Do charter school teachers’ ethnicities match the district?

I’m baaaaaaaack. Here is a quick question that has been bothering me for a while. I have a very simple wondering: does the ethnic make up of charter school teaching staff match the ethnic make up of LAUSD teaching staffs?

This question has come up over and over again in Louisiana. After Hurricane Katrina, a new charter school district was opened up to revamp the school system, and many have noted that the teaching staff in New Orleans has become whiter and younger.

So what about Los Angeles?

The answer is….drumroll….something is wrong with the data.

Source: California Department of Education.

In the whole district (all 31,000 employees) only 11.73% did not report their ethnicity. But at Alliance 78.18% were not reported. KIPP and PUC also have exceptionally high rates of “not reporting” teacher ethnicities.

There are three possibilities or this.

1. There is some kind of error, and the charters failed to report this information.
2. Its all a bad survey design. Perhaps, the survey that these schools give to their teachers gives them the option to “not report” more prominently than other schools, so they choose not to report.
3. The schools are hiring more people who are concerned with releasing their personal information.

Whichever possibility it is, it basically makes it impossible to compare LAUSD with those three charter networks.

So what about the other four? How do they compare?

Overall, the percentages are pretty similar. Magnolia has a slightly whiter staff. Aspire has a much more Hispanic staff. Green Dot has a higher percentage of African American teachers. But on the whole, the percentages are all pretty close.

So, unlike New Orleans, LA Charter Schools’ teaching staffs seem to pretty much match the ethnic make up of the district. But at the same time, several charter operators are experiencing a reporting error, so we cannot say this for certain.

This is not simply a charter school problem. LAUSD has a similar problem when it comes to educational levels of parents. Sometimes, there is clearly an error in the data without any explanation I can find- but maybe someone will read this and fix it.