University of California, Berkeley, California on a rainy Thursday. The bells in the iconic campanile are ringing, it’s noon. The class is focused on teachers of color, as a topic, and as I look around the room, future teachers of color who have registered for this class.
Ten undergraduate students sit in a circle with their professor, Travis. Travis founded a center last year, the Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity, or CREEO. The center’s mission is to “use research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in the United States and internationally.”
In addition to the students, there are several visitors in the room. A colleague from the graduate school responsible for creating university-community links, two employees from his center, and me. The chairs are on wheels, each with a collapsible desk for left and right handers, more right than left. The rectangular room has a very high ceiling and windows that stretch from the floor most of the way to the ceiling. Earlier, as we walked in out of the rain, Travis mentioned the building was originally a women’s gym. I need to look into that more. The room is fitted with whiteboards now, haphazardly erased, a steel lectern balancing a computer, and a screen pulled down in the front of the room. Pretty standard classroom stuff. The tile floor is scuffed and dirty. The heater along the window next to me is bent, it looks like someone tried to use it as a chair. The walls are olive green, the curtains just a touch darker. Pleasant in a well worn, state university sort of way.
Undergraduate students are generally between 18 and 22, I suppose these folks are in the middle of that range. Hoodies, jackets, one woman wears a hat and a medical mask. Just her eyes peer out at us. Laptops are decorated with stickers. The Barbie logo in pink Barbie script is prominently displayed on one of them. Preparing the teachers and leaders of tomorrow.
Wouldn’t it be fun to scroll forward 20 years, to see these folks in their early forties? Who will still be in education? I picture the man in the green sweater and khaki pants, in his first year as a principal after years as an elementary teacher, then a curriculum lead, while he completed graduate school. I picture the woman restlessly bouncing her foot as the head of school at an international school in Asia. Maybe that tall woman in the stylish leather boots will be talking to students in the hallway outside her university office one day. Some of them may never start in education, some of them may get disgusted or disgruntled and change professions. I think part of Travis’s goal for the course is to make it more likely that these young students of color do have fulfilling careers in education, that they make a difference, and that just a few more students in future elementary and secondary schools will say to themselves: “My teacher looks like me.”
“How do teachers of color make their way into the profession?” asks Travis. “What are the trends?” He shares a graph. ethnic groups in the US teacher workforce from 1987 to 2020. Striking to me – and the students – is that Black teachers dropped from 8.2% to 6.1%. Asian Americans, someone mentions, only make up 2.4% of the teacher workforce in 2020. Another student shares that the overall percentage of teachers of color is only 20% in 2020. Up from 13% in 1987, but still. “Aren’t there more than 20% of students of color in the US?”
“Are the trends a function of demographic shifts?” One student thinks so. The overall Latinx population in the US is growing, that could explain some of the change. “But there are other explanations going on here,” says Travis. The Black population hasn’t decreased over time, but the Black representation among teachers has.
Travis projects a new slide and asks the students to talk about what they see. There are two graphs: the percent of novice teachers and the percent of teachers, by racial group, in 2020. In general, people of color are not staying in the profession.
“What is the percentage of students of color?” asks the student on my left. “It doesn’t match the percentages of teachers of color.”
“No, it does not. Students of color are about 53%. There is ‘a coloring of America.”
Travis asks the students to dive into the reading. The text they are using is a collection of work, Travis and a colleague are the editors. The book is thick. It looks, in fact, like a ream of paper you’d find next to the copy machine, but with a cover. A few students don’t have the book, perhaps because they are worried it is too expensive. Travis assures them that grant money provides all of them a free copy. “That we can keep?” He nods and tells them it’s theirs, they can keep it. A ripple of gratitude washes across the room.
“You know what,” says the green sweater khaki pants student, “I have a little wagon and lots of time. I’m happy to get books and bring them to you in the next class.” We all have a chuckle. Four students raise their hands appreciatively.
Then they dive into the text, an article by Van T. Lac. Each student shares lines in the article that spoke to them. Stories of feeling disconnected, of not learning about Black history how they would have liked to, back in high school. Of being disconnected because teachers never really shared their stories, “you don’t really know the teacher, you just move from one to another, determined by subject.” It felt isolating.
The phrase I want to mention, says another, is about how being a teacher and teaching is far more than just teaching academics. Being a teacher is about making personal connections. It’s about relationships. She relates a story about a biology teacher that made that connection for her, someone who helped shape her world view, who passed on moral values.
They move on to an article by Brown, Beck, and Nganga. About the recruitment of international women teachers of color in US schools. More students share specific parts of the text that resonated with them.
One man, who hasn’t contributed up to now, shares a few lines from the text and then tells the class that he is interested in being a teacher in an international school. He’s not very sure about being a teacher in the US. He should, he thinks, return to his home country.
“Nobody tells you about the hidden rules …. if you don’t know them, you don’t get to play.” This is read by a young woman. It describes the situation for teachers in the US who have come from abroad. They feel that there is little help. Perhaps “it’s a really common immigrant experience,” the student reflects out loud. You come into an unfamiliar environment and it is just very hard. That would certainly tend to affect the demographics that we were looking at earlier. Why the percent of teachers of color in the US, already low among the novice teacher population, is even lower two, three, five, ten years later.
Travis makes this point. The class is looking at these two articles because they illustrate how the path for teachers of color into teaching is difficult, and that, once arrived, there are factors in schools that discourage teachers of color from staying.
The end of class is approaching. Travis asks the students, in groups, to design a teacher preparation program for future teachers of color. He introduces the task by talking about Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “You know she created the program as an undergraduate at Princeton.” The message is clear: You young people here today, you can have an enormous impact on education, too. You can be part of the solution to the low representation of teachers of color in US schools.
I cannot understand emotionally, deep in my gut, how constant microaggressions and macroaggressions and ingrained habits of language and mind and unnecessarily high hurdles based on prejudice and pettiness and hate add up to the low representation of teachers of color in education and the difficulties they encounter once in the profession that, as the students have seen in the data and talked about today, tend to drive them away. But I do understand that these undergraduates, if they go into teaching, will be that much more prepared for the challenges they will face.