Diversifying Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

In this column, the author raises and explores questions about new teacher diversity initiatives and the call for more teachers of color. Such questions include, why is there now a heightened awareness and focus on the need for more teachers of color? How are these new initiatives different than those that came before? How has the context-politically, socially, and economically-shifted and evolved to warrant successful teacher diversity reform? Or has it? The author examines the historical conditions that influence the presence and lack thereof of teachers of color and the policy reforms that both support and undercut teacher diversity initiatives.

In all my years of formal education, I never had a teacher who looked like me or who shared my cultural heritage outside of the Black women educators in my own family (Haddix, 2016). My teachers represented what is widely known and researched about the current teacher workforce—they are White, English monolingual, middle class, and female. It is no secret that the racial and linguistic diversity of the teacher population is limited and does not come close to matching the increasing diversity of the student population. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Policy and Program Studies Service (2016), 18% of P-12 teachers are people of color. Along with the growing body of academic research (e.g., Achinstein & Ogawa, 2012; Brown, 2014; Jackson, 2015), there has also been an increase in public scholarship exploring the lack of racially and linguistically diverse teachers in public school settings and calling for initiatives to recruit and sustain this needed teacher population. This call for increased teacher diversity is not a new one, but I wonder what, if anything, has shifted and evolved to warrant successful reform efforts.

As a literacy scholar and teacher educator, I am particularly interested in the connection between literacy research, racial and linguistic diversity, and teacher education. In my mind, there is a parallel relationship between advocating for literacy classrooms with diverse racial and linguistic representation in curriculum and instruction and addressing the need for more teachers of color. In this column, I invite the literacy research community to join me in exploring what calls for increased teacher diversity mean for our work as literacy scholars and teacher educators. What are the policies and practices that actively and effectively recruit, support, and sustain teachers of color? How do we, as a literacy research community, advance a scholarly agenda that challenges a deficit-oriented view of teacher diversity and affirms the importance of diverse representation in literacy teaching and teacher education?

Such questions and their answers are particularly important and useful to the literacy research community given the commitment to research and practice geared toward achieving racial equity, justice, and inclusion. Literacy is not just about reading the word, but reading the world. The lack of racially and linguistically diverse literacy teachers means that the lens through which students are encouraged to read the world is largely White, monolingual, and middle class (Thomas, 2015). All teachers are teachers of literacy. Any goal to improve literacy education for all students must involve a close look at the educators charged with delivering literacy curriculum with equity-minded, culturally relevant, and anti-racist pedagogies.

Where Are the Teachers of Color?

Much of the media reporting the lack of teachers of color neglects to interrogate factors that impact their absence. Their absence did not just happen. For instance, several studies document the effect of school desegregation on Black teachers (see Ethridge, 1979; Foster, 1998; Siddle-Walker, 1996). Ethridge (1979) reports that at the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools, there were 82,000 Black teachers. In the 11 years following the Brown decision to integrate schools, the ranks of Black teachers declined drastically: More than 38,000 Black teachers and administrators in 17 Southern states lost their jobs. As all-Black schools shut down and Black children moved to newly integrated schools, their former teachers became expendable. White teachers retained their positions, and Black teachers were let go (Foster, 1998; Milner & Howard, 2004). The dismissal of Black teachers also meant the erasure of a Black cultural imprint on curriculum, pedagogy, and school community (Tillman, 2004), which had a direct impact on the educational experiences of, and outcomes for, Black children (Siddle-Walker, 1996).

Despite the challenges teachers of color faced entering and staying in the profession post-Brown, they were not entirely dissuaded from pursuing teaching careers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, programs were implemented to increase teacher diversity and attract teachers of color to the profession (Ogletree, 2004). In Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity’s 1985 court order required that the teacher population in Boston public schools be 25% Black and 10% “other minority” teachers; his historic school desegregation plan had also included the busing of thousands of Black and White children to equalize racial diversity in schools, resulting in racial violence and turmoil. In 2015, the district was falling short of Garrity’s court order, after a recent wave of retirements by Black teachers who had begun their careers there in the 1970s. In response, Boston Superintendent Tommy Chang pledged to build a workforce that looks more like Boston’s students, who are 86% Black, Latina/o, and Asian (Fox, 2015).

Today, we are facing a teacher shortage nationally (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016). As in Boston, teachers across the country who began their careers in the 1970s and 1980s are retiring. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs has declined sharply in recent years. The retention of new teachers is challenged by increased levels of standardized assessment and accountability. As a result, districts nationwide are creating new positions for directors of recruitment, talent management, and “human capital” and launching hiring campaigns (Podolsky, Kini, Bishop, & Darling-Hammond, 2016). It seems that one way to solve two problems—increasing teacher shortages and addressing lack of teacher diversity—is to target students of color and encourage them to consider the teaching profession. That would appear to be a win-win situation for all involved. However, if the objective driving such initiatives is to increase “human capital” without real consideration for the potential of a racially and linguistically diverse teacher force to transform schools and communities, such initiatives will fail.

Rhetoric or Action: Initiatives to Change the Teacher Demographic

In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan introduced a national initiative to recruit the next generation of teachers (see http://www.ed.gov/teaching). Although one of its main objectives is to build a more diverse teaching force, there are few federally supported programs and initiatives that focus on teachers of color. Instead, plans targeted at increasing the number of teachers of color, and in particular male teachers of color, exist in statewide efforts and large metro areas. For example, the Call Me MiSTER program (https://www.clemson.edu/education/callmemister), an initiative in South Carolina, places Black male graduates from area colleges in teaching positions in high-poverty schools with high percentages of students of color. In New York City (NYC), where the percentage of Black male teachers is less than 8%, Mayor Bill de Blasio, in conjunction with NYC Young Men’s Initiative, pledged that the city would develop new initiatives and programs to recruit and prepare 1,000 men of color to become NYC public schoolteachers by 2018 (see www.nyc.gov/youngmen). The Young Men’s Initiative, together with the Department of Education, the City University of New York, the Center for Economic Opportunity, and Teach for America, launched NYC Men Teach to recruit and unite Black, Latino, and Asian men committed to educating today’s diverse student population. In Philadelphia, the Fellowship, a recently founded organization of local teachers, has put together a plan to increase recruitment of Black men into the profession, with a target to recruit 1,000 male teachers of color by 2020.

Nationally, school districts are forming partnerships with historically minority-serving colleges and universities to attract their students to education careers, promoting state scholarships for students of color who wish to study education, recruiting in churches of various faiths, and bringing recent graduates of color to teacher hiring fairs (Boser, 2011). At present, there is a nationwide increase in “grow your own” programs and teacher pipelines targeting students of color. In my own community, for example, the Syracuse City School District has partnered with Syracuse University to launch an urban teacher fellowship program, targeting students of color from historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions. My district’s initiative also includes the development of a teacher pipeline to encourage more of its own K-12 students to consider teaching as a profession.

Despite programs aimed at preparing the next generation of effective teachers, attention to the need for teachers who possess the cultural capital and racial and linguistic backgrounds to teach the current diverse student population is still an uphill battle (Dilworth & Coleman, 2014). The solution is not as simple as providing same-race teachers for students of color. Regardless of background, teachers struggle to comprehend and employ culturally responsive practice, especially in an educational climate moving toward greater standardized accountability measures (Richmond, Bartell, & Dunn, 2016).

Teachers Change, Systems Stay the Same

In her 2005 American Educational Research Association (AERA) presidential address, Marilyn Cochran-Smith urged the educational research community “to challenge the many aspects of the new teacher education that did not serve the interests of students and did not acknowledge the complexity of school contexts and cultures” (Cochran-Smith, 2016, p. 97). She also pointed out how teacher education reflects multiple and often conflicting and contradictory reforms that proceed simultaneously, such as the conflict between diversification and selectivity of the teacher workforce. In this case, Darling-Hammond (2016) argues, “research has become a weapon wielded to advance competing views of macro-level policy moves rather than a tool to inform the learning process for prospective teachers” (p. 88).

What remains largely absent in the policy discussions are the voices and experiences of teachers of color, especially during their preservice teacher education. The diminishing presence of racially and linguistically diverse student participation in teaching and teacher education programs remains an important issue (Ladson-Billings, 2005). As more initiatives to increase teacher diversity are launched, a continued agenda to understand the experiences of current teachers and preservice teachers of color is warranted. Studies into why and how teachers of color come to teaching and what pulls them away can greatly inform these initiatives. Furthermore, research that looks at the experiences of preservice teachers of color is important in disrupting a teacher education agenda that centers Whiteness and dominant culture ideologies (Sleeter, 2001) and marginalizes the voices and experiences of teachers of color. This includes research with and about Black preservice teachers (e.g., Cook, 2013; Kornfeld, 1999; McGee, 2014; Meacham, 2000; Zitlow & DeCoker, 1994), Latinx preservice teachers (e.g., Arce, 2004; Burant, 1999; Clark & Flores, 2001; Galindo, 1996; Guerrero, 2003; Irizarry & Donaldson, 2012; Jones, Young, & Rodríguez, 1999; Rodriguez & Reis, 2012; Tellez, 1999), and Asian preservice teachers (e.g., Nguyen, 2008; Pailliotet, 1997; Sheets & Chew, 2002). In her work on race and literacy preservice teacher education, Willis (2003) draws attention to the “excessive publication of, and overindulgence in, helping European American students understand their whiteness” (pp. 68-69). This attention, by “many well-intentioned folks,” Willis writes, almost always leads to

the marginalization of the needs of the students of color, and a superficial attention to the intersection of race, class, gender, and power in pedagogy and content. In the future, it is advised that narratives written by scholars and teachers of color, as authentic voices of our experiences, be included. (p. 69)

Instead of being in programs that acknowledge their cultural knowledges and center on curriculum and practice, students of color are expected to excel in Whiteness-centered teacher education programs and in standardized teaching metrics (i.e., teacher certification examinations) to be identified as “a teacher.” For students of color, becoming a teacher means erasing or hiding their racial, linguistic, cultural, and sexual identities to fit a set standard (Haddix, 2010).

An underlying assumption behind many of the current teacher of color pipeline models is that adding more teachers of color in schools with majority students of color from high-poverty communities will change the schools, transform the educational experiences for the students, and close the achievement gap. At early meetings to discuss our pipeline efforts here in Syracuse, I consistently asked questions: What are the experiences for current teachers of color in the district? How are we going to change the teaching environment to both support and sustain a new cohort of teachers of color? How are we going to change? Simply recruiting more teachers of color but doing nothing to change the current system would be a failure. Instead, this model would expect teachers of color to come into a system that has historically failed them as students. Why would one expect this same system to do anything other than fail them as teachers? In an unsuccessful model, the blame for the failure will be on the teachers of color. In essence, teachers of color are brought in to address the achievement gap for students of color, and when there is little change, it will be their fault.

Disrupting Teacher Education: A Literacy Research Agenda Toward Change

Teachers of color are not supermen or superwomen—it is not their responsibility alone to fix the problems with the education system that affect literacy education. If the goal is not to place the onus for academic achievement on teachers of color, we must identify ways to increase teacher diversity while disrupting the system that has largely hindered the participation of diverse communities. As literacy researchers and teacher educators, we must ask how our research and practice furthers an agenda toward diversity in teaching and teacher education and centers the needs and experiences of students and teachers of color. I offer the following solution-oriented ideas:

1. The field needs research into the intersections of teacher education, increasing teacher diversity, and the experiences of literacy preservice teachers of color. Research inquiries into culturally relevant and anti-racist literacy teaching practices must include and highlight teachers of color as participants and co-researchers. Literacy researchers can draw on critical theories and methodologies to examine the ways that curriculum and pedagogy privilege Whiteness and exclude diverse voices and histories.

2. Teacher diversity initiatives provide an opportunity to restructure existing teacher education programs. It is critical that we take a hard look at our own teacher preparation programs, including literacy specialist programs. How do we recruit, support, and retain students of color? What do we know about the curricular, field-based, and professional experiences of our current students of color? What can we learn from students to transform our teaching and curriculum? A program assessment is the first step to understanding how we are complicit in maintaining Whiteness within our teacher preparation programs. Students and teachers of color must be at the table for policy and program decision making about increasing diversity.

3. Teacher diversity initiatives often emphasize culturally relevant and social justice–oriented curriculum and pedagogy. These approaches should not be marginalized but instead viewed as an opportunity to revise teacher education programs. While the numbers of teachers of color increase, there must be an intentional shift to engage culturally relevant and anti-racist pedagogies and a mission to cultivate a more racially and economically just society. This is evidenced in the texts, stories, and experiences we select, teach, and value within the literacy classroom.

4. Teacher diversity initiatives must include a plan to restructure leadership and positions of power. Studies show that school leaders (principals and assistant principals) often forward disciplinary responsibilities to teachers of color (Dilworth & Coleman, 2014). Instead, teachers must be positioned as sources of power in all aspects of the school community and included in a shared leadership model. Concerted efforts to recruit and train teachers of color to become literacy specialists and coaches and curriculum leaders, for example, are needed.

5. The texts used in teacher education programs should be reviewed to verify that they represent diverse perspectives and culturally relevant ideologies. Teacher preparation programs work against teacher diversity initiatives when students of color are only presented with a “window” (Sims-Bishop, 1990) into the teaching profession but never see themselves reflected in the teacher education classroom or their student teaching placements. We need our teacher preparation programs to also be a “mirror” (Sims-Bishop, 1990) for students of color, if we are serious about enacting change in teacher education and increasing teacher diversity.

In calls for increasing teacher diversity, it is important that we acknowledge the kinds of teaching and learning that happen outside the classroom and in out-of-school spaces. Literacy teaching and learning cannot be relegated to school-sanctioned activities; an expanded understanding of literacies being multiple, fluid, and diverse requires the acknowledgment and validation of counterspaces of teaching and learning, where educators of color often work with youth and communities. Youth literacies are being fostered outside of mainstream dominant classrooms, in spaces such as community arts programs, youth centers, afterschool programs, and summer institutes. In these spaces, there are successful models of teachers of color; this disrupts a deficit framing of the absence of teachers of color and the idea that students of color are not interested in teaching.

It is also important that we critically examine the policies and practices that impede goals of teacher diversity. This critique can only happen when teacher education programs leverage the voices and experiences of current teachers of color and students of color. How we “frame the problem” for teachers of color—and how we examine the concerns and issues they face—is of great importance. If we “see with the third eye” (Irvine, 2003), we can begin to see a different picture and examine alternative explanations for diversity efforts that work counter to the interests of teachers of color, instead of promoting narratives that position them as absent or disengaged from the teaching profession. Instead, research studies that examine the language and literate identities of teachers of color can offer critical understandings about the literacy learning of children of color and insights into transforming literacy education for all. A true commitment to inclusion and social justice in literacy teaching and research can only happen with an intention to cultivate teacher diversity.