Teach­ers and ad­min­is­trat­ors in Des Moines are still work­ing to catch up to this new, com­plex real­ity. Schools will al­ways want in­nov­at­ive, caring, hard-work­ing teach­ers—re­gard­less of race—but re­search sug­gests it can also help stu­dents to work with teach­ers who look like them­selves. In a 2001 work­ing pa­per for the Na­tion­al Bur­eau of Eco­nom­ic Re­search, Stan­ford Gradu­ate School of Edu­ca­tion pro­fess­or Thomas S. Dee found that a one-year as­sign­ment of stu­dents to a teach­er of their same race res­ul­ted in high­er math and read­ing scores for both black and white stu­dents of 3-4 per­cent.

“It’s noth­ing unique to Des Moines,” says Isai­ah McGee, the school dis­trict’s equity co­ordin­at­or, but the ad­min­is­tra­tion has real­ized it must di­ver­si­fy its teach­ing ranks. In Iowa, where 87 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is non-His­pan­ic white, when you look at the stu­dents gradu­at­ing with teach­ing de­grees, “it’s not really people of col­or,” he notes. To com­pensate, he is try­ing to re­cruit minor­ity teach­ers in nearby states, hawk­ing Iowa’s qual­ity of life.

The dis­trict is also try­ing to train its ex­ist­ing cadre of teach­ers in what it calls “cul­tur­al pro­fi­ciency,” one of three ma­jor themes in Drake’s mas­ter’s pro­gram. (The oth­ers: ef­fect­ive teach­ing meth­ods; and in-school lead­er­ship, such as design­ing cur­ricula.) The dis­trict star­ted this ef­fort dur­ing the 2011-2012 school year. “We really kept com­ing back to the rap­idly chan­ging demo­graph­ics of our dis­trict,” says Su­per­in­tend­ent Thomas Ahart, “and the teach­ers not be­ing pre­pared really to ad­dress what they were fa­cing in the classroom, with poverty, with Eng­lish lan­guage learners, men­tal health is­sues, et cet­era.”

School ad­min­is­trat­ors real­ized they needed a way to at­tract and keep the best teach­ers, while pay­ing salar­ies on a par with oth­er dis­tricts nearby. They settled on an al­tern­at­ive con­tract, with the in­cent­ive of a mas­ter’s de­gree that the school dis­trict will pay for, start­ing after three years of teach­ing and com­pleted while the re­cip­i­ent con­tin­ues to work. To make the con­tract more luc­rat­ive, the pay scale is front-loaded, with a high­er salary in earli­er years.

There was a prob­lem, though: Ahart and oth­er ad­min­is­trat­ors doubted that a mas­ter’s de­gree in it­self would ac­tu­ally im­prove a teach­er’s per­form­ance. While teach­ers across the coun­try typ­ic­ally re­ceive a pay raise with an ad­vanced de­gree, stud­ies have shown a neg­li­gible im­pact on stu­dent achieve­ment. For the dis­trict to foot the bill for the ad­vanced de­grees, it wanted to cre­ate a mas­ter’s pro­gram with its spe­cif­ic needs in mind, fea­tur­ing an à la carte se­lec­tion of courses that would best serve its in­terests. The dis­trict so­li­cited pro­pos­als from uni­versit­ies around the Mid­w­est, and a com­mit­tee of ad­min­is­trat­ors and teach­ers nar­rowed the can­did­ates to two, in­clud­ing Drake.

From there, price be­came the biggest factor. Drake agreed to a com­pet­it­ive tu­ition rate of $330 per cred­it hour, paid by the dis­trict for teach­ers who signed the al­tern­at­ive con­tract but also avail­able to Des Moines teach­ers em­ployed un­der the stand­ard con­tract. Drake was a good match, con­sid­er­ing its con­veni­ent loc­a­tion and its his­tory of work­ing with the pub­lic schools. Un­der the agree­ment, the school dis­trict and the private uni­versity col­lab­or­ate on the cur­riculum, com­posed half of new, Des Moines-spe­cif­ic classes and half of hand­picked elect­ives use­ful for the city’s teach­ers. “This is really a new pro­gram for Drake,” Ahart says. “It’s not just a re­work­ing of something they already had in place.”

Court­ney Ihnen, a 27-year-old mu­sic teach­er at Hanawalt Ele­ment­ary School, is part of the first co­hort of 50 teach­ers en­rolling in Drake’s mas­ter’s pro­gram. She’s ex­cited. Hav­ing grown up in the sub­urb of West Des Moines, where most of the stu­dents in her school were (like her­self) white and middle-class, she thinks she’ll be­ne­fit from the cul­tur­al-pro­fi­ciency train­ing. Dur­ing her three years in the classroom, she has already ad­ap­ted her ap­proach to stu­dents in cer­tain re­spects. When stu­dents didn’t make eye con­tact with her in class, she learned that, in some cul­tures, it’s dis­respect­ful to look an adult in the eye. In late Oc­to­ber, she wasn’t aware of the 15-day Nepalese fest­iv­al of Dashain un­til an in­struct­or in a pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment sem­in­ar for al­tern­at­ive-con­tract teach­ers men­tioned that Nepali stu­dents might miss a few days of school and re­turn to class tired or emo­tion­al. The train­ing “helps you be more know­ledge­able about what they’re go­ing through in their life,” Ihnen says.

She has already de­veloped a bond with the oth­er teach­ers in the al­tern­at­ive-con­tract pro­gram, who have been meet­ing on a reg­u­lar basis since they began in 2012-2013. In her eyes, these will be the next gen­er­a­tion of lead­ers with­in schools across Des Moines, all equipped with a surer sense of how to work with stu­dents who don’t al­ways look like the Iow­ans of yore.