Let’s talk about your survey of black male teachers in Boston. What did you find? 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.
One of the things that I found out: If a school did not have a black male teacher on the faculty, it was more likely to be led by a white principal. If a school had three or more black male teachers on the faculty, it was more likely to be led by a black principal. So the two categories suggest that I was looking at very different types of schools.
One participant talked about how someone would come and ask him to watch his students. And so for him, and for many of the participants, their colleagues only sought their help when it came to behavior management and not when it came to thinking about some of the content that they might have designed to engage students. These black men didn’t have space and time to think about their practice in deep ways in their schools because they were serving the role of a behavior manager.
What’s the key takeaway from your research? Recruiting black male teachers is not enough. Policymakers and school administrators must give attention to the working conditions in schools that drive black men away from the teaching profession.
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