PUBLICATION: Ties That Bind? The Teaching and Post-Teaching Trajectories of Black and Latino/a Community Insiders and Elite College Graduates," by Brantlinger, A., O’Neal Turner, B. & Valenzuela, A.

Students, Friends, & Colleagues:

Happy to share this recently published piece titled, "Ties That Bind? The Teaching and Post-Teaching Trajectories of Black and Latino/a Community Insiders and Elite College Graduates, co-authored with Andrew Brantlinger and Blake O’Neal Turner in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737231162583

Abstract: 

"Community teachers, particularly those who are Black and Latinx, are assumed to improve retention and outcomes depending on retention in schools that serve low-income Black and Latinx students. Based on a critical quantitative analysis of data collected on the career trajectories and retention of hundreds of alternatively certified mathematics teachers, the study shows that community insiders exhibit significantly higher rates of retention in district schools than community outsiders and, in particular, those from elite colleges. Utilizing quantitative critical theory methodology, the study helps to move the field beyond race-neutral analyses of teachers’ retention and careers."

In short, the study lends support to the idea of growing our own, community-based educators, i.e., establishing pathways into the teaching profession, and why investing in community-based teachers that emanate from their local communities to subsequently teach in them makes good sense from a policy perspective.

Conversely, on the other hand, it encourages us to re-think introducing 

"economically and socially privileged community outsiders as teachers in low-income neighborhood urban schools under the assumption that, as the graduates of the nation’s most selective colleges, they will be particularly effective at improving student learning, even if they stay only for a few years (Higgins et al., 2011; Lovison, 2022)."

It was a pleasure doing this work with University of Maryland professor, Dr. Andrew Brantlinger and his newly-minted Ph.D, student, Dr. Blake O'Neal Turner.

-Angela Valenzuela

"DISD recruits in Mexico, Colombia to fill ‘hard to fill’ teaching jobs," By José Luis Adriano

We are in a definite teacher retention crisis in our state and nation. This piece is very informative on one of the Dallas Independent School District's creative approaches to addressing this shortage. 

Some number get hired with a J1 visa. Others with a H-1B visa. Via the former route, learn more here about the J-1 Teacher Program that other districts should know about.

Particularly with a district like Dallas where 45.1% of the students are either enrolled in a bilingual education or English as a Second Language learning programs, recruiting quality candidates like this is a definite stopgap measure. Longer term, instead of outsourcing, the teacher ranks can and should get built from within through improving teacher working conditions and establishing Grow Your Own educator pathways into the teaching profession.

-Angela Valenzuela

DISD recruits in Mexico, Colombia to fill ‘hard to fill’ teaching jobs

School district sponsor special talent visas for foreign professionals

DISD recruited in October professionals in Monterrey, Mexico to teach at Dallas schools.(Jorge Martínez/Especial para AL DÍA)

By José Luis Adriano

5:30 AM on Dec 28, 2022

Dallas ISD will hire about 100 professionals from Mexico and Colombia to teach during the 2023-24 school year and alleviate its shortage of teachers.

“We are bringing in the best candidates from Mexico and Colombia to teach our students, which is the most important thing, [and we’re] providing quality educators to our students,” said DISD recruiter Eric Castañeda.

The new educators were recruited at events in late October in Monterrey, Mexico, and in mid-November in Bogotá, Colombia.

Castañeda said hard-to-fill teaching positions in math and science sparked a lot of interest from foreign professionals.

More than 220 people attended the recruiting sessions on Oct. 28-29, in Monterrey. About 80 candidates were interviewed.

The possibility to teach in Dallas generated similar interest in the Bogotá event, held on Nov. 10-13, Castañeda said.

About 71% of the district’s students are Hispanic.

New teachers could make $60,000 annually, about 1.26 million pesos in Mexico, and 290 million pesos in Colombia.

Additionally, bilingual teachers get a $5,000 signing bonus; math, science and special education teachers get a $3,000 bonus.

The teachers selected during international recruiting trips have until Jan. 15, to submit certifications and approve an English proficiency exam as a requirement for getting hired.

Soon after, the district will determine the exact number of teachers hired with either a J1 or H-1B visa. The J-1 Teacher Program is a nonimmigrant cultural exchange program. The H-1B is a visa issued to foreign professionals in specialty occupations. The visas authorize professionals to work in the U.S. for up to six years.

The school district has 50 spots for J1 visas and 50 for H-1B visas to start classes in August 2023.

According to Castañeda, most professional candidates interested in teaching in Dallas are between the ages of 30 to 45, some are career educators, but other applicants are engineers and retired physicians, which fit into the profile of teaching positions DISD struggles to find teachers for —mathematics, physics and chemistry.

“Sometimes people think we bring unqualified teachers, but I can say that these candidates are excellent. They master English as if they were from the U.S. They are very accomplished, hardworking professionals”, Castañeda said.

José Luis Adriano, Reporter. Reportero de Al Día Dallas / Reporter at The Dallas Morning News. Originario de Ciudad de México. Le interesan la cultura latina, la tecnología y las historias locales. / Jose was born in Mexico City and just completed is MA in Data Journalism at the University of Missouri. He's interested in local journalism and technology.

 @adriano_dreamer

Empowerment Zone PODCAST with Dr. Ramona Houston, featuring Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.—How Can Municipalities Produce Academic Success & Teacher Pipelines Within the Latino Community

Empowerment Zone PODCAST with Dr. Ramona Houston, featuring Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.—How Can Municipalities Produce Academic Success & Teacher Pipelines Within the Latino Community

Friends:

Check out this podcast with Dr. Ramona Houston of the Empowerment Zone featuring our work here in Austin with respect to Academia Cuauhtli on Spotify. Here is the description:

Angela Valenzuela: Look to Academia Cuauhtli -

Providing educational support with identifiable teachers are important to the academic success of all students. In today’s episode Dr. Angela Valenzuela shares her work with Academia Cuauhtli (Nahuatl for "Eagle Academy”), a partnership model with the Austin Independent School District and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center that supports the educational development of students and creates pathways into the teaching profession for bilingual and dual language educators. Listen and learn how the Academy incorporates culturally relevant teaching methods and uses bilingual educators to elevate academic achievement among Latino students.

Dr. Valenzuela is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin in both the Cultural Studies in Education Program within the Department of Curriculum & Instruction and the Educational Policy and Planning Program within the Department of Education Leadership and Policy, where she also serves as the director of the Texas Center for Education Policy. Dr. Valenzuela also founded and operates an education blog entitled, "Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas.” Originally from San Angelo, Texas, Dr. Valenzuela now makes Austin her home.

To learn more about Dr. Angela Valenzuela, her blog, and Academia Cuauhtli, visit https://education.utexas.edu/faculty/angela_valenzuela

Thanks, Dr. Houston, for this wonderful opportunity to share a little bit about my life, political formation, and our work.

-Angela Valenzuela

We have a dearth of African American, Latina/o, and Native American teachers in this country.  This piece gets at why this is so for these, as well as other, under-represented groups in the teaching profession. So unfortunate when teachers of color are so desperately needed.

-Angela Valenzuela

How Black Student Debt Affects the Teacher Pipeline

BY MARY ELLEN FLANNERY

Public school students are more diverse than ever, but their teachers? Not so much. Even as research shows that students, especially students of color, benefit from a diverse workforce, more than eight in 10 teachers in American public schools identify as white.

One reason—which is receiving more attention from policy makers—is the unequal amount of money that students of color, on average, must borrow to pay for college. On the day they graduate from college, black students owe about $7,400 more than white students, according to a Brookings Institute analysis.

That kind of debt, paired with the prospect of low teacher wages and other factors, makes education an impractical choice for many black and Latino students, say the authors of a 2019 report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) that takes a close look at student debt among teachers of various races.

Many think they simply can’t afford to be teachers.

And they may be right: CAP researchers found that 91 percent of black students who studied to become teachers were forced to borrow from the U.S. Department of Education to finance their college education, compared to 76 percent of white students. Among Latino students studying to be teachers, it was 82 percent. In graduate school, which may be required by states for licensure and certification, the disparity grows even larger: about half of black teachers borrowed, compared to about one in three Latino teachers and one in four white teachers.

These include educators like Tremayne Wootten, a Maryland high school teacher who owes around $115,000 for his undergraduate and master’s degrees. Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he was driving Uber to pay for his summer wedding. And Shaniqua Williams, a Virginia school counselor, who owes about $97,000 for her degrees, and testified on Capitol Hill about the problem of educator debt last year.

And yet, students need more teachers who look like Wootten and Williams. Research shows that all students benefit from diverse teachers, but black students specifically do better on tests, attend school more regularly, and have fewer discipline issues when they’re paired with a black teacher. Black students also are more likely to be identified as gifted by black teachers than by white teachers.

These effects may be true for other ethnic-minority groups—Native American teachers and students, for example—but those groups are smaller and have been less studied.

Meanwhile, the trend is heading in the wrong direction. Federal education data shows that the percentage of black teachers actually has declined over the past decade.

“Without specific policies designed to address these issues, the United States is unlikely to solve its persistent diversity problem,” the CAP authors conclude.

What are the answers?

For its part, NEA and its state affiliates have long acknowledged the value of a diverse educator workforce and have invested in programs to develop—and sustain—teachers of color. These programs range from a Nebraska initiative to increase passing rates on the Praxis exam to an anti-racism, professional development program by Education Minnesota. Recently, Connecticut Education Association members advocated for a new state law that would help high school students to consider a career in teaching.

Meanwhile, NEA leaders also are pursuing legislative solutions to the specific issues of student debt, including:

* Increasing Pell Grants, which are federal grants to low-income college students. They helped sustain 57 percent of black college students in 2016;

* Protecting Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which erases the student debt of educators who make 10 years of qualifying payments.

* Increasing support for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and minority-serving institutions (MSIs), which confer 33 percent of the degrees earned by black students; 44 percent of the degrees earned by Hispanic students; and 28 percent of the degrees earned by Asian students.

NEA lobbyists and members also are asking lawmakers to provide a minimum of $30,000 in student debt cancellation, per borrower, in their next COVID-19 relief package. In a letter to Congressional leaders, NEA and its partners note that the “student debt crisis has hit Black and Latinx communities and women particularly hard,” with half of Black borrowers and one-third of Hispanic borrowers forced to default on their loans within 20 years.

Ask your lawmaker to support student debt relief in its COVID-19 relief efforts. 

Study Finds Students of All Races Prefer Teachers of Color

Super interesting. Researchers Cherng and Halpin analyze data sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation involving "1,700 sixth- through ninth-grade teachers from more than 300 schools" and arrive at this finding of a preference by all students for teachers of color.

This finding might ruffle some feathers in light of the fact that most public teachers are white. However, this is consistent with a growing body of research which shows not only that students who are "ethnically matched" with their students register consistently higher levels of achievement, but that white children benefit from these environments, as well.

For example, read Dr. Easton-Brooks book titled, Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color, as it supports the former claim. I refer to an earlier post to this blog on Easton-Brooks' findings, as well.

Regarding the latter, Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard (1999) additionally found that the test scores of Anglo students also benefit from a large presence of teachers of color. I also address this in my book, Growing Critically Conscious Teachers at some length.

It's great to see additional confirmation for findings that are turning up in the research literature on teachers and students in classrooms. The evidence is increasingly pointing to a need for districts to actively recruit and retain teachers of color for the benefit of the whole.

Although this study provides insights through survey data, qualitative ethnographic research can get a better grasp of how race, class, and gender dynamics position teachers of color optimally for today's classroom. A deeper analysis would also examine the uniqueness of community-based educators such as those emanating from Grow Your Own (GYO) educator pathways.

Additionally, I can't help but wonder about the extent to which any of this maps on to university classroom contexts. That's for someone else to study.
Thanks to Dr. Greg Pulte for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela


Study Finds Students of All Races Prefer Teachers of Color
October 7, 20167:00 AM ET

By Anya Kamenetz | NPR


LA Johnson/NPR

"Do you speak English?"

When Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng walked into his summer school classroom for the first time as a brand-new teacher, a student greeted him with this question. Nothing in his training had prepared him to address race and identity. But he was game, answering the student lightly, "Yes, I do, but this is a math class, so you don't have to worry about it."

"Oh my gosh, was that racist?" he says the girl asked, and quickly checked her own assumption: "'That's exactly like when I go into a store and people follow me around because I'm black.'"

During the time that Cherng, who is of Chinese descent, taught in an 85 percent African-American middle school in San Francisco, he enjoyed a good rapport with his students, and he wondered what role his own identity played in that.

Now Cherng is a sociologist at New York University and he's just published a paper with colleague Peter Halpin that addresses this question. It seems that students of all races — white, black, Latino, and Asian — have more positive perceptions of their black and Latino teachers than they do of their white teachers.

Cherng and Halpin analyzed data from the Measure of Effective Teaching study sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also supports coverage of education at NPR.
They looked at a group of 1,700 sixth- through ninth-grade teachers from more than 300 schools in cities around the country. The students had completed 30-question surveys, asking about a variety of different dimensions of teaching.

For example:
· How much does this teacher challenge his students?
· How supportive is she?
· How well does he manage the classroom?
· How captivating does she make the subject?

Although NPR Ed has reported before on the pitfalls of student evaluations used in many undergraduate classrooms, this particular student self-report measure may be more valid because of its thoroughness; it's been independently linked to student learning gains on standardized tests.

Cherng and Halpin found that all the students, including white students, had significantly more favorable perceptions of Latino versus white teachers across the board, and had significantly more favorable perceptions of black versus white teachers on at least two or three of seven categories in the survey.

The strongest positive relationship was the flipside of what Cherng experienced in his own classroom: Asian-American students had very rosy views of their black teachers.

The relationship persisted after controlling for students' age, gender, their free and reduced-price lunch status and their academic performance. The researchers also controlled for other factors like the teacher's level of experience and education, their gender, and even outside expert ratings of the teachers' effectiveness, based on classroom observations.

No matter what, students had warmer perceptions of their teachers of color.

Cherng calls the findings "surprising."

"I thought student awareness of the racial hierarchy would influence the results," in favor of whites, he says.

Other studies have found evidence for "race matching," or the idea that students and teachers of the same race or ethnicity perceive each other more favorably. And NPR Ed recently covered research on "implicit bias," the idea that teachers of all races look less favorably on students of color.

"We're not done," investigating this finding, Cherng says.

His working theory is that teachers of color score more highly because of their ability to draw on their own experiences to address issues of race and gender, which, he says, can be highly germane even to teaching subjects like math, especially in America's majority-minority public schools. He's currently working on a series of studies that look at preservice teachers and teacher training, to provide more evidence about the relationship between teachers' multicultural beliefs and awareness and their effectiveness in the classroom.

As a math teacher, and now a sociology professor, Cherng was never prepared to really understand or address race or gender dynamics in the classroom. But, he says, there may be good evidence that these are essential tools to being a good teacher, period.