Keeping Black Men In Front Of The Class
Of all the teachers in the U.S., only 2 percent are black and male. That news is bad enough. But it gets worse: Many of these men are leaving the profession.
Just last month, a new study found that the number of black teachers in the public schools of nine cities dropped between 2002 and 2012. In Washington, D.C., black teachers' share of the workforce dropped from 77 percent to 49 percent.
Now, a researcher at Stanford, Travis Bristol, is trying to figure out why black men are leaving the profession. Bristol himself taught high school English in New York City public schools; there he grew interested in designing policies that would support his male students, particularly boys of color. As a Ph.D. candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, he noticed a disconnect: While lots of attention was being paid to hiring more black male teachers, relatively little was being done to hold onto them.
So Bristol, now a fellow at Stanford's Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, set out to understand: What can be done in classrooms and break rooms to improve retention? For answers, he designed a survey for black male public school teachers in Boston.
I spoke with Bristol about teacher turnover and what he learned from the survey.
Why is the shortage of black male teachers something we should worry about?
Diversity drives innovation. There are more students of color in U.S. public schools than white students. Teachers of color represent 18 percent of the country's teaching force, and black male teachers less than 2 percent. Teachers of color are well-positioned to support their colleagues in navigating unfamiliar cultural terrain and designing culturally relevant pedagogy. Having a teacher of color, or black male teacher, can serve to disrupt societal preconceptions. And, as Gloria Ladson-Billingsrecently suggested, white students also benefit from having teachers of color.
Let's talk about your survey of black male teachers in Boston. What did you find?
I had about a 34 percent response rate. So it was a small sample, but I was able to note an interesting pattern: The number of other black men in the building seemed to influence their experiences. If you were the only black man in your school, you were more likely to say that people in your building were afraid of you because you were black — versus a school with three or more black male teachers.
I decided to compare schools that had just one black male teacher and their Keeping Black Men In Front Of The Class : NPR Ed : NPR: