While state and local leaders have comprehensive plans to increase the number of Black teachers, there are few plans to increase the hiring of Black principals, who play a critical role in preparing Black teachers.
Only 10% of public school principals nationwide are black., This helps explain why hiring and retaining Black teachers is so problematic.
The roots of this problem go back to the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. Brown’s decision called for the integration of faculty, administration, and student bodies, but this was not the case. Once the student body was integrated, black teachers and principals were fired.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of that decision, but Brown’s promise has not been fulfilled, nor has integration led to the role of Black educators being taken more seriously in the lives of Black children.
Before 1954, black principals played a unique and transformative role in ensuring that black students had black teachers. For example, Horace Tate, profiled in Vanessa Siddle Walker’s book The Lost Education of Horace Tate, left a historically black university to teach in rural Georgia in the early 1940s. He is a hero for actively recruiting undergraduate students. He believed that recruiting and retaining black teachers was important to uplifting the black community. Tate and the Georgia Teacher Education Association also fought unfair credentialing practices that strained the pipeline of Black teachers.
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Influenced by Brown, Leslie T. Fenwick wrote in her groundbreaking book The Pink Slips of Jim Crow that job losses for black principals were so devastating that in 1971 It said a Senate committee hearing was convened in 2019 to investigate the issue. The Nixon administration meant there was no relief for these principals. But the testimony from the fascinating hearing left a historical record.
Fenwick notes that today’s policy efforts must recognize and address the vestiges of “the systematic dismissal of Black educators from public schools.” Her books seek a deeper understanding of what has been, what should be, and what could be.
If states are committed to fulfilling Brown’s promise, they will not only rebuild the pipeline of Black teachers, but also recognize the important role that Black principals have played and can continue to play in the development of Black teachers. We must recognize the important role that gender plays. Horace Tate is not a relic of history. Black principals continue that fight today. Hooray.
In my first year as principal of a middle school in Mississippi, I struggled to hire black teachers and retain those already on campus. I can’t count the number of times I’ve called up teachers who once taught in my school and convinced them to give black graduates of HBCUs the opportunity to give their children the opportunity to be taught by someone who looks like them and shares their values. spent a lot of time.
Later, while working for the Mississippi Department of Education, she led state-level efforts to address the state’s severe teacher shortage and increase the proportion of Black, Latino, and Native American teachers. We have formulated a comprehensive plan that takes these policy changes into consideration.
We are working with the Legislature to create more entry points into teacher education programs by adding provisions that consider future teachers’ GPAs, rather than relying solely on ACT and Praxis scores. The law was amended to include.
We partnered with teacher advocacy organizations to provide statewide access to training and tutoring for assessments, and focused on building community among Black educators. And we launched the nation’s first state teacher training program for teachers. As far as I remember, my first resident was over 70% black.
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Many educators, including myself, believe that this work builds on the legacy of black principals like Tate and embodies what activist Mary Church Terrell called “the uplifting of the ascent.” I’m looking at it as something.
These stories call for recognition that state education agency leaders have truly engaged with Black principals, understood the need for more Black principals, and have been effective in their efforts to increase the percentage of Black teachers. It emphasizes that sexuality is on the rise.
Strategies that do not involve Black principals are short-sighted. Professor Jarvis Givens, in his book Fugitive Pedagogy, characterizes black educational leaders who believed that their own sabotage was paramount to improving black education: “Under threat of violence, “It defies law and custom.”
Today’s efforts should no longer be escapist. Indeed, educational leaders should consider these efforts necessary. First, leaders need to build on Black school leaders’ efforts to recruit talented and diverse teachers by expanding do-it-yourself programs and teacher training programs, as we did in Mississippi. may assist.
National policymakers will also invest in HBCUs and other institutions that serve underrepresented populations (such as Hispanic-serving institutions and institutions serving Native Americans) and reduce existing loans. Waiver programs need to be reformed and recruitment tools for teachers improved.
If education leaders fully understood the significant impact that Black principals have on the pipeline of Black teachers, they would push to increase the proportion of Black principals—principals have been doing so for decades. He has called for more attention to the recruitment and retention of black teachers.
Felton Moss is the acting director of the Education Policy and Leadership Program at American University. He is a professor of education policy at American University and a research associate at the NAACP’s Center for Educational Innovation.
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