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Welcome to The Anti-Racism Leadership Institute, where we engage in thoughtful conversations with professors and visionary leaders who are dedicated to dismantling racism in schools and transforming education. Join us as we explore their inspiring journeys, innovative strategies, and impactful initiatives aimed at creating more inclusive, equitable, and anti-racist learning environments. Our podcast is a platform for sharing insights, stories, and actionable ideas that can help shape a brighter, more just future for education. Tune in and be inspired to be a part of the change!
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Welcome to the Anti-Racism Leadership Institute podcast, where we ignite the sparks of change and inspire a world free of racism. This podcast is dedicated to highlighting the most cutting-edge anti-racist research and education for the purpose of connecting practitioners to powerful research-based approaches to racial equity. I am your host, Dr. Tracey A. Benson, and today we invite you on a transformative journey as we delve into the efforts and triumphs of those dedicated to fostering racial equity within education.
Welcome to the Anti-Racism Leadership Institute Research to Practice podcast. Today, we have the opportunity to talk with Dr. Richard Ingersoll about his decades of research on the teaching profession. Dr. Ingersoll is a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
His research focuses on the character of elementary and secondary schools as workplaces, teachers as employees, and teaching as a profession. And also, I've been following Dr. Ingersoll's research for decades, ever since I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. And so, this is sort of a dream come true to speak to the professor who I've been following for like decades.
So, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Tracey. I appreciate it.
Wonderful. So, I know that you have some background at practice, right? You used to be a classroom teacher. Can you tell us a little bit about that transition from the classroom into academia, and why did you choose to study teaching? Like, how do you even get interested in that as a topic? It is part of my story.
All I ever wanted to be was a high school history teacher, and in fact, I became that at some point after college. And I first was a teacher in Western Canada out in the West Coast after college, and I taught there for a couple years, got a teaching certificate, in a Canadian university in Vancouver. And then I moved east.
I moved back to Pennsylvania and Delaware and got a teaching job, and boy, did I have a comeuppance. Teaching was far better in Canada than in the U.S., or at least in the schools I taught in. And this was puzzling.
Like, what's going on here? You know, whether it was salaries or respect or resources, or this issue of having voice in the decision-making, having autonomy in the classroom, professional development, any characteristic, somehow as a job it was better. And I thought, okay, and I taught in both public and private schools in this area. I was really puzzled, and I wasn't particularly happy.
It was a rough job of being a high school teacher. You know, I mean, just the discipline issues, you know, you have a 17-year-old in your face, to be blunt. So I eventually quit, and I thought, well, I like to teach.
I want to teach bigger kids who are better behaved. This is how. So I went and got a PhD and became a professor, and sure enough, I teach bigger kids who are better behaved.
So that's sort of my biography, how I came to this. And in my PhD, you had to pick an area, and of course, the area I was really interested in trying to understand went back to these questions. What is it with the job in the U.S.? Well, what's it like in other types of schools? And how good or bad is it? And what's it like? And if it's worse than Canada, then how did this happen? How did schools get to be such poorly set up and managed workplaces? Just as a job, it seemed nuts to me.
So I've been actually trying to answer those questions ever since. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, thank you for that brief history, and I'm glad that you're a practitioner who's turned to an academia.
Not that just folks who are just academics aren't useful, but you have on-the-ground experience in terms of what it was like in the field, right? It gives you a different perspective. And just for folks that understand sort of the dichotomy between teaching in Canada and teaching here, I did teach abroad for a year as well in a different country that was not Canada. And yeah, the prestige was a lot different.
But can you give a couple examples just like so folks can bring to life about just what was, so you said, professional development, working conditions. What was so much better about Canada's system with relation to the U.S. system for teachers? There was two things. One was the degree of conflict.
In Canada, it was pretty harmonious. Teachers, students, administrators. In the U.S., in my schools, these were worlds of conflict.
There was all kinds of issues between teachers and students. I mean, half of your job was just dealing with misbehaving teenagers. There was all kinds of distrust and tension between teachers and administrators.
Then there was different factions and fighting within teachers. I mean, I was sort of struck by the, it was a workplace with a lot of conflict. The second thing that hit me was this issue of having autonomy and voice, being a professional who's an expert, have input into decision-making that impact your job.
And teachers had no say. We're just, our job is to implement. And of course, the history of school reform is the history of failure.
And so those two things, the conflict and sort of the voice issues really took me back. And I kind of thought, well, I just must have gotten unlucky and got into tough schools. And so hence, What's It Like Elsewhere became my path.
Yeah. Let's go into that conflict piece, right? Because we see this in private industry. We see this in nonprofits, which we work with a lot of nonprofits.
We see the same sort of climate issues. And we see that also in some schools. What do you think is sort of the root cause? Not that there's one, right? But what do you think is one or two of the root causes of why there's this, of course, there's a hierarchy, right? That sort of naturally lends itself to distrust.
But, you know, some principles have transcended that. Some schools are harmonious, right? And what do you think the source of it is? And what do you think the solution is to make schools, writ large, more harmonious? One of the things is that elementary secondary teaching is not a particularly well-respected line of work in this country. No, teaching is not a profession in the sense that it doesn't have the characteristics of, you know, medicine, academia, law, dentistry, architecture, accounting.
It doesn't have the respect, the pay, the training, the voice, these other sorts of things. Teachers are not viewed as real experts often. And this is a societal kind of thing.
And, of course, when you start to study teaching in other nations, you quickly find out, gosh, there's some places, you know, Finland, Switzerland, Korea, Singapore, et cetera, where it's a very highly esteemed, well-paid, well-trained occupation. So that's one issue that, you know, you'd go to some party and someone would chat with you and they say, what are you doing? You say, I'm a high school teacher. They go, geez, why would you want to do that? Or, you know, you seem like a smart guy.
Why are you doing that? And you, I mean, what do you say? I would be taken aback. I mean, let's face it. What's more important in a culture, in a society than education and in teachers? I mean, to me, one of the big things is kind of the stature, the respect, the status of this line of work.
And that's a longstanding cultural issue. And then the other thing, which I've said a couple of times, I'm very interested in is the issue of voice and having say, that if you're respected, I mean, this is one of the hallmarks of the established professions. They are the experts.
They have a say in their workplace, in their job, in their work. And teaching often doesn't have that. I mean, that's what I discovered.
Teaching, unfortunately, is not a hugely respected line of work in this nation. And boy, of course, I discovered that when I became a professor. My gosh, it's like going from night to day.
You know, all of a sudden, you just are treated with more. I'm the same guy. Overnight, you're treated with, whether it's the real estate agent or your family or people you meet, oh, you're a professor, you know, sort of thing.
And I think that's great, but why teachers so less of that? Yeah, yeah. And it's such a hard job. I started out, I was only an elementary school teacher.
I never went to high school. I was a high school principal, middle school vice principal, but I taught pre-K and fourth grade, right? Hardest job I have ever had in my life was being a classroom teacher, even though it's only 180 days. It might as well be 365 days, right? Because just putting that many hours.
And so what do you think in terms of, okay, there's a societal perception of teachers as not being prestigious. And again, we're not treated as such, right? And that's historical. And there's our ways in which schools can function, right, to still value teachers.
You know, and we're going to get into the voice thing in a minute, but how could schools create sort of the microcosm in which there is value, right, in the teacher profession within the school, within their community? Have you seen anything out there where, because of the broad societal, you know, trope of teachers, are there protective strategies that either school leaders or groups of teachers put together to sort of ratify their prestige so that they feel that they are in a profession that they want to stay for a long time? The thing that I follow a lot, and I think it can work well towards improving the lot of teachers, again, is this issue of voice. So, and this is not a new issue. We've had reforms.
You can read the history. Way back in the 1920s, people were saying, well, listen, instead of just being treated like factory workers, these teachers should be like professionals and they should be able to have some input. It's not like they necessarily need to run the show with some input.
So it's not a new issue. We've had decades, you know, teacher empowerment and site-based management, school-based reform, and teacher leadership. We've had all these different reforms.
Really, at heart, they're all about giving teachers more say, more voice in the key decisions in the building that impact their work. And a lot of times those reforms haven't worked. I mean, you cannot, it's hard to get schools and school districts and the whole bureaucracy to change.
There is a genre of reform over the last decade and a half that I really like, and I can see that it can be successful. It's very interesting. It's where teachers lead and run a school.
It's modeled after the partnerships that lawyers or accountants have, where the professionals, it's their organization. It's their firm. They make the decisions and they're accountable.
And so if you take that model and apply it to elementary, second-year schools where the teachers are running it, they're still accountable, but they make key decisions in the building. In other words, it does away with the boss-worker model, which is the standard in schools. And it's more of a professional model where you have, it's this collective decision-making.
It's very interesting to me. I had just sort of inadvertently found out about it about a decade and a half ago, and it's mostly in the Midwest, this small but growing movement, sometimes charter schools, of these schools where the teachers have major voice. Sometimes they'll have a principal that they actually hire that does administrative stuff.
But again, it's like a law firm. They might hire someone to do administrative work, but those lawyers, those partners, it's their show. They own it.
So that's a small reform. It's a growing, they have a national movement now on a website and conferences. To me, that's a very promising reform.
And it's the most, there's all kinds of attempts to professionalize teaching. And of course, we're talking about that it hasn't had eye status as a profession. And this is sort of, to me, I don't want to say extreme, but sort of an example of trying to really professionalizing this line of work.
Yeah, I want to sort of introduce a new paradigm before our discussion around the utility of teachers, right? Because there's a line of thinking, you know, around, the system was designed this way. It was not an accident. It's not broken, right? It was designed this way purposefully.
Those who need to get educated, get educated. And those who don't, who don't, they don't. And also we need a hierarchy within our society because we can't have everyone graduate high school, go to college and graduate.
That does not fit within our social order, right? In capitalism, it just doesn't work, right? So we need folks to be cooled out enough to accept their low-paying jobs. We need that because the majority of what makes our society work are these low-paying blue collar jobs, right? So what is your thought around that it's designed this way and we actually need schools to perform this way? Well, okay. Now you're talking about sort of the functions as far as students go.
What are the purposes here? How much education do we want to give them? Now, of course, what you say is true. Historically, there's a whole argument, well, the economy's changed. There's a whole lot more knowledge work.
There's all kinds of technical jobs. And the old system where barely literate high school graduates could fill all these factory jobs, the argument is that economy is no more and it's changed. And so that there's need for a far more cognitive thinking, critical thinking, whether they're going to college or not.
That, I mean, my son became an electrician. He deals with all these computers. It's really complicated and sophisticated, way beyond me.
He went to trade school and he learned all that. It's not simple work. It's also well paid.
And this is someone who was a special needs, special ed student. And now he's got this job where, no, a high school education was certainly, would not be enough for that type of work. It's sophisticated.
It's complicated. It's all this computer stuff. So the argument is that our economy has changed and the school system needs to change along with it.
And we need to produce, you know, whether you go to college or not, we need to produce folks that can take these much more technical, sophisticated types of jobs. Not that there's not manual labor. There is.
But, you know, with AI, that's still going to lessen, etc. So those are the arguments that you need to, as far as what you're offering to the students needs to be upgraded and changed. I agree.
I agree. Absolutely. Right.
And that then, you know, before we get into the teacher diversity question, right, because this is the one where I really want to get into what that means, how it manifests, and is it even useful, right, which is the foundational question. I just want to talk about the utility of the sort of your standard teacher. Right.
Teaching profession, the schoolhouse. And I liken it to a case study that I read way back to my doctoral program that talked about this ice making company in Wisconsin. I'm from Wisconsin.
And when refrigeration came out, you had this ice making company that was very lucrative. They provided ice to all upstate Wisconsin and Illinois. And, you know, so they were super lucrative, made a lot of money, offered their ice making business, right, because they had frozen lakes and they would, you know, cut up the ice and ship it out.
Now, when refrigeration came out, what did they do? They didn't switch their technology to then incorporate refrigeration into their model. What they did is they doubled down on making more ice, right, and sort of expanded as their ice depreciated, as the need for that ice was less and less, they decided to keep, you know, sourcing more ice in different places, right, until eventually they went under because they were antiquated, right? Refrigeration was going to outlast any need for frozen ice because it just simply didn't exist, right? And so to what aspect are we, the ice company, where we're seeking to push out more and more traditional teachers where society is actually changing? And I've argued that the last place a student would go, I know my son's 23 right now, if I ask him, you know, if he wanted to learn something new, I think the last place he would say is go sit in the classroom, right? There's all these other places where he would actually go to learn something than go to a teacher. Well, yes, I guess there's truth to that.
And in all kinds of professions, they all say, you know, once they get on the job, they start to learn a whole lot more than they did, whether it's law school or medical school or whatever. There's truth to that. But on the other hand, to me, one of the lessons of the pandemic was that remote teaching only goes so far, particularly with the younger students.
To me, I think this is maybe an under-recognized lesson, which is that you need that human being in front of those students, that they make a difference. And I know that, you know, there's all kinds of variants of remote education. Some are much better than others.
And you read about it all the time. That's not new, by the way. We've been hearing since we were kids that technology is going to remake education.
I mean, when I was a kid, it was educational television, which, by the way, was so boring. And when I was sick, my mother made me watch it. Well, the technology has progressed.
Okay. But still, there seems to be a need for that teacher in front of students. So back to your question, the utility.
To me, that was borne out with the pandemic. I mean, the learning loss that students had because of that, because of, you know, shutting down schools. The second thing, answer I'd give to your great question is, ask any person.
How many teachers did you have that really impacted you? And then talk about that. Everyone. It'll be very few, which is telling.
You know, it'll be less than five, maybe. And they'll talk about it movingly. The typical, you go with a friend, a family member, you ask them where someone really impacted them in third grade, in sixth grade, in twelfth grade, as a junior in college, and made a huge difference in their life.
I mean, it's really interesting to hear those stories. And you're thinking, okay. Okay.
You know, that's not from a book. That's not from a whatever, a job site. That's from experience.
That's from interaction with some really terrific teacher, which is so hard to do that work well. I mean, what a sophisticated set of art, craft, science skills to be a really good teacher. But boy, does it seem to make a difference.
Now, that's just anecdotal. But so I see utility for teachers. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I think there is a utility there still, of course. You know, the holders of knowledge, because they sort of, they teach more than just, you know, how to spell and how to read and, you know, how to do math, right? There's a certain amount of sort of cultural norms and societal norms that teachers teach, regardless of subjects that they sort of are in charge of teaching.
And the question is still sort of remains, because we opened the Pandora's box, we were sort of forced to, of remote learning, right, of going the route of, oh, wow, we will not have students in a traditional classroom in front of us, right? And it was wide open. It was hard, right? Because as you say, that there's a movement for teachers to sort of own the curriculum and create their own schools that have more voice. And what I've seen over time, especially with charter schools, is that we often just replicate the same system, right, in a slightly different way.
Well, you're right. And maybe that's a return to the old stuff, which doesn't work very well. On the other hand, certainly a lot of the remote didn't work very well.
I mean, I'm still puzzled. How could you get an elementary school, a middle school kid to sit down at the kitchen table and sit there in front of their laptop and stay engaged for four hours, five hours? I'm not actually sure how it worked, how you could get remote. I found it tough enough teaching graduate students, you know, you have some remote two-hour or longer session.
I had to force them to be engaged. I mean, you know, because engagement is the key. To get students to learn, there has to be engagement.
And I just, I'm puzzled as to how the young kids, how remote, I'm sure there's a way of doing it, which does get engagement and does work. But in many cases, it doesn't seem to work very well at all. And so you go back to the tried and true.
Now, your point about charter schools, yes, charters were going to be the window of innovation. And sometimes yes, and often no. It's like, well, I think we've seen this before.
We've completed schooling with learning, which that's not the way it has to exist, right? But we have a three-year-old, and you said you have a son. And we see how our kids learn. I will watch my daughter and see how she functions independently within our house.
Like she'll go to this activity, she'll go to that activity. When she wants me as a teacher, she'll come and ask. But when she figures it out, she's on her own again, right? And she switches from activity to activity, and she has very little screen time.
But when she does have screen time, she loves Bluey, right? She'll watch some Bluey, get some Sesame Street, right? Get a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and she'll go back to playing, right? And I'm there as a guide. I don't interact with her a lot, but she learns so, so much. I think there was an opportunity if we just gave it an actual chance.
I think us adults, we're so uncomfortable with remote learning that we never gave it a chance to take hold and really change the paradigm. I think you're right, and I hope you're right in a sense. I mean, if we could use technology to revolutionize schooling so it becomes closer to learning.
You know, look, in schools of education, forever we've been talking about Holy Grail is student-centered learning. You know, there's sort of the ideal, and student-centered learning might be what your daughter's doing. She's following her muse, and she's learning all kinds of things, and she's engaged, and she's motivated, and I think that's the core of student-centered learning.
So if you could just take what your daughter's doing and create a school that fosters that, I think you're going to do it. I think that's going to be wonderful. Well, I'm limited to prestigious Dr. Ingersoll.
He's been doing this research for decades, right? He's a bastion of knowledge, right? At the Fort Knox of knowledge about how to make the teaching profession better. That's what I'm waiting for. Yes.
Well, you know, to me, the simple answer is you improve that job, you make it more like a profession. Well, through this idea of diversity, and this is something where, you know, your more recent research is around, and I have a lot of questions around that, because if we talk about racial diversity, because that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about racial diversity, right? That when we think about the, there was a preponderance of black teachers pre-Brown, pre-1959, there were hundreds of, tens of thousands of black educators.
And then post-59, you know, with the passage of the decree to desegregate, that's, we had a large, you know, influx of white women teachers who came in and started filling these positions previously occupied by black teachers. Under the impetus that one, if we're going to have an integrated school, most of the white parents didn't want their children having black teachers. And then also, when they began to impart these qualification standards on a lot of these black schools, the black teachers didn't even have access to even be credentialed.
And so they instantly lost their jobs. And so we had tens of thousands of black educators that were erased from the classroom that left the legacy. And now there's a more contemporary thought around, well, we need to diversify.
And so where are you at in your thinking about educated diversity? And one, it's utility, and two, how we get there. The utility is something I haven't studied, but there's a lot of research on that, and there's very good studies. To me, they seem common sense that having a teacher that looks like you, has maybe similar background to you, that there's a value in that.
There's an argument of role models. Black kids need to see some black male teachers in particular as role models, et cetera. So there's some really good arguments to diversify the teaching force.
Because the basic finding is, is that the teaching force doesn't look like America. And you're right. This started in a big way back with desegregation.
And you had teachers that, you know, black teachers who lost their jobs. Now, that was quite a while ago. But since then, there's been this, there is this, what we call the, you know, the parity gap, the percentage of students who are of color, minority students is greater than the percentage of teachers.
And so we have this gap. What I've done research on is, has it changed? Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better? What is the gap? And what has happened to the diversification, if anything, over time of the teaching force? Because what happens, I was in this meeting, this is 15 years ago, and there was a bunch of people brought together by a foundation on this topic, diversity in the teaching. Linda Darling-Hammond and Gloria Ladson-Billings and Jackie Irvine and people that had really done good work in that topic.
And I was invited there and people said, look, so Richard, we have all this debate that it's good to diversify the teaching force. But you know, no one actually has looked at what is the state of things? Has it changed over time? Has it gotten better? Has it gotten worse? Can you take on this project, Richard? We started to do this research and just to sort of find out, what's the portrait? How diversified is the teaching force and has that changed for better or worse? So that's what we've done work on and discovered very interesting things, some of it good news and some of it bad news. And I can run through some of those findings if you'd like.
Now, that would be wonderful because I've done some research about student-teacher matching, right? How students are matched with teachers and the quality of teacher based on student SES and also student academic ability and student race, right? And what we found in our study on a small scale, as was found on a large scale, is that if you're low-income black or brown students, you're more likely to have a less experienced teacher. That's just what it looks like, right? Yes. Yes.
There's no question there's a quality of teachers, the qualification teachers is what we call maldistributed. It varies across different types of students. And there's definitely equity issues there.
Look, here's in a nutshell what we found. One, of course, there continues to be a parity gap. That is, the percentage of kids from marginalized racial ethnic groups is greater percentage of teachers.
Okay. But there's actually been a huge increase over the last three decades in the numbers of teachers of color. It's sort of under-recognized.
No, we don't have parity. But there's been this big, big increase. And to some extent, it shouldn't be a surprise because starting back in the 1980s, there's been a lot of recruitment initiatives for teachers of color.
Ford Foundation put $60 million into this. Two-thirds of the states have what was called minority teacher recruitment initiatives, etc. And they seem to have succeeded.
There's been a big increase. And it's interesting, that increase has also been uneven. And this is a puzzle.
So, for instance, Hispanic Latino teachers have gone up over the last 30 years by over 400 percent, a massive increase. White teachers have gone up less than 50 percent. Hispanic Latino, over 400 percent, this huge increase.
Asian teachers, over 300 percent increase. Big increases. So, no, we don't have parity.
But there's actually been some improvement here.
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