Flemming teaches English language arts to 5th graders at John B. Kelly Elementary School in Germantown. All but three of his students, spread over three homerooms, are African American.
Of the District’s teachers, just 4 percent are African American males, like Flemming, and he’s one of a mere handful at the elementary level.
In his spacious classroom, some of the students, especially the boys, are so eager to participate that they can hardly stay in their seats. One boy grasps a basketball and occasionally bounces it. Flemming doesn’t tell him to put it away.
Arrayed in a circle, they are discussing a book featuring a bullied high school student, learning on this Tuesday morning about how to spot bias in writing and the use of metaphor. Flemming, in his 10th year at Kelly, darts up and down inside the circle, coaxing out answers, prodding for more, lavishing praise, and all the while conveying an infectious enthusiasm about what they are reading and about school itself. He knows how to keep the discussion at a high level and also how to rein it in.
After the lesson, 11-year-old Jordan Smith marches up to a reporter and starts answering questions before they are asked. “If you’ve got a problem, he’ll talk to you,” Jordan says of Flemming. “Seeing a black man teaching us actually changes our lives. We can be believing that we can be anything we want.”
Instantly, there is a crowd of boys, all echoing the same thought.
In March, Johns Hopkins University economists released a study showing that low-income black students randomly assigned to at least one black teacher are more likely to graduate from high school and aspire to college.
The researchers tracked through high school all 100,000 students who entered 3rd grade in North Carolina between 2001 and 2005. The results were especially profound in the early years: Having just one black teacher during grades 3-5 increases “persistently low-income” black boys’ interest in pursuing college by 29 percent and decreases their chance of dropping out of high school by 39 percent. For black girls, the effects were smaller, but still significant, regarding college aspirations.
Click Here to Read Full Story