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Black men make up only 2 percent of public school teachers across the nation.
That shortage of teachers can be partly linked back to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling to end the unconstitutional segregation of schools — but at what cost?
The ruling integrated schools to some extent but resulted in the removal of some Black teachers to appeal more to white families, according to https://hechingerreport.org/. Many white families back then did not want their children to have Black teachers.
Before Brown v. Board, there were 82,000 black teachers in American public schools, according to the article; the ruling put 40,000 Black teachers and administrators out of a job. And, eventually, the teaching profession became primarily led by women — still the case today.
According to the article, over 50 percent of students in U.S. public schools are minorities, and well over 50 percent of teachers are white.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in 2017–18, about 79 percent of public school teachers were white, 9 percent were Hispanic, 7 percent were Black and 2 percent were Asian.
Locally, Detroit-based Quan Neloms, 40, an educator and counselor, is trying to change those statistics by bringing more Black men into the classrooms.
Neloms runs a movement, In Demand, which is an effort to inform Black men about ways they can be involved in the educational arena, from teaching to volunteering.
“There is definitely a tremendous need for Black men to be involved in education,” Neloms said, adding that the small fraction of Black men in schools comes down to them not knowing they could be teachers and impacting the next generation. “Research shows that when students have a Black male educator, especially in middle school and elementary school, they are more likely to come to school more and get suspended less and literally more likely to attend college.”
Neloms said that he started as a volunteer with a local school district in his teens and he was impressed with how closely the community and church were tied to the school. His mentor asked if he thought about entering the teaching field and he hadn’t before.
“I never thought about it — I switched my major,” Neloms, who changed his material science engineer major for teaching, said.
He feels that other young people might not be thinking about entering the education field, too. Black men, he says, need to be doing their part in bringing up the next generation.
“It’s my belief that every Black man has a right to passage — some type of effort — where they are investing in the next generation,” Neloms said. “Even if you don’t want to be a teacher you can be a mentor, volunteer — so many opportunities. Again, in my experience I don’t think we put that word out enough. You can be a teacher, mentor or volunteer.”
Neloms said that long story short “it’s important that Black men, first of all, know that they are needed.”
Through his group, which started last year, they’ve collected the names of 160 men who said that they want to be involved and they answered the call.
“Some who are already educators looking to educate in Detroit, some who are in college looking to know more about becoming an educator and men looking to be mentors and volunteers,” he said, adding that when a need is present in a partnership organization, they learn of who is available from the list. “We collect that information, disseminate it. … even if you don’t get educators you still get the presence of mentors and volunteers involved in the life of students.”
Neloms, a Detroit Public Schools System employee, said that he’s collaborating with the school district, too.
According to an article from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, says that his focus is on teacher diversity, professional development, pedagogy for Black students that have been used for hundreds of years.
“What we’ve seen is really an exacerbation of injustices for Black people,” according to Mekki. “This pandemic on top of layers and layers of a racist endemic. The Black student experience and the Black teacher experience are intertwined.”
His center just announced a new $3 million national educational justice campaign to dramatically increase the number of Blacks entering the teaching profession.
Black teachers close educational achievement and opportunity gaps, decreasing dropout rates and increasing college enrollment of Black students by more than 30 percent per the article.
Terrence Martin, president of Detroit Federation of Teachers, agreed that the organization is in support of increasing the number of Black teachers, and other ethnicities, in the school district.
“We want to make sure they see themselves as well throughout the teaching staff,” he said of the multifaceted approach. “We want to be reflective at the end of the day in the population we service and … we are certainly in lockstep with the district on that.”
Martin said that over a decade ago when a DPSCD student graduated from high school, the student remarked to him about how Martin was his only Black male teacher.
“He had only had me — one African American male teacher in all 13 years of his K though 12 education which I thought was rather fascinating and speaks to the need for more African American male teachers.”
Martin added that it’s not only something Detroit should be doing.
“I think it is at a state level — we need to talk about how we need to improve this from the state perspective,” he said, also adding that Black and Brown students living in the suburbs who might have predominantly white teachers need to be in on the conversation, too. “They are underrepresented in terms of teaching staff. They [students] are predominately taught about white men and women. We need to make an effort [here so] that those students have representation.”
The Michigan Education Association (MEA) is looking to make a difference, too, early on at the college level.
Members of MEA’s program, Aspiring Educators of Michigan (AEM), started an effort to create changes in the Teacher Preparation Program in the College of Education at Michigan State University.
AEM members who are education students at MSU have created the group “Empowering Spartan Educators,” and are working to create a teacher preparation program that is equitable, accessible and sustainable. They have begun a petition drive that has quickly generated over 600 signatures.
AEM has identified several areas that need to be addressed to improve the Teacher Preparation Program including breaking down the internship’s financial hardship on low-income students and the lack of compensation or tuition relief.
“At a time when our state is facing a severe teacher shortage crisis, made only worse by the global pandemic, changes must be made to remove obstacles that prevent many students from considering a career in the classroom,” said AEM President Brittany Perreault. “We will continue to fight to ease the financial burden and stress level for education students, and especially focusing on breaking down the barriers for low-income and minority students to becoming teachers.”