HOME: Oakland Equity Indicators | Education | Teachers

The Teachers Topic includes three Indicators that measure racial and ethnic disparities in teacher representation of the student population, teacher experience, and teacher turnover. The first Indicator measures disparities in teacher representation of students between Latinos and Whites. The second Indicator measures disparities in teacher experience between schools that are predominantly African American and Latino vs. schools that are majority White. The third Indicators measures disparities in teacher turnover between majority African Americans and majority White schools.

Teachers is the second lowest scoring Topic in the Education Theme with a Topic score of 28.3, and the Indicator scores are highly variable. Teacher experience scored highest at 55. Teacher turnover was next but substantially lower at 29. Last and dramatically lower was representation of the student population at a score of 1. All the Indicators in this Theme have room for improvement, but the overall Topic score hides the especially serious disparities in teacher representation of the student body.

Districtwide, there were 67.5 teachers per 1,000 students, so rates less than that indicate that a particular group was underrepresented in the teaching force and rates higher than that indicate overrepresentation in the teaching force. We found that Latino students were greatly underrepresented with only 23.0 Latino teachers per 1,000 Latino students. White students were greatly overrepresented with 301.5 White teachers per 1,000 White students. African American and Asian students were slightly underrepresented at 59.2 and 60.5 teachers per 1,000 students respectively. White students in OUSD had 13.09 times as many teachers of their own race/ethnicity as Latino students did.

Schools in OUSD with a predominantly African American and Latino student body had the highest percent of teachers in their first five years of teaching, averaging 48.9% in the 2016-17 school year. Majority Latino schools were second highest at 42.9% and majority African American were next at 38.3%. Schools with a majority Asian student body had the lowest percent of teachers in their first five years of teaching at only 20.3%. However, there are only 2 schools with a majority Asian student body, so this Indicator is scored using majority White schools which had 29.9% of teachers in their first five years of teaching. Students that went to predominantly African American and Latino schools had 1.64 times as many teachers in their first five years of teaching as students at majority White schools.

Schools in OUSD with a majority African American student body had the highest teacher turnover, averaging 38.3% of teachers leaving between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years. Majority Latino schools were second highest at 34.5% of teachers turning over. Schools with a majority White student body had the lowest teacher turnover at only 10.2%. Students that went to majority African American schools experienced 3.76 times more teacher turnover last year than students at majority White schools. Students at majority Latino schools experienced 3.38 times more than those at majority White schools.