32 Preparing White teachers for diverse students Christine Sleeter California State University Monterey Bay Beginning in the 1960s, desegregation was intended to make schools more equitable and responsive to communities of color. I will not review the extent to which this inten- tion was actually fulfilled, but will focus on one result: problems associated with the Whitening of the teaching force. In the wake of desegregation, because Whites perceived Black schools and teachers as inferior, numerous Black schools were closed and almost 40,000 Black teachers and administrators lost their positions (Milner & Howard, 2004). Currently less than 16 percent of the teaching force is of color, in contrast to about 42 percent of public K-12 students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). The demographic gap between students and teachers is growing as the student population continues to diversify but the teaching population does not. This gap matters because it means that students of color—especially Black and Latino students—are much more likely than White students to be taught by teachers who ques- tion their academic ability, are uncomfortable around them, or do not know how to teach them well. For example, researchers consistently find teachers to see White and Asian students as more teachable than Black or Latino students, and White teachers to be more likely than teachers of color to hold lower expectations for Black and Latino students (Hauser-Cram et al., 2003; Pang & Sablan, 1998; Warren, 2002). White teachers often have more difficulty forming constructive relationships with students of color, particularly African American students, than with White students. Commonly assuming that African American and Latino parents do not value education, White teachers are much less likely to build relationships with them than are teachers of color. Lacking familiarity with communities their students of color come from, many White teachers are unable to build bridges between students and curriculum, but then attribute students’ lack of engagement as disinterest in learning, or their academic problems as inability to learn. Due to a combination of low expectations and cultural mismatch, White teachers appear to refer students of color to special education more than do teachers of color. As a result, students of color tend to be overrepresented in special education, while White students—particularly those from affluent backgrounds—overpopulate gifted programs (Harry & Klingner, 2006). White teachers who are ill-equipped to teach stu- dents of color, particularly those in low-income communities, often seek jobs elsewhere as soon as they can, leading to high levels of teacher turn-over in many urban and poor rural schools. Empirical research documents that White preservice students commonly bring into teacher education attitudes and experiences that eventually lead to the patterns above. As members of the most segregated and isolated racial category in the U.S. (Orfield & Lee, 2005), most White candidates enter teacher education with very little cross-cultural background, knowledge and experience, although they often bring naive optimism that coexists with unexamined stereotypes taken for granted as truth (Barry & Lechner, 1995; interpret