Where Are All the Black Male Teachers?
As minority children have become a majority in public schools, districts struggle to build a diverse educator workforce.
These days, the teaching profession can be a hard sell. It’s a fact made even more apparent as districts nationwide struggle to fill vacancies, and as some look to place Black male and other teachers of color in classrooms.
By the time the new school year launched at the end of August in Maryland’s Montgomery County school district, all but a dozen of the 600 to 700 new teacher slots were filled. Think of it as a real estate deal and new teacher recruits have the upper hand.
These days, the affluent county—a suburban enclave of Washington, D.C.—represents the aftermath of a fast moving racial shift that started to inch forward in the 1970s, says Christopher Lloyd, the new president of Maryland’sMontgomery County Education Association (MCEA). That was four decades ago, when district school students were 91 percent White and the teacher workforce was a close match with 80 percent White. Today, Lloyd says, “Racially and culturally, it’s like we have two Montgomery Counties—one White and the real one is largely immigrant, Black, and Hispanic.”
But even the county’s growing diverse population and its proximity to the nation’s capital hasn’t been enough to keep other competing districts from trolling for the same small applicant pool of racially and ethnically diverse teachers. Just two years ago Black male teachers represented 3.7 percent of teachers in Maryland public schools. And nationally, no more than 2 percent of teachers in the nation’s public schools are Black men.
“If I’m an African-American teacher in the D.C. metro area, I have a lot of choices of schools and careers in front of me,” a factor that’s kept the numbers low, Lloyd says. For the past five years, the percentage of teachers of color in Montgomery County schools has hovered between 24 and 30 percent of each hiring class. Preliminary hires the district made through the end of June 2015, pointed to an upswing, “about 10 to 15 percent more racial diversity,” says Lloyd, who was counting on a more noticeable bump as the hiring concluded before Where Are All the Black Male Teachers? - NEA Today: