Innovative recruiting strategies like Teacher Villages aren’t keeping pace with the number of Black teachers leaving the classroom.
Study after study confirms it: Black children perform better in schools with Black teachers. They score better on achievement scores and have lower dropout rates and higher rates of college completion.
Yet Black teachers make up just 6% of the public school workforce.
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So perhaps it’s not surprising that advocates for diversity in education are trying everything from innovative internships to an experimental “teacher village” in Los Angeles that offers affordable housing, mentorship, and a peer support system for young Black men.
But experts, and some Black educators, argue the creative attempts to bring more Black teachers into the classroom mask a bigger, thornier problem: keeping the ones who are already there.
We placed the most novice, earliest-career teachers in the most challenging schools, because that’s where the jobs are.
TRAVIS J. BRISTOL, UC BERKELEY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Chronic issues Black teachers face in K-12 education — ranging from lack of administrative support and being pigeonholed as an educator for Black kids to the constant stress of working in under-resourced schools — are driving them from the profession at a faster rate, and earlier in their careers, than their white peers.
Until those issues are addressed, they say, recruiting new Black teachers is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
Black teachers “are tracked into — and attracted to — schools with the most challenging working conditions,” says Travis J. Bristol, an associate professor of teacher education and education policy at Berkeley’s School of Education. That includes schools with high rates of students living in poverty and low scores on standardized tests.
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