Why Black teachers matter to Black and White kids -- book excerpt - The Washington Post

Why Black teachers matter to Black and White kids -- book excerpt - The Washington Post

Why Black teachers matter to Black and White kids

Fifteen years ago, Hurricane Katrina swept into Louisiana from the Gulf of Mexico and decimated parts of New Orleans, including its long-troubled school system. What rose in its place was a collection of charter schools that operated very differently from the district that preceded it.

School reformers who supported charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — hailed the changes and pointed to a rise in standardized test scores as evidence of success. But, as Andre M. Perry writes in his new book, “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities,” the story wasn’t as rosy as reformers said it was.

For one thing, scores on high-stakes standardized tests are not valid measures of what students have learned. For another, thousands of students with disabilities were denied services in the new charter schools, and the pre-Katrina predominantly Black teaching force was replaced with mostly White teachers.

As Perry explains in his book and in the following excerpt, that was a problem for Black students, a majority in the district, and for White kids, too.

Perry is a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington whose research focuses on race and structural inequality, education and economic inclusion. In 2013, he founded the College of Urban Education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich. He once led a charter school in New Orleans, which he says informed his later critiques of charters.

Here’s an excerpt of Perry’s book, with footnote numbers removed:

WHY BLACK TEACHERS MATTER

If I proposed to a governor or a school board that they replace a significant portion of a majority-White teaching corps with Black teachers after a natural disaster decimated a city because doing so would potentially confer educational and social benefits I’d probably be denounced as a racist and publicly excoriated.

Even a cursory reading of the literature on Black teachers should have given politicians and reformers pause before forcing their mass exit, but alas, even the research has apparently been devalued. For years, researchers such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Pedro Noguera, Lisa Delpit, Adrienne Dixson, Christopher Emdin, and James A. Banks — all people of color — validated the need for Black women teachers in New Orleans schools through their studies on teachers of color. Their scholarship serves as the foundation for inquiries like one by Stanford University researcher Thomas Dee who, the year before Katrina, found that Black students of both sexes who had a Black teacher scored 3 to 6 percentile points higher on standardized tests in reading than those who did not. Dee found a similar increase in the math scores of Black students taught by a Black teacher.

In a 2017 study published by the Institute of Labor Economics, researchers found that low-income Black male elementary school students who were paired with a Black teacher in the third, fourth or fifth grades were 39 percent less likely to drop out of high school. The researchers also found that matching low- income Black students of both sexes with at least one Black teacher between the third and fifth grades increased their aspirations to attend a four-year college by 19 percent.

In addition to academic gains, Black students taught by Black teachers exhibited better behavioral outcomes. According to CONTINUE READING: Why Black teachers matter to Black and White kids -- book excerpt - The Washington Post