Race-conscious professional teaching standards: Where do the states stand?

Education policymakers have long sought to reduce persistent achievement disparities between students of color and White students with varying levels of success. Understanding the different needs and obstacles faced by students and families of color is important given educating all individuals for our future U.S. society is a priority. Educational policy should reflect the assumption that race matters and continues to impact educational opportunity. This paper argues that race-conscious professional teaching standards could extend the structural boundaries of teacher practice when working with racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. Using discourse analysis to analyze the deeper meanings of selected states’ teaching standards in different sociopolitical contexts, this paper describes the challenges and opportunities for infusing race-conscious perspectives in teaching standards. Implications for how states’ teaching policy language actively creates and builds teaching and learning environments are discussed.