Consider these statistics: Slightly more than half of all public schools students are children of color. Yet, despite documented benefits of a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force, no more than 2 percent of teachers in the public education system are black men. What’s more, research shows that teachers of color are leaving the profession. The following post discusses the reasons for the dearth of black males in the teaching force and how to support and retain them. It was written by Travis J. Bristol, a research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) who used to teach high school English teacher in New York City public schools and who was a teacher educator with the Boston Teacher Residency program.
Bristol’s research interests now focus on the intersection of race and gender in organizations. His most recent work includes consulting for The World Bank in Washington D.C. and Georgetown, Guyana; his projects included providing technical assistance to the Guyanese Ministry of Education as it created the 2014 – 2019 Education Sector Plan. Travis has been awarded the Vice-President’s Grant for Student Research in Diversity and the Provost Doctoral Dissertation Grant from Teachers College at Columbia University, the Minority Dissertation Fellowship from the American Educational Research Association, a Ford Dissertation Fellowship from the National Research Council of the National Academies and the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship from the National Academy of Education.
By Travis J. Bristol
“This isn’t a prison… We can’t treat our kids like they are criminals – especially [when] they are not doing anything wrong… it creates tension and nobody really wants to be here.” Dante Smith, 30, and in his fourth year as a high school teacher recounted how, in the middle of students taking a standardized exam, an administrator asked him if he had collected cell phones from students during the exam. He replied “yes,” and showed the administrator the phones that he had collected. Believing that he had not collected enough phones, the administrator interrupted the exam to stop and frisk the students for cellphones. Dante left teaching the following year.
As federal, state, and local policy makers, as well as institutions of higher education and foundations industriously search for new initiatives to increase the diversity of the teaching workforce – they may well benefit from, first, understanding the experiences of male teachers of color.
Latino, Black, Asian, and Native American teachers account for 17 percent of all U.S. public school teachers. About 2 percent are black men. However, slightly more than half of all public schools students are children of color. This disparity between the racial/ethnic composition of teachers and students in our schools is troubling for several reasons. First, in this flat or interconnected world, our children deserve a diverse teaching force to prepare them to be global citizens. Second, diversity drives innovation. White teachers can benefit from having teachers of color on the faculty to assist with navigating unfamiliar cultural territory and designing culturally sustaining pedagogy. Finally, evidence exists that there is an added-value — as measured by increases on standardized exams – for students of color when taught by a same race teacher.
But, in spite of the benefits from having a more racially/ethnically diverse teaching force – teachers of color are disappearing from schools. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz from Teachers College at Columbia University and Richard Ingersoll from the University of Pennsylvania find that teachers of color leave the profession at rates that are higher than their White colleagues. While it may be easy to conclude that teachers of color are fleeing the profession for more lucrative opportunities, my study on the school-based experiences of 27 black male teachers across 14 public schools in Boston suggests otherwise.
Dante Smith’s experiences mirrored those of the other 26 black male teachers in my study. Participants believed their interactions with colleagues paralleled the encounters their students of color had with adults in the building. Black male teachers also described having to serve, first, as police officers, rather than teachers. Instead of their colleagues coming to them for help designing engaging curriculum, Black male teachers became responsible for taking care of the “misbehaving” students.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
Travis Bristol is a Research and Policy Fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
