Different Experiences of School
Indeed, the important quest to develop more teachers of color is not new. Education leaders and researchers from a variety of camps have been asking the same questions about this for quite some time. However, it is a question that seems to skirt, if not outright ignore, the system of racialized privilege that is historically embedded in, and endemic to, the public school system writ large.
As a researcher, I study white teachers, their words, and their practices. As a university professor, I teach education courses where, most semesters, each and every one of my teacher-education students is white.
I have yet to meet a student in my college courses who did not claim to excel in school, or at the very least to do exceptionally well. My students, for the most part, fondly recall their experiences as K-12 students.
Such fondness, to be sure, is part and parcel to why students go into teaching, and it is not far-fetched to assume that they look back fondly on their experiences because schools were set up by people who look like us for people who look like us.