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9486 in the collection
Duncan Can't Figure out Why So Few Black Teachers in New Orleans
I'm going to be really honest. The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.
--Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Washington Watch, Jan. 29, 2010
Larry Miller's Blog
May 11, 2010
Below is a story that ran
today about Arne Duncan visiting New Orleans and bemoaning the low
percentage of African American teachers in the United States. He is
expected to give a commencement speech at Xavier University in New
Orleans today and encourage students to consider a career in teaching.
I hope that during Duncan‘s visit someone reminds him that all 4,000
teachers in New Orleans, 90% of whom were black, were summarily fired
after hurricane Katrina and replaced with overwhelmingly white Teach For
America teachers with no certification and little more than six weeks of
training.
Why would young African Americans opt for a career in teaching after
seeing what the state did to the 4,000 black New Orleans teachers who
devoted themselves to educating challenging students? Teaching has
become an even more perilous vocation as a result of Duncan‘s Race To
The Top Program, founded on the specious argument that failing schools
are the sole responsibility of bad teachers, so bad teachers need to be fired.
The New Orleans policy of relying on novice teachers has contributed to
an academically segregated two-tiered system of schools that
concentrates novice teachers in schools where students have the greatest
needs for skilled educators. I have attached an UNTO report on the lack
of experienced teachers in New Orleans in which the authors note that:
- Before Katrina only 10% of New Orleans Teachers were in their first or
second year teaching. By 2008, 33% of the city’s teaches fall in this
novice category.
- Inexperienced teachers are dumped into the remaining state-run RSD
public schools, ensuring that the students with the greatest needs are
taught by the least prepared teachers.
- 40% of all teachers in the state-run RSD schools have less than 2
years experience, compared to only 18% in the charter schools that
opened in 2006.
- At-risk black students are nearly three times as likely to have a
novice teacher than non at-risk white youth.
If we want more young African Americans to rise to the challenge of
teaching the disadvantaged, then we need to reward altruism rather than
punish it.
Lance Hill, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Southern Institute for Education and Research
Tulane University
Minority teachers' importance emphasized by U.S. education secretary
By Katy Reckdahl, The Times-Picayune
When Duncan gives the commencement address today at Xavier University, he is expected to ask the student body and their families to consider a career in teaching. He was photographed in April in New York.
Quinton Jones, a Houston teacher, told U.S. Education Department Secretary Arne Duncan that he had entered college "strongly against" teaching as a profession.
"That's a common theme," Duncan said, as he moderated a Friday roundtable of young African-American and Latino teachers at the Children's Defense Fund offices in New Orleans with Marian Wright Edelman, the iconic advocate who began the organization in 1973.
All of the teachers at Friday's roundtable were inspired by the Children's Defense Fund's Freedom Schools: after-school and summer programs in 75 cities that are rooted in the civil-rights movement and focused on holistic, socially aware education.
Duncan said that black teachers currently make up about 8 percent of the nation's total. To increase that, he wanted each teacher to tell him how they felt about the profession.
"We always had teachers in the African-American community," said Franceria Moore, a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge. "And it was a very prestigious position."
But today, as a black woman living in a country with a black president, she has many other options. "The sky's the limit," she said. "So why would I limit myself to being just a teacher?"
Jones said that, growing up in Houston, it was clear that his teachers weren't paid well, because he saw the cars that his teachers drove and the neighborhoods where they lived. Another young man said that his friends "laughed in my face" when he raised the idea of teaching: they couldn't believe he'd spend four years amassing $50,000 in school loans for a job that might pay $30,000 a year, he said.
As Duncan gives the commencement address today at Xavier University, he is expected to ask the student body and their families to consider a career in teaching. It's become a theme for Duncan this year.
In February, Duncan told leaders of historically black colleges and universities that "we have far too few teachers of color. Only 2 percent, one in 50 teachers today are African-American males. Something is fundamentally wrong with that picture."
Although he didn't spell it out on Friday, Duncan's campaign to recruit more black teachers may be driven by research that found improved test scores for black students who spend at least a year with a black teacher. In past speeches he's mentioned that black teachers are more likely than their white peers to want to work in high-poverty, high-needs schools, the front line for closing what he calls the nation's "insidious achievement gap" between white and black students. And he cited data showing that during the next three to five years, the nation could lose a third of its veteran teachers, as baby boomers reach retirement age.
But Duncan's motivations also seem driven by more anecdotal evidence, such as what he heard from the young teachers.
"If we're not in the classroom, we're trusting others to educate our children," said La'Mont Geddis, a school principal in Washington, D.C.
"As black males, we have a huge impact on our students. They gravitate to us," said Brandon Corley, a Philadelphia math teacher.
"I'm struck how exposure to Freedom Schools changed your life. It's staggering," said Duncan, who sat at the head table with Edelman and a line of local officials: Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Recovery School District head Paul Vallas, Louisiana's education Superintendent Paul Pastorek, Xavier President Norman Francis and U.S. Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-New Orleans.
Afterward, the young teachers showed off their work, through the songs and chants of 50 Freedom School students who attend after-school sessions in the North Broad Street building.
Together, Edelman and Duncan read the children "The Carrot Seed" by Ruth Krauss. The children's classic is about a little boy who planted a carrot seed and, despite his family's skepticism, cares for it until it comes up, "just as the little boy had known it would."
"Don't let anybody tell you something can't be done," Edelman told the children.
— Katy Reckdahl
The Times-Picayune
2010-05-08
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2010/05/minority_teachers_importance_e.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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