Introduction

For the first time in our history, students of color make up the majority of students enrolled in U.S. public schools.¹ Yet 65 years after Brown tried to pave a fair path for these students, the promise of educational equity remains elusive. Too many students of color are languishing in under-resourced schools, where they lack access to high-level academic courses, enrichment opportunities, quality materials, and adequate facilities.² These resource inequities only begin to scratch the surface, however. It is also the case that too many students of color are held to lower academic standards, subjected to harsh discipline approaches, and taught in ways that overlook or discount their cultural and linguistic assets.³ These and other barriers give way to massive imbalances in academic performance that serve to limit students' life opportunities.

Building a diverse pool of educators who are prepared to demonstrate culturally responsive teaching or relevant teaching (herein CRT)⁴ is critical to reversing underachievement and unlocking the potential of students of color as well as that of other groups of underserved learners. Culturally responsive teaching is an approach that challenges educators to recognize that, rather than deficits, students bring strengths into the classroom that should be leveraged to make learning experiences more relevant to and effective for them. Adopting CRT goes beyond celebrating students’ cultural traditions once a year. Educators who practice CRT set rigorous learning objectives for all of their students and they continually build helpful bridges between what students need to learn and their heritage, lived realities, and the issues they care about. In short, culturally responsive teaching is about weaving together rigor and relevance.

What is needed now is a major investment in developing culturally responsive educators, one that goes beyond providing one-off courses or workshops.

The need for culturally responsive teaching is more pressing than ever before, especially when you consider the deep demographic gaps between teachers and students. A teaching workforce that remains overwhelmingly female, white, middle-class, and monolingual is increasingly likely to teach students who are of a different race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, language group, and so on. Teachers are the drivers of culturally responsive practices in schools and classrooms. But without the appropriate training and support, even the most well-meaning teachers can unwittingly provide instruction that is irrelevant, ineffective, and even antagonistic to today’s diverse learners.⁵ Research concludes that recruiting a more racially diverse teaching workforce can dramatically improve cultural responsiveness in schools,⁶ but demographic parity is unlikely to be achieved in the coming years.⁷ Therefore, all teachers, regardless of background, benefit from support in reaching the diverse learners they are likely to serve.

Unfortunately, teacher preparation programs and professional development systems across the country are not sufficiently preparing educators to bring CRT to life in the classroom. Consider: while some educator preparation programs are now required to offer coursework on teaching diverse students,⁸ these courses are often narrow and disconnected from the mainstream curriculum.⁹ In-service support and development fall short as well, as confirmed by teachers themselves. For instance, a 2018 survey of New York City teachers conducted by the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, found that fewer than one in three teachers had received ongoing professional development on how to address issues of race and ethnicity in the classroom.¹⁰

Culturally responsive teaching is about weaving together rigor and relevance.

What is needed now is a major investment in developing culturally responsive educators, one that goes beyond providing one-off courses or workshops. Developing comprehensive professional teaching standards that incorporate expectations for CRT is a foundational step state leaders can take to bolster the focus of CRT in current systems of teacher preparation and development. Not only would such standards ensure that teachers receive clear and consistent messaging about the knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to be culturally responsive throughout their careers—they would also establish CRT as a formal state priority. Though not a panacea, comprehensive state-level professional teaching standards offer an opportunity to send a bold message that far from being an "add-on" initiative, CRT is integral to the work of all quality teachers.

New America analyzed professional teaching standards in all 50 states to better understand whether states’ expectations for teachers incorporate culturally responsive teaching. To support this analysis, we identify eight competencies that clarify what teachers should know and be able to do in light of research on culturally responsive teaching. Our research finds that while all states already incorporate some aspects of culturally responsive teaching within their professional teaching standards, the majority of states do not yet provide a description of culturally responsive teaching that is clear or comprehensive enough to support teachers in developing and strengthening their CRT practice throughout their careers. As an added resource, we have assembled excerpts from state standards in which CRT is already well articulated, as well a data visualization that describes the prevalence of CRT competencies in teaching standards across states.