A Diminishing Number of Black & Latino Educators in US Public Schools
This past school year was the first time in history that racial and ethnic minority students outnumbered their white counterparts.
The U.S. Department of Education has projected that by 2022, non-white
students will make up 54.7 percent of the public-school student
population, largely due to the national increases in U.S.-born Hispanic
and Asian populations. Despite
the fact that more students of color will be filling classrooms at
increasing increments every school year, it’s a well reported fact that
almost 80 percent of their teachers are white—and it doesn’t appear that
that will change any time soon.
According to a recent study from the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank funded by the American Federation of Teachers, the number of black teachers dropped from 2002 to 2012.
Dyett Hunger Strike for a Progressive School Vision
Dyett GlobalAndGreen Tech HSProposal
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Parents’ Hunger Strike Reveals Flaws in Chicago’s Education Reforms
By Joseph Williams | Takepart.com
September 18, 205
Parents’ Hunger Strike Reveals Flaws in Chicago’s Education Reforms
It’s a drastic, painful,
potentially fatal tactic associated with third-world political movements
calling attention to brutal regimes, or history lessons about legendary
protest leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Cesar Chavez.
Yet activists
on Chicago’s hardscrabble South Side are entering their second month of a
hunger strike, launched to draw attention to the plight of a storied but downtrodden neighborhood school scheduled to close next year.
The activists say they launched the strike because city leaders, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have repeatedly turned a deaf ear
to their complaints about the fate of Walter H. Dyett High School in
the historic majority-black Bronzeville neighborhood. Emanuel’s
administration, they say, has also ignored their demand for a say in
what happens to their community’s school—including their suggestions to
junk plans to turn Dyett into a music and arts school and instead create an academy for kids who want careers in the future-facing high-tech, green-energy field.
“The
community said they wanted Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology
High School,” Jitu Brown, one of the hunger strikers, told Chicago’s WTTW-TV
on Wednesday, the 31st day of the protest. “It’s really frustrating
that taxpayers have to go to this length when you realize that you’ve
been rendered voiceless.”
Hunger-strikers Irene Robinson and Jitu Brown at Dyett High School on Wednesday.
While
the “Fight for Dyett” movement has adopted desperate measures for what
it sees as a desperate time, the standoff between the protesters and the
powers that be is a microcosm of similar conflicts playing out
nationwide.
Several
studies have shown that when urban school districts from Washington,
D.C., to Oakland, California, have had to balance the books by closing
low-enrollment, poorly-performing schools, black communities are hit the hardest.
But city and school officials say the enrollment numbers don’t lie; In
Chicago, Dyett High’s class of 2015 had just 15 students.
But
analysts say families displaced by gentrification, as well as the appeal
of charter schools, is artificially driving down enrollment,
undermining schools like Dyett, named for an esteemed African American
music teacher whose pupils included jazz legends Nat King Cole and Dinah
Washington.
“People have gotten to a level of desperation,” said Richard Gray, director of community organizing and engagement
at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform. The
decision to close Dyett without their input, said Gray, felt to
Bronzeville community leaders “like an attack on their schools and their
teachers” and proof that Rahm Emanuel “disdains their community.”
Gentrification
is “definitely” a factor in the standoff in Chicago, according to Gray.
For several decades, “massive real-estate speculation” has forced the displacement
of a substantial portion of residents, he said. To make affordable
communities more attractive, city education administrators bypassed
plans to revive traditional public schools and joined the parade toward
publicly funded charter schools.
Officials
“are building these charter schools and boutique [magnet] schools for
affluent whites,” Gray said. “These things accumulate.”
Hunger strikers at Dyett High School at the start of a press conference.
Gary Orfield, an education and city planning professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and codirector of the school’s
Civil Rights Project, agreed with Gray’s assessment of the situation at
Dyett. A former Chicago resident, Orfield said the breakdown in
communication reflects “negative racial change” in the city, and he
wouldn’t be surprised if protesters in other cities mirrored the
hunger-strike strategy.
“I
hope that reason takes hold, and they negotiate a settlement, and these
people don’t die,” Orfield said. “None of these things have been handled
well.”
Ultimately, however,
he said, the hunger strike could prove to be an opportunity for Emanuel,
who as a congressman and chief of staff for President Barack Obama
purportedly advised his staff to never let a crisis go to waste.
“This is the kind of crisis that could change things,” Orfield said.
A State of Emergency for Black Education and Black Educator!!
Black Educator "Teacher Nikky" Speaks at Cambridge Mass BlackLivesMatter Rally
August 9, 2015 Cambridge (Mass) #BlackLivesMatter Rally
As school is opening and the numbers of Black teachers continue to
decline. Most students entering schools this September will not have a
teacher of color. Please take some time to read this and think make this
silent phenomenon known.
The following is a slightly edited speech by an unjustly displaced
tenured Black educator who taught for over 25 years in a Metro Boston
sub/urban district. That educator is asking President Obama and Governor
Baker to issue an Executive Order to overturn all subjective,
questionable dismissals or displacements and put these 80, 000 to
100,000 tenured, veteran Black teachers nation wide back in the
Community where they belong. A generation ago when we had more teachers
of African descent from the community teaching in public schools, there
were less Black men and women dealing with the justice system, or less
Blacks killed by police officers.
Thank you
BLMCambridge for inviting me to speak. I appreciate the diversity of
topics today. We are talking about jobs, economy, Education, LGBT-
issues that directly affect people of color in Massachusetts and around
the country. Though, I am a very international/ cross cultural,
multilingual person, for the next four minutes I am going to use the
word Black. Are you with me?
The Education of
Black folks is in a state of despair, disarray and disgrace. Many of
you are familiar with phrases such as “school to prison pipeline”,
“Achievement Gap”, “Education is the civil rights issues of the era”,
“high stake standardized assessments that adversely impact Black and
Latinos.” However there is a nation-wide 60 year old issue that, except
for Chicago and New Orleans hardly any one is addressing. It’s the
issue of removing Black teachers in the Education arena through pseudo
evaluations, downsizing, “school turn abounds”, charter schools,
demotions, or forced retirements.
That phenomenon
of removing Black teachers in the classrooms started in the South at the
onset of 1954 -55 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. In a USA Today
April 2004, entitled Thousands of black teachers lost jobs, Greg
Toppo gave a historical perspective on the declining of Black teachers
in the South. By 2015, the process of “structuring out” teachers of
African descent has spread all over the country. In almost every state,
one will find a number of tenured veteran black teachers who have been
displaced, via demotions, dismissals or forced retirements or phony
negative evaluations. Tenured Latino teachers are demoted, but they are
not dismissed. WE NEED TO STOP THE REMOVAL OF BLACK TEACHERS FROM THE
EDUCATION ARENA.
I don’t want to sound like a lecturer, but like the previous speaker, we have to provide some references.
On September 2012 around the time of
the Chicago Teachers’ strike Reuters published an article by Stephanie
Simon and James B. Kelleher that says “Today, just 19 percent of the
teaching force in Chicago is African American, down from 45 percent in
1995, the union says; organizers fear that shift means fewer teachers
have deep roots in and passion for the communities where they work. In
other words as it is around the country many Black teachers who are
close or part of the Black community are forced out. A former Chicago
teacher and union activist posted in her Facebook page that Chicago lost
about 6,000 Black teachers’ jobs in 3 years. There were 8,-9,000 Black
teachers in 2010, in 2013 about 2,500.
On September 2014, The Root featured an article by Melinda Anderson called America’s
Unspoken Education Issue: Black Kids Need Black Teachers, A new
historical account is just the latest reminder that relying on white
teachers to save black students has never been enough.
A lot had been published about the
need for more teachers of color in the schools. However, the
historical, the unjust context of educators of African descent, such as
7,000 Black teachers who lost their jobs in New Orleans after Katrina
had not received enough coverage. Not too many had given a voice to this
blatant injustice that a group of professionals had sustained.
According to Huff post May 2015 article by Eric Cooper and Philip Jackson, “An estimated 100,000 Black teachers were retired, fired, removed from or "structured out" of education in America since 1990.”
Now let’s talk
about Massachusetts. Based on the Department of Ed’s (MADESE) website,
in 13-14, there were 59,232.9 full time teachers in Massachusetts. Out
of those 59,232 teachers, 1,488.0 were/are Black and 730.1 of them teach
in Boston; 754.3 Asian teachers (199.1 teach in Boston); 1,421.2 Latino
teachers- (325.3 Latinos) teach in Boston. If almost half of Black
teachers teach in Boston, what are the chances of students from the
other 350 cities in the Commonwealth to have a Black or a nonwhite
teacher? We are sitting - in near MIT. You know the probabilities for a
student to have a Black teacher if there are 757.9 Black educators to
teach in 350 cities.
What have the
bargaining units done to represent and protect these tenured
professionals who have paid union dues for years ( 10, 15, 20, 25
years)? The sad part is - No
one, even the Black leadership is saying anything about students not
seeing a Black teacher in their school buildings, not alone in their
classrooms. There are many school buildings in Massachusetts with school
population of 50%, 70%, 80% students of color, or linguistics minority
/majority students that have no Black teachers.
Analyzing these
numbers, Is there a future for Black teachers in Massachusetts or in the
Education field? One needs to envision the long term perception and
impact of any student Black, White, or Asian, growing up not ever having
a Black teacher, or any professional of African descent, during their
formation years, i.e a Black nurse, a Black physician or any
non-European professional. So if children and youth are not exposed to a
diverse group of professionals, society will continue to produce more
brutal and violent police officers and more Dylann Roofs. As children
they were subconsciously raised to perceive nonwhite people as “not
equal”, “less than”, “irrelevant” “ nothing”, therefore like black
people, they can be killed.
Given such blatant injustice, please repeat after me:
We cheer! We lead! We know there is a need for Black teachers! I believe that we will win, I believe we will win Educational freedom! Back up, back up we want to Diversify Education!
