FRANKFORT, Ky. — State leaders have announced the relaunch of the Kentucky Academy for Equity in Teaching, an initiative to recruit and retain a more diverse workforce of educators.
The academy, which is a partnership between the Kentucky Department of Education, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet, will focus on mentoring and training future teachers, as well as working on ways to expand pathways for certification.
"We have too few people wanting to become teachers and too many teachers leaving the field shortly after they start. We especially have too few people of color, too few men and too few individuals from lower-income backgrounds currently in the teaching profession," KDE Commissioner Jason Glass said. "It’s important for our students to see people who look like them at the front of a class, whether we are talking about race, ethnicity, economic background, disability or gender.”
According to KDE statistics, almost 61% of Kentucky’s student population last school year was considered economically disadvantaged. Around 25% of students identified as a race other than white, while only about 5% of teachers identified as non-white.
“Research has shown that when students see a teacher who looks like them or shares their background, they do better in the classroom,” said Thomas Woods-Tucker, Kentucky’s deputy commissioner of education and KDE’s first chief equity officer.
Aaron Thompson, president of the Council on Postsecondary Education, said they must remove barriers to recruitment and create opportunities for successful completion of college educator preparation programs to create a diverse workforce.
KAET will focus on providing grants to develop a pipeline of future educators, creating mentor and assessment coaching opportunities for participating students and expanding programs that support alternative pathways to certification.
The academy will also develop a research-based series of cultural competency and equity modules that include unconscious bias training for public educators
More information on KAET's initiatives can be found here.
►Make it easy to keep up-to-date with more stories like this. Download the WHAS11 News app now. For Apple or Android users.
Have a news tip? Email assign@whas11.com, visit our Facebook page or Twitter feed.