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.

Does Teacher Diversity Matter in Student Learning? by Claire Cain Miller

This story was on the front page of the New York Times last Monday.  The jury is in: Students benefit from children who look like them, particularly minoritized boys.  When we speak of equity in schools it's clear that we need greater diversity in the teacher workforce.  To get there, we should consider growing our own educators by creating pathways into the teaching profession while also addressing the higher education teacher preparation curriculum to address issues of bias, prejudice, and institutionalized forms of racism, and oppression, as a whole.

Thanks to Pedro Pedraza for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela

Does Teacher Diversity Matter in Student Learning?

Research shows that students, especially boys, benefit when teachers share their race or gender. Yet most teachers are white women.

By Claire Cain Miller

• Sept. 10, 2018

• 

As students have returned to school, they have been greeted by teachers who, more likely than not, are white women. That means many students will be continuing to see teachers who are a different gender than they are, and a different skin color.

Does it matter? Yes, according to a significant body of research: Students tend to benefit from having teachers who look like them, especially nonwhite students.

The homogeneity of teachers is probably one of the contributors, the research suggests, to the stubborn gender and race gaps in student achievement: Over all, girls outperform boys, and white students outperform those who are black and Hispanic.

Yet the teacher work force is becoming more female: 77 percent of teachers in public and private elementary and high schools are women, up from 71 percent three decades ago. The teaching force has grown more racially diverse in that period, but it’s still 80 percent white, down from 87 percent.

There are many things that contribute to children’s academic achievement, including teachers’ experience and training; school funding and zoning; and families’ incomes and home environment. And teachers have long been predominantly white and female. But new educational opportunities for girls may mean that they can take more advantage of the benefits of female teachers. And studies show that teacher diversity can make a difference in students’ performance and their interest in school.

The effect is stronger on boys. Research has found that boys, and particularly black boys, are more affected than girls by disadvantages, like poverty and racism, and by positive influences, like high-quality schools and role models. Yet they are least likely to have had a teacher that looks like them.

“We find that the effect is really driven by boys,” said Seth Gershenson, an economist studying education policy at American University. “In the elementary school setting, for black children and especially disadvantaged black children, the effect of having even just one black teacher is fairly big and robust and a real thing.”

When black children had a black teacher between third and fifth grades, boys were significantly less likely to later drop out of high school, and both boys and girls were more likely to attend college, Mr. Gershenson and his colleagues found in a large study last year. The effect was strongest for children from low-income families. The study included 106,000 students who entered third grade in North Carolina from 2001 to 2005, and it followed them through high school. There was no effect on white children when they had a black teacher.

Teachers’ gender does not necessarily have a big effect during elementary school but seems to make more of a difference when children are older. Then, girls do better with a female teacher and boys with a male one, said Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford.

When eighth graders had a female teacher instead of a male one, boys fell behind girls by the equivalent of three and a half months of learning, according to a well-regarded study he wrote, which compared the effect of two teachers of different genders on the same students. When students and teachers were the same gender, teachers also had more positive impressions of students, and students looked forward more to the subject. The study used Department of Education data on 25,000 eighth graders from 1,000 schools.

In high school and college math and science courses, studies have shown that when women have a female instructor, they get higher grades, participate more in class and are more likely to continue to pursue the subject.

Researchers say it’s not entirely clear why teachers’ gender and race make a difference; it’s likely to be a combination of things. Students tend to be inspired by role models they can relate to. Same-race teachers might be able to present new material in a more culturally relevant way. Also, teachers sometimes treat students differently based on their own backgrounds and stereotypes. Social scientists call this implicit bias, when stereotypes influence people’s thinking, often unconsciously.

A variety of research, for instance, has shown that teachers tend to assess black students differently from white students. Preschool teachers judge black children more harshly for the same behavior. White teachers are less likely than black teachers to assign black students to gifted and talented programs even if their test scores match those of white students. When black students had both a white and black teacher, the black teachers consistently had higher expectations for the children’s potential.

Teachers’ biases can end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecy, Mr. Gershenson has found. “The high expectations actually motivate kids to do better,” he said. “Black students are hurt by that lack of optimism that white kids get, and black kids with black teachers rise to meet their expectations.”

Sometimes teachers underestimate students of their race or gender, suggesting that they have internalized stereotypes about their own group and that white and Asian-American students may not experience negative effects from having nonwhite teachers.

Girls perform about the same as boys in math on average through eighth grade. By age 17, there is a meaningful male advantage in that subject.

A new study, not yet published, found that math teachers favored boys over girls, and white students over black or Hispanic students — and that female teachers were biased in favor of boys and that nonwhite teachers were the most biased in favor of white students.

“These results indicate that enduring cultural biases may have long residual effects on stigmatized groups,” said Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, one of the authors and an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California.

Long term, the evidence suggests it would make a difference to train and hire more diverse teachers. But researchers say there’s also something that schools can do immediately, with the teachers they already have: teach them about their biases and stereotypes. It can lead to fairer treatment of students.

The research shows that no matter their demographics, teachers can overcome some of the effects of bias, Mr. Dee said. He summed up the interventions this way: “Signal to students your deep faith in their capacity to learn, coupled with your high expectations that they’ll do great things, full stop.”

It’s surprisingly effective and simple to do, social scientists have shown. One study found that merely informing teachers about their stereotypes closed gaps in grading. An hourlong online tutorial for teachers has halvedsuspension rates for black students, after training educators on how to value students’ perspectives and view misbehavior as a learning opportunity.

Another strategy is coaching teachers on how their language can unintentionally signal to students that they can’t excel. Teachers are taught to convey to students that intelligence is not fixed, but built through hard work, and to talk about each student’s value and belonging in the classroom.

Retaining current teachers is also important, researchers say. More qualified people would stay in the profession if the jobs had better pay, benefits and support. Nonwhite teachers in schools with poor resources are at particular risk of burning out.  

“It also matters just to have a really good teacher,” Mr. Dee said. “We don’t want to lose sight of that as we support diversity.”

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @clairecm • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 10, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Students Thrive When Teachers Are Like Them. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe