There are more and more qualified and great non-white teachers who would love to help non-white students just like them because they went through the same experiences growing up. According to the NEAG School of Education at UConn, “the number of students of color has more than doubled in the Neag School’s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates and increased by 33% in the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s Teacher Education Program.” So there are more teachers who are graduating every year who are non-white. It’s not that there is a lack of diverse teachers, these teachers just aren’t being hired.

Marquis Johnson earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from UConn, and went on to combine his two loves as an eighth grade science teacher, first in Hartford and now as instructional coach at Windsor’s Sage Park Middle School.

Our new study, just published in AERA Open, provides evidence that increasing the financial support offered to potential Ph.D. students offers a promising approach for attracting a more diverse pool of doctoral students. Along with co-authors Christopher Bennett, H. Kenny Nienhusser, and Milagros Castillo-Montoya, we studied Ph.D. student application and enrollment patterns at a large public research university in the Northeast. We were interested in how the diversity of the Ph.D. students changed corresponding to a change in the financial support offered to doctoral students.

S. Kent Butler came to UCF in 2007 to teach counselor education and has more than 30 years of experience in the field and multicultural work. As the head of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, he has created the Leadership Council for Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity, which is made up of 22 individuals across UCF that champion social justice and equity.

In Degrees of Change: UConn Increases Diversity in Teaching Programs, Enright states that “UConn and the Neag School of Education have made a concerted effort to increase their minority student population, with the long-term hope of closing the gap that exists now in classrooms.”

Like other programs, our teacher preparation program at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education has long struggled to recruit as many students of color as we’d like. That’s why we joined AACTE’s networked improvement community (NIC) in 2014 to collaborate with other institutions on strategies to bring more Black and Latino men into our programs. Already, we have nearly doubled the percentage of students of color in our program, going from roughly 12% of students to 20% of our entering cohort this fall.