Black Teachers Matter

Black Teachers Matter

African-American children who are taught by just one black teacher during their school years are 13% more likely to go to college.   Students have at least two African-American teachers are 32% more likely to go to college.   These are facts garnered from a recent study by a Johns Hopkins University professor.  This information isn’t new.  It builds on what has been found previously that black students with black teachers are also much more likely to graduate high school.    The theory seems to be that black teachers can tap into their lived experiences when relating to black students.

Next up there were lots of concerns that in Baltimore City (with the most African-American teachers at 40%) and in the surrounding counties the percentage of black teachers was well below the percentage of black students.  The author of the study insists that public education needs to get moving to increase the numbers of black teachers that minority students experience.  It all seems so simple.

But let’s hold up here for a minute.  In Baltimore City roughly 80% of the students is black while only 40% of the teachers is African-American.  So it stands to reason, that even though the number of black teachers doesn’t equal the percentage of black students, those African-American students most likely had at least 2-3 African-American teachers in their twelve years of schooling.  According to the predictions of this research, these kids are 32% more likely to go to college-except that they don’t!  Not sure how that would be explained.

Then there is the issue of numbers.  Maryland colleges of teacher education are graduating about 550 qualified to teach black graduates.  That is 550 all-total, not just one school.  So where are these African-American teachers going to come from.

There is also another issue and that is the BIG assumption that all African-Americans share the same “lived experiences”.   From my perspective that is racism at its finest.   Sure, both students and teachers are black and as such have certainly shared racist experiences.   But I am willing to bet that those middle and upper middle class young African-American adults who are graduating from Maryland colleges have hardly had the same “lived experiences” as the kids growing up in Baltimore’s shooting galleries- where guns and drugs are everyday happenings.  And yes, I know that some kids do make it out of the low socio-economic neighborhoods and go to college.  But I also know that when they do, they may be looking for more high status and higher paying positions than teaching.

In my view, it would make more sense to provide in-service education experiences for all teachers, black, brown, yellow and white, about implicit racism, those sneaky little conclusions that sleep in our minds with no visible means of hard evidence.   Pre-service programs might want to do a bit of that as well.

Yes black teachers do matter, but so do all teachers and we need to start training our educators so that all STUDENTS matter regardless of the color of skin teachers and students are wearing these days.