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Article Excerpt
The best of the Negro teachers will largely go because they will not and cannot teach what many white folks will long want taught (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1954).
The newspapers headlines say that teachers are "fleeing urban classrooms" because they fear the students. The Blacks and Latinos I know are not fleeing. We're trying to get into classrooms, but there are so many things stopping us (Felipe M., a 45-year-old bilingual Latino college graduate who tried to enter the teaching field for 15 years).
OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS, I HAVE PARTICIPATED IN THE PREPARATION OF SOME 2,000 new teachers. I have found little correlation between the requirements to enter a credential program and one's likely effectiveness as a teacher. Due to a series of barriers that fail to predict good teaching, while excluding "minorities," America's school children, soon to be a majority non-Anglo, suffer needlessly from the absence of Latino, Asian, African-American, and Native American teachers. Moreover, some urban classrooms have no permanent teachers at all.
Our vocabulary is inadequate when it comes to words that group together people who are not white. "Minority people" are not really a minority in relation to the world's population, or even in the public school population in many cities. Concerning the subject being studied, however, the experience of all nonwhite groups differs from that of whites as a group. Therefore, I resort at times to available, yet inadequate, terms such as "nonwhite" and "people of color."
The Problem Restated
40% of the public school students in the U.S. are African-American, Latino, Asian, and Native American (U.S. Department of Education, 1999). During this same period, less than 10% of the teachers come from those groups (NCES, 2001). The discrepancies are even more dramatic in the central cities, where Latino and African-American youth have made up the majority of the student populations since 1981 (Schaerer, 1996).
Further whitening of the teaching force is projected primarily from the composition of those currently enrolled in teacher preparation programs: 85% are white, seven percent African-American, four percent Latino, less than one percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and .5% Native American (AACTE, 1994). Scholars have noted that the absence of nonwhite teachers deprives African-American and Latino students of role models and creates a distorted social reality for all children (Witty, 1982). As a Los Angeles teacher, who is one of the few African-American adults in her school, observes, "It's a good thing to have role models of the same ethnicity; it's very important. I know all the Black students from kindergarten all the way up; there's just this automatic attraction. There are times when kids not even from my class stop and have conversations with me, whether it is a casual thing or they are having a problem" (ARC, 1999). Moreover, rarely noted are the following equally significant problems:
1. The absence of African-American and Latino teachers deprives many urban school children of the opportunity to have a permanent teacher. Teacher education has historically failed to staff urban schools or to accept responsibility for this failure (Haberman, 1991).
2. School teaching is a rapidly growing, stable job for college graduates. This job is one of the most widely available in many urban communities, but not to half the African-American, Latino, and Asian college graduates who seek to enter it. Thus, parents within the most unemployed sections of the U.S. population are deprived of one of the best jobs in their communities--teaching their own and their neighbors' children.
3. White teachers, widely acknowledged to be in need of multicultural training, are deprived of role models that might enable them to interact successfully with children from cultures different from their own (Goodwin, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1991; Sleeter and Grant, 1991). Teacher education as it is currently conducted tends to reinforce rather than challenge the racial-deficit models of white teachers (Yeo, 1997).
In this article, I will argue: (1) that the cause of the whitening of the U.S. teaching force is erroneously understood as a recruitment problem among minorities; (2) that the real causes rest upon a racially skewed set of criteria for the initial selection of teachers; (3) that the results of this selection system are far more damaging than is generally acknowledged, particularly for urban students; (4) that the selection system has its roots in white racism in the U.S., both institutional and ideological; (5) that the erection of an equitable teacher selection system will require struggle by those adversely affected by the present system; and (6) that an equitable and educationally successful system would select candidates first on the basis of classroom effectiveness and then require each to add to his or her knowledge base elements that are missing in his or her undergraduate education.
Is the Problem Recruitment?
The absence of nonwhite teachers is generally regarded as a recruitment problem resulting from greater opportunities available to nonwhites in other fields or to the lack of status that greets urban schoolteachers (Darling-Hammond, 1984; Cartledge et al., 1995; Gordon, 1997; Shaw, 1996). Nonwhite college graduates can certainly now choose jobs other than teaching. However, thousands of college graduates do choose teaching and are unable to enter the field. The passing rates on the California Basic Educational Skills Test are just one indication of this reality. Most people who take this test have a college degree and sufficient interest in teaching to pay a $40 fee. Yet nearly half the nonwhites...
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