So in an attempt to figure out how schools can retain more black teachers, Education Trust, an advocacy organization focused on low-income students and those of color, did something that shouldn’t be novel, but is: They actually talked to African American educators about the challenges they face. “We just decided to go out and listen,” Ashley Griffin, the lead author of a new report and the current head of K-12 research at the nonprofit, said during a phone interview.

Using government data from the 2012 Schools and Staffing Survey, Education Trust identified states and districts with significant numbers of teachers of color, and then asked for willing interviewees. In all, the researchers spoke with 150 black teachers with varying experience levels at both traditional public schools and charter schools across seven states. (The organization also conducted similar interviews with Latino teachers, which it will lay out in a future report.)

Most other qualitative surveys have involved interviews with teachers in just a single state or district. This report is particularly interesting because it features teachers from across the country, suggesting, as the researchers do, that the findings “can be extended to an entire population of black teachers and are useful to multiple stakeholder groups.” It’s worth acknowledging that these are the voices of teachers who were willing to share their perspectives, but there’s no evidence that these teachers felt more or less compelled to outline the challenges they face. And the findings are valuable because they may highlight blind spots for schools, especially those that aren’t sure why relatively new hires are quitting.

Education Trust discovered in focus groups in both rural and urban schools that many black teachers experience constant tension at work between a sense of frustration at being “pigeonholed” into teaching primarily black students and a desire to support black students specifically. Increasing the pipeline of black college students pursuing teaching isn’t enough, nor is rethinking how colleges of education operate. The school environments teachers end up in after they graduate with a credential matter, too.

There’s a lot to unpack in the findings. If some black teachers feel like their colleagues think they’re only good enough for black students, does that imply those colleagues also think black students deserve less than other students? Does that suggest black teachers’ white colleagues see them as less qualified? Does that indicate white teachers won’t do as much to support black students as they will to help other students? These questions are difficult to answer because the report features the perceptions of black teachers and not white teachers. But the perceptions of these black teachers are valuable, regardless of what white teachers think, because they inform who stays in the profession and who leaves.