Why America lost so many of its black teachers
Before 1964 nearly half of college-educated African-Americans in the South were teachers
JULY MARKS the 55th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin. It also enforced desegregation of the government-run school system nationwide, largely ending the practice of educational apartheid. But while desegregation transformed America's education system, the way it was implemented by discriminatory school boards in the South was harmful to black teachers. A new paper by Owen Thompson, an economist at Williams College, shows there was a dramatic decline in the employment of African-American teachers in the aftermath of desegregation. The policies behind that decline have contributed to lower employment for African-American educators in the decades since.
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v Board of Educationthat “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” Ten years later, less than 5% of black children in the Southern states of the former Confederacy were attending school with whites. The Civil Rights Act, which among other enforcement mechanisms tied federal education funding to school integration, dramatically changed that: by 1970, more than 90% of black children attended schools that also taught white children.
For African-American students, the impact of desegregation was overwhelmingly positive. It was one reason why the gap between test scores of black and white students born in 1954 and those born 30 years later declined by nearly 40%, according to research by Eric Hanushek and colleagues at Stanford University.
For African-American teachers, it was a different story. Before the Civil Rights Act, Southern black schools were staffed almost exclusively by black teachers. Nearly half of African-Americans with a post-secondary CONTINUE READING: Why America lost so many of its black teachers - Civil rights and wrongs
