Charlotte, North Carolina, United States – September 12, 2026 – Jermaine Gassaway spent years watching schools talk about diversity without measuring it. Principals would say they valued a diverse staff, then hire the same way they always had.
Gassaway wrote Unopened Books: Multiplying the 2% to put a number on the problem: the rate of Black male teachers in American classrooms. The book asks readers to look past the goal and check the process that produces the outcome.
The self-check he is releasing now grew out of that same instinct. It is not a policy paper. It is a short set of questions any principal, superintendent, or hiring committee can run through in an afternoon.
The self-check, in five questions
Gassaway built the tool around five questions a school team can ask before, during, and after a hiring cycle.
Where did this year’s applicant pool come from, and does it look different from last year’s?
Who reviewed resumes first, and did more than one person see each one?
Did any candidate get screened out for reasons unrelated to classroom skill?
What did the school do, specifically, to reach candidates outside its usual pipeline?
Did the people hired last year stay, and if not, why?
“None of these questions requires a consultant or a new budget line,” Gassaway said. “They require someone willing to write down the answer instead of assuming it.”
He designed the questions to be answered in writing, not just discussed in a meeting. “A verbal answer disappears,” he said. “A written answer is something you can check against next year’s numbers.”
Why he built it this way
Gassaway has said the hardest part of changing a teacher pipeline is not persuading people the goal matters. Most educators already agree diversity in the classroom helps students. The hard part is the unglamorous work of checking a process that feels fine until someone counts it.
That is why the self-check avoids targets or quotas. It asks about process instead: who saw the application, who made the call, who followed up. Gassaway argues that a school that cannot answer those five questions honestly is not ready to set a diversity goal, because it does not yet know where its hiring is actually breaking down.
“You cannot fix a leak you have not found,” he said. “Most schools are still looking for the leak.”
Who the tool is for
Gassaway built the self-check for building-level leaders first, not district offices. He has said the decisions that shape a staff happen at the school level, in the specific choices a principal makes about where to post a job and who gets a callback.
He is encouraging school leaders to run the self-check once now, then again at the end of the next hiring cycle, so they have two answers to compare instead of one impression.
Where it fits with his other work
The self-check follows the same thread as Unopened Books: Multiplying the 2%, which lays out the research behind why teacher diversity matters and what tends to get in the way of it. Gassaway wrote the book after years in classrooms and school leadership, watching the same patterns repeat across different schools and cities.
He has said he built the self-check to give readers of the book something to do with the argument, a way to turn the case he makes on the page into five questions they can actually answer about their own school by next Friday.
To read more, visit the website here.
About Jermaine Gassaway
Jermaine Gassaway is a Superintendent based in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the author of Unopened Books: Multiplying the 2% and When You Arrive: A Children’s Book About Racism. Gassaway is a graduate of The Piney Woods School and Johnson C. Smith University, and he has spent his career in classrooms and school leadership roles focused on educational equity and teacher diversity.
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