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Black Male Teachers Required
Can
filmmaker Spike Lee encourage black male college graduates
to "do the right thing" and go into teaching? The
famous director teamed up with Education Secretary Arne Duncan
yesterday at the nation's only all black male college campus,
Morehouse College. Together they issued the call for more
black men to give back to their communities by heading to
teach in a K-12 classroom.
The
town hall meeting and discussion was part of the Department
of Education’s TEACH campaign, which hopes to raise awareness
of the teaching profession and inspire Americans to step up
and make a difference in the classroom. Given the shockingly
low numbers of black men teaching in public schools, the campaign
couldn't be more timely.
Of
the nation's 4.8 million public school teachers, only 1.7
percent are black males, meaning that most kids will go through
their entire K-12 careers without seeing what one Morehouse
student described as "caring, responsible and honest
black men in positions of authority." Indeed, as a parent
of two black boys, I've resigned myself to the likelihood
that my two sons may never have a role model who looks like
them standing at the head of the classroom.
Lee,
who is a Morehouse alumnus, shared stories of two such role
models—black male educators who motivated him to do well
in school and pursue his dreams. He also acknowledged the
pressure on men to go into higher paying careers such as law,
medicine, or business after graduation, but told the crowd
that, "Everybody can't be a business major. We have to
educate ourselves. We have to educate our young black men."
Activist
and MSNBC contributor Jeff Johnson also joined Duncan and
Lee at the town hall to talk up his new task force, 5 by 2015.
The goal of the organization is to "increase the number
of black male teachers nationally to 5 percent by 2015."
That means putting 80,000 black males—both recent grads
and career changers—in teaching positions in the next
four years.
It's
an ambitious goal because one of the consequences of the achievement
gap is the relatively small pool of black men with college
degrees. Black men are only 6.5 percent of the U.S. population,
and in 2008 they were only 5 percent of college students.
Given those kinds of stats, there simply may not be enough
qualified black males to answer the call.
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