Help Wanted: Schools Struggling to Keep Black Teachers

Joseph Williams, Word in Black

Innovative recruiting strategies like Teacher Villages aren’t keeping pace with the number of Black teachers leaving the classroom.

Study after study confirms it: Black children perform better in schools with Black teachers. They score better on achievement scores and have lower dropout rates and higher rates of college completion. 

Yet Black teachers make up just 6% of the public school workforce. 

So perhaps it’s not surprising that advocates for diversity in education are trying everything from innovative internships to an experimental “teacher village” in Los Angeles that offers affordable housing, mentorship, and a peer support system for young Black men. 

“What we’re doing is actually listening to young people,” who say they need encouragement and guidance as they learn how to teach, Peter Watts, who co-created the Teacher Village initiative, told Fox 11, a local L.A. TV station. “It’s us saying how can we support them to mitigate some of those barriers … to make it a little bit easier for them to enter into the profession.”

But experts, and some Black educators, argue the creative attempts to bring more Black teachers into the classroom mask a bigger, thornier problem: keeping the ones who are already there. 

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See what Black students can do when given good role models in this virtual exhibit.

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