He said the number and percentage of schools where there are virtually no staff or no students who are African American has increased a lot too. In just the last decade the number of schools with fewer than a 10 percent black teaching staff jumped from 69 to 223. Schools with no black teachers soared from 10 to 50.
Of course, school policies aren’t the only thing going on. There also may be fewer black teachers because other professions have opened up to African Americans.
Dominic Belmonte, president and CEO of the Golden Apple Foundation, has another theory.
“If you are a person of color with a 25 ACT and you’re a high school senior, there are avenues for you that are everywhere that are saying come hither, come join us in law, come join us in business, come join us in finance where the ground will be padded down for you, where you can have internships,” he said. “…and here we are in the teaching corner, saying, ‘Come here where no one believes you’re doing a good job. Come on over here where you are distrusted and belittled and maligned.’”
At one point, approximately half of all black professionals across the country were teachers. In the era of Jim Crow, African Americans had to staff schools that were all black. Teaching became a pathway to the middle class.
Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo says the decline of black teachers has consequences inside and outside the classroom.
“When you have big teacher layoffs or you have a decline in the number of black teachers, that could destabilize some of the neighborhoods that are most well-known as Chicago’s black middle-class neighborhoods — places like Chatham and Pill Hill and parts of South Shore and parts of Auburn-Gresham, and those kind of neighborhoods could be negatively affected by declines in the teaching profession,” she said.
For children, Pattillo said, the value of a teacher who looks like you can play into some of the most rigorous ways we measure teaching and learning.
“The demographics of the teaching profession is very important. A number of studies have begun to show that having a teacher of one’s own race can boost all kinds of education outcomes. Can boost scores on standardized tests, those kind of things,” Pattillo said.
Second grade teacher Porter said she hasn’t had honest conversations with teacher friends or colleagues about race in the classrooms.
“Because most of my friends are African American, we don’t talk about race as it relates to teaching and our decision to teach or even decision to leave the field. I think the decision for people to leave the field is not based on race. It’s based on the conditions and things that have seemingly nothing to do with race but the political nature of it sometimes takes us back to race,” Porter said.
Circling back to race is common—and important—in a school system of mostly black and brown students.
Clarification: National Teachers Academy is a training school for teachers who go into turnaround schools.
Natalie Moore is WBEZ’s South Side Bureau reporter. nmoore@wbez.org Follow Natalie on Google+, Twitter
Article Appeared @http://www.wbez.org/news/why-are-there-fewer-black-teachers-cps-112385