The right way to hire teachers

The gist of the Nov. 16 news article “In search of Hispanic teachers” was that, because the number of Hispanic students is growing, Prince George’s County public schools and school systems elsewhere want to hire more Hispanic teachers. This is untenable as a matter of both law and logic.  

Federal civil-rights statutes and the Constitution forbid hiring teachers with an eye on race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court has expressly rejected the notion that faculty racial percentages should mirror student-body racial percentages (Hazelwood School District v. United States, 1977), as well as the “role model” justification for faculty discrimination (Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 1986). As Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the latter case, “Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that [minority] students are better off with [minority] teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education.”