black teachers.
Nearly three in four of the state’s black teachers — 72 percent — work in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, where 54 percent of the state’s black students attend.
But these two counties, too, have racial disparities — 40 percent of the students are black, compared to 14 percent of the teachers.
These numbers are based on information provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) for the 2016-17 school year. The nonprofit organization
Research for Action(RFA) created a
data set containing the racial breakdown of teachers and students in every school, district, and county in Pennsylvania, as well as summary statistics for the entire state. RFA also published a
brief of the main findings to accompany the new data.
More than half of Pa. districts have no teachers of color | The notebook
