Efforts to broaden the demographics of the U.S. teaching force have yielded change, but more remains to be done to better reflect the diversity of the student body. A group of researchers led by Dan Goldhaber from the American Institutes for Research and the University of Washington suspect that multi-layered hiring processes may introduce heretofore unstudied points of friction. Their recent working paper digs into the question.
The researchers’ main data source is a company called Nimble Hiring, which provides recruitment, candidate screening, job offers, contracting, and onboarding services for dozens of education providers in several U.S. states. These include preschools and private schools, but the present study utilizes only data from public K-12 education providers (18 traditional districts and 24 charter school networks) that contract with Nimble. No geographic data is provided on where these are located, although Nimble’s website only lists five states in which they work.
Goldhaber and team combine these data with publicly-available organizational and demographic characteristics via the Common Core of Data. Their records cover job postings and applications for both teachers and principals from January 2019 through September 2024. They standardize the hiring process into four stages: (1) initial screening by central HR, (2) application made visible to school-level personnel, (3) engagement with school-level personnel (e.g., interviews), and (4) job offer. They then track all applicants through these stages, looking to see how the racial composition of applicants changes as candidates advance (or not) and how those advancement patterns vary across organizations with different characteristics (e.g., student demographics).
The findings start with applicant demographics. Sixty-three percent of teacher applicants were female, and female applicants were hired at significantly higher rates than males. The teacher applicant pool was more racially diverse than the teacher workforce in general, with 35.6 percent identifying as one of several underrepresented groups (specifically, Black, Hispanic, or Native American). However, White applicants were significantly overrepresented among applicants with offers (41 percent of all applicants, but 52 percent of applicants with job offers) and Asian applicants were significantly underrepresented (13.7 percent of all applicants, but only 5.7 percent of those with offers). Black applicants are slightly underrepresented among candidates with offers and Hispanic applicants are slightly overrepresented.
While the demographics of principal applicants were similar to those of teachers—also more diverse than the principal workforce in general—hiring patterns for principal positions were somewhat different. Black applicants maintained roughly proportional representation (34.2 percent of offers versus 33.6 percent of applicants), White applicants were slightly underrepresented among those receiving offers, Asian applicants were significantly overrepresented (only 2.7 of all applicants, but 5.6 percent of offers), and Hispanic applicants were slightly overrepresented.
For the most part, with respect to teacher hiring, the early screening stages appeared to be responsible for the majority of these job offer disparities. Black and other non-White applicants were significantly less likely to advance through each of the first three stages of the hiring process than their White peers. However, once they did so and were engaged at the school level (such as being invited for an interview), White and non-White applicants were equally likely to receive a job offer. Hispanic applicants appeared to be particularly disadvantaged at the second stage of the hiring process (when applications were made visible to school-level personnel), while Asian applicants were significantly less likely than their peers to advance at all four stages. Female applicants were more likely to advance at each of the first three stages than their male peers, but were equally likely to get job offers once engaged by school personnel.
The researchers saw no statistically significant relationship between non-White and White principal applicants and their overall likelihood of receiving a job offer at any stage. However, the analytical sample of jobs is far smaller than for teachers, so these findings need to be taken with a grain of salt. Female principal applicants showed a small but statistically-significant higher likelihood of receiving a job offer than their male peers.
Finally, Goldhaber and his team also found that organizations with higher proportions of underrepresented minority students were more likely to hire Black and Hispanic applicants overall—both teachers and principals. Charter schools particularly were more likely to hire non-White teacher applicants.
The researchers explain that the mechanisms at work are nuanced. Nimble’s recruiting system does not require racial/ethnic demographic information from any applicant, and any such detail voluntarily provided (say, via a personal essay) is not revealed to non-HR personnel until stage three. They conclude, then, that disparities observed in the first stage are likely driven by a mix of candidate preferences or actions (such as withdrawing an application after submission) and what they term “coarse” screening methods used to winnow down a large number of submissions. In the second stage, nearly all decisions—and the disparities that result—are driven by HR screening processes which likely include a mix of electronic and human-centric reviews. “At this point,” they write, “either screening instruments [the schools] use are biased, implicit or overt human bias operates, or job-relevant factors excluded from our analysis but correlated with race differ.”
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the final stages, when candidates interact with non-HR school personnel, show minimal disparities. All of which means that schools looking to diversify their teacher and principal workforce must focus on refining their earliest screening processes to make sure that no particular racial or ethnic group is being disproportionately caught up in the machine.
SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber et al., “School System Selection Processes and Workforce Diversity in Schools,” CALDER Working Paper (February 2026).
