Two gaps plague education in the U.S. One is the gap in achievement between students of color and their White peers, and the other is the racial gap between an ethnically diverse student body and an increasingly White teaching staff. Contributing to this gap are the racial identities and ideologies that White teachers employ to explain the persistent underachievement of students of color. Unfortunately, multicultural teacher education (MTE) often fails to help educators develop an understanding of how racism has been institutionalized into American education and how it continues to create and perpetuate inequities. MTE also often triggers cognitive dissonance in White participants, which may account for the fact that they are more likely than their peers of color to drop out of a graduate MTE certificate program designed for in-service educators. This study examines factors that impact White educators’ participation in an MTE program as well as their development of non-racist identities and ideologies
