“But if you don’t keep them, it’s like putting water in a bucket with holes in the bottom.” Federal and state data on teacher departures lag by a year or more, meaning we won’t have a conclusive picture of the pandemic’s impact on teacher diversity for years to come. And more recently the Kellogg Foundation partnered with several historically Black colleges and universities to boost the numbers of Black male educators. About a decade ago, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan helped lead a campaign to recruit 80,000 Black male teachers. In the 1980s, the Ford Foundation partnered with other organizations to recruit and prepare more teachers of color. Starting several decades ago, several powerhouse groups and individuals invested in recruiting a more diverse teacher workforce, says Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and policy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and an expert on teacher demographics. “They have not spent a second thinking about what kind of environment they are recruiting people to,” says El-Mekki, who invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s worry, expressed shortly before his death, that he had integrated Black Americans “into a burning house.” “That could stand for teachers of color entering racially hostile school environments today,” El-Mekki says. “A lot of school and district leaders take the approach, ‘We don’t care how messy or untidy or oppressive our house is-just come in anyway,’” says Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, whose organization last fall co-released with the teacher leadership and advocacy organization Teach Plus a report that lays out steps school leaders should take to retain more Black educators. Read more: What It’s Like to be a Teacher During the Pandemic Meanwhile, many districts and schools continue to believe they can hire their way out of the teacher diversity problem-if they acknowledge it’s a problem at all-and fail to take on the hard work of transforming school culture. Students of color perform better academically, and are more likely to stay in school, when they are exposed to teachers of their race or ethnicity. 22%, when teachers were asked if they were considering leaving because of reasons related to COVID-19.)ĭespite all the recent and increasingly dire warnings of a teacher shortage in some parts of the country, we have too often failed to clarify who is most at risk from the departures: Black and Latino educators and the students of color who rely on them. 42%-said that they were considering leaving their position last school year, researchers at the University of Arkansas’ College of Education & Health Professions found. And a slightly higher percentage of nonwhite teachers than white ones-45% vs. ![]() Into a burning houseīlack teachers were more than twice as likely as other teachers in the winter of 2021 to say they planned to leave their jobs at the end of the 2020-21 school year, according to a report released by the RAND Corporation. Now, as Talbott’s story underscores, the problem could be poised to get worse, with Black teachers in particular feeling increased strain. The research has been clear for years that many of our schools struggle less with recruiting diverse educators than retaining them: between 19, the number of teachers of color hired by the country’s schools increased at a faster rate than the number of white teachers, yet those diverse educators also left their positions much more quickly, on average. ![]() At Lusher, in 2020, 13% of teachers were Black compared with 22% of the students. identify as people of color, compared with more than half of students. Lusher, like America, has long had a teacher diversity problem: Slightly more than 20% of public school teachers-who include those at charter schools- in the U.S. “I was tired of sitting back so that white people could feel comfortable.” By the end of 2020, the 44-year-old was agonizing over whether the school year might be her last teaching there. In the summer of 2020, Talbott and her colleagues asked for a meeting with the charter school’s leaders to discuss racial justice at Lusher, one of the city’s most coveted for families and teachers alike they also created an antiracism group for teachers.
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