TOP POSTS THIS MONTH 8/29/20
POSTS THIS WEEK 8/29/20
WHY BLACK TEACHERS MATTERIf 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
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“Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably
emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our
“Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job
with yesterday’s tools—with yesterday’s concepts.”
