I’m almost always the first Asian American teacher my students have had. That’s a problem

My first homeroom class as a seventh-grade teacher was at Intermediate School 184, in what was once District 7 in the New York City Public Schools. My joyful, smart, creative students were Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican and Guatemalan Americans from the surrounding Mott Haven and Melrose neighborhoods of the South Bronx.

Every once in a while, one of them would sidle up to me and ask, “Where are you from, Miss?” Immigrants and children of immigrants themselves, they were asking for my story, who my people were and above all, how I came to be their teacher.

In New York, a city with close to 1 million Asian residents in 2002, none of my students had ever had an Asian American teacher before our year together. Nationally, the teacher workforce remains largely white, female and middle-class. Only 2% of K-12 teachers in the United States are Asian American, though Asians make up 7% of the overall population. Of course, national numbers obscure regional variations, particularly in states where numbers are much higher or lower. There are more Asian teachers in urban areas than in rural areas, but white teachers still make up 69% of the urban teaching force and 90% of the rural force.

In over 10 years as a professor of education at a public university in Massachusetts, a state in which 7.5% of residents and less than 2% of teachers are Asian, I can count on one hand the number of Asian American-identifying students I have taught. And, unsurprisingly, I am still almost always the first Asian American teacher my students have ever had.

Increasing teacher diversity is an especially urgent challenge for Asian American students, who are part of the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States.

The demographic chasm between teacher and student populations is a problem. We know that representation matters: Students of color benefit from having teachers who share their racial or ethnic identification. Importantly, students of color score higher on standardized tests and graduate from high school at higher rates when they have a teacher of the same race or ethnicity.

The presence of teachers of color also benefits white students, who show improved critical thinking and increased civic engagement skills when they work with teachers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Educator diversity can also lead to higher test scores, fewer disciplinary issues, and a range of other cognitive, social and emotional benefits for all students.

That said, increasing teacher diversity is an especially urgent challenge for Asian American students, who are part of the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States. In fact, by 2060, the number of Asians in the U.S. is expected to rise to 35.8 million, more than three times their 2000 population. It’s critically important to have more Asian American teachers in classrooms to teach these students and those of all backgrounds.

In Massachusetts, ongoing efforts to diversify the teacher workforce and meet the growing demographic imperative have included proposed legislation to expand pathways to teacher licensure and state-funded pilot grants to support grow-your-own programs for teachers of color and from groups historically underrepresented in teaching. These are promising initiatives, but there’s more work to be done.

To be clear, we need policies designed to increase and support teachers of color from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. But effective policy has to be built on a recognition of the diversity that exists across -– and within -– groups of teachers of color. This is certainly true for Asian American teachers: The 22 million Asian Americans in the United States today claim over 20 origin groups and represent a range of language, socioeconomic, immigration, cultural and transnational backgrounds. The conversation around the terms we use to refer to Asian Americans, including Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) and Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AAHNPI) — and whether they are both inclusive and nuanced enough — is just one illustration of this complexity.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Recruitment and retention policies aimed at Asian American teachers will fall short of their potential if they are not built on an understanding of the heterogeneity of this group. In order for policy efforts to encompass the diversity of the Asian diaspora in the United States, they must be informed by teachers who can speak directly to diverse histories, identities and lived experiences. But despite ongoing attempts to increase the number of teachers at the policymaking table, teachers have historically been excluded from policy design.

To build policies that reflect America’s diversity and effectively recruit and retain the Asian American teachers we need, we must make sure teachers have a seat at the policymaking table. We can start by taking a cue from the seventh graders I taught in the Bronx and ask Asian American teachers some important questions: Who are you? What has your experience been like in the classroom? What will make you stay?