If someone told you that there were hundreds of open teaching positions in Minneapolis Public Schools, and then asked to you guess whether those positions are relatively evenly distributed among all schools, or if there was some other kind of pattern to the data, what would you think?
Would all schools be looking for around 2-4 teachers or would some be looking for significantly more teachers while some were looking for one or none?
I took a stab at trying to figure this out by putting the current job openings in a spreadsheet and comparing the number of openings (teacher and paraprofessionals) to the percentage of white students in each school. Notice the gradient:
What I’m seeing is schools with larger percentages of students of color having more teaching job openings than schools that are majority-white.
This list doesn’t include schools that have no job postings. Top-10 for whiteness school, Armatage, is an example of that.
What I think is happening here is that our largely white teachers (82%) have chosen where they’d like to work and MPS will scramble to find inexperienced teachers to fill in the gaps.
This is our current system working as designed.
MPS then continues to struggle to retain families with students of color who’ve been seeking out alternatives to this system.
