"I have decided to divorce my wife after 31 years, on scientific grounds"

I was asked this week to provide evidence for how a more ethnically diverse teaching staff would improve the educational outcomes of our students.  It's a great question, an important question, and it has stayed with me for a few days.  My initial response was to offer the tales of students who were asking for this diversity, and who felt seeing teachers who looked like them would greatly improve their experience and engagement at school. But this is open to the charge of being anecdotal, and furthermore, if students showed a bias to, say, male teachers, it would not cut much ice with me.  So, maybe my initial response was rather lacking.

There might have been a time, some years ago, when I would have spent a great deal of time seeking data to support the case.  All I would need would be to find a very similar international school, with the same profile of students, the same Mission and aspirations and the same funding levels - that is control all the variables but one - and systematically vary the diversity profile between the two schools.  Then I could simply quantify the educational outcomes in both schools (ahem) and hey presto! the answer would be obvious.  Alas, the facts are not ascertainable like this.

So what evidence, then is available?  Of course, a lot depends on what you mean by educational outcomes.  Would a more ethnically diverse teaching staff improve Maths' scores?  Better grades in Theory of Knowledge?  There is no strong link between ethnicity of individual teacher and these outcomes (though it might be great, for example, for our whole maths department to have an expert in Shanghai Maths join the team), so again, I am not sure this would be a good answer - it would all depend on the individual teacher.  But of course there are educational outcomes other than the readily quantifiable.  How would we measure the value of showing to students that people of the same colour as them can be leaders in their schooling?  Recent alumni survey feedback suggests that some of them would value it very much indeed. 

Another powerful answer is related to providing students with the skills they'll need to flourish after school.  Google's 2017 Project Oxygen listed the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, based on years of data.  These turn out to be:

1. Being a good coach
2. Communication skills
3. Possessing insights into others and different values and points of view
4. Empathy toward one’s colleagues
5. Critical thinking
6. Problem solving
7. Drawing conclusions (making connections across complex ideas)
8. STEM skills

(Incidentally, this is fairly in line with Mann's 1918 assessment of the top traits as Character; 
Judgment; Efficiency; Understanding of others).  In this case, while the ethnicity of any one teacher is probably irrelevant, it seems likely to me that students with a monoculture of teachers are going to be missing out on 2,3 and 4, at least.  And if the current direction of the world of work - constantly emphasizing systems thinking, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity - continues, then surely bringing in various elements of diversity (of which ethnicity is one) will better prepare our students.  In educational terms, Barkman and Speaker at the University of Arizona suggest that diversity opens possibilities to support students in building positive self-esteem;  affirming their identities with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, (dis)ability, class, etc etc; helping them and us learn to work and play together; helping them communicate across their differences and value what each contributes; valuing just and fair treatment for all; preparing them for citizenship.

Further reasoning can be found when we shift from an individual to an organizational lens.  If diversity is good for us as an organisation, then the effect will, indirectly, be good for students.  And if management consultants McKinsey’s claim that diversity of leadership leads to better company performance is right, then that's significant. 

The claim does need some investigation, based as it is on (a) diversity of leadership measured by a nationality metric (ii) performance based on financial return relative to national industry.  But it is nevertheless, a striking finding, consistent with data from The Economist Intelligence Unit showing a link between workforce and marketplace diversity, with 83% of respondents agreeing that a diverse workforce improves their firms’ ability to capture and retain a diverse client base, 82% agreeing that a strategic approach to managing diversity can help access a rich talent pool and 80% viewing diversity management as yielding a competitive advantage in labour markets. 

I have to say, I am somewhat suspicious of these reasons - we're not about market share, client base or competitive advantage.   Some might say we should be; but it seems to me that these things are at best tangential to, and at worst, complete distractions from the business of educating young minds for peace and a sustainable future.   

Coming back to the question: Can we provide evidence for how a more ethnically diverse teaching staff would improve the educational outcomes of our students?  I think the answer is 'yes', though I accept that the proof is not rigorous; and data is compelling to different people in different ways.   I guess I am left wondering if it is generally better to accept something unless you have reason to doubt it, or doubt it unless you have reason to accept it? 

So the question remains, and it's true that the rigour with which we can prove things in education is different to that in other disciplines.  We have to come to terms with that; as the inimitable Rory Sutherland makes clear: 

I have decided to divorce my wife after 31 years on scientific grounds. Though perfectly happy, on reassessing my original decision to enter matrimony it has emerged that at no point was that choice subject to peer review, there was no randomised control trial, the experiment could not be replicated and the data-set on which I based my decision failed to provide the levels of statistical confidence required.

....in reality what you don’t know is always more critical than what you do.... An insistence on the scientific method has costs as well as benefits ...in the messy world we inhabit the facts that are available are usually not important and the facts that are important are usually not available.

References

Barkman S., Speaker H. (n.d.) Valuing Diversity; Arizona University (available here)

Guerin, S. and Vernon K. (2015) Examining Diversity and Inclusion from an Asian Perspective; Diversity & Inclusion in Asia Network (DIAN) (available here) 

Helgesen S. (2014); Values-based Diversity; Economist Intelligence Unit (available here)

Hewlett S., Marshall M.and Sherbin L (2013); How Diversity can Drive Innovation; Harvard Business Review (available here)

Hunt V., Layton D., Prince S. (2015); Why Diversity Matters; McKinsey and Co (available here)

Little, A. and Backus, M. (2020) Confidence Tricks AEON

National Soft Skills Association (2017) The NOT So Surprising Thing that Google Learned about Its Employees – And What It Means for Today’s Students  (available here)

Sutherland R (2020) The danger of following ‘the science’. The Spectator (available here)