Wave of retirements thinning ranks of black educators
Boston’s public school system is struggling — and failing — to satisfy a federal mandate to diversify its ranks of teachers, a requirement made all the more difficult as a generation of the city’s black educators retires.
Even amid ongoing efforts to diversify, the district is falling short of US District Judge Arthur Garrity’s 1985 court order requiring 25 percent black and 10 percent “other minority” teachers, part of Garrity’s historic school desegregation plan.
The district meets Garrity’s standard for Hispanic and Asian teachers, but just 22.7 percent of last year’s Boston Public Schools teachers were black, according to state data.
Many of the city’s black teachers were hired in the 1970s and 1980s, following orders from Garrity, and have reached retirement age. Last year, 73 percent more black teachers left Boston schools than could be replaced with external hires, according to the district, and high levels of retirement are expected to continue.
The district could have foreseen the retirements and acted sooner, said Travis J. Bristol, a research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education who has studied diversity in Boston schools.
“Until there is a crisis, there isn’t a need to address the issue,” he said. “I don’t think that’s true only of Boston; I just think it’s true of large bureaucracies.”
It is not uncommon for schools to “operate in crisis mode,” he said.
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