Gate Is Open for Minority Teachers in San Francisco

San Francisco may bill itself as “Everybody’s Favorite City,” but city school officials say they’re having trouble finding minority teachers who want to work here.

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most ethnically diverse spots in the country, and more than half the state’s schoolchildren belong to minority groups. But nine out of 10 would-be teachers in the California State University system are white.

Barbara Render has traveled to Atlanta, Washington, Texas and Seattle trying to find black, Hispanic and Asian teachers for San Francisco classrooms, but she says they are going into careers that pay better.

Minorities Shun Teaching

Locally, she said, “minorities are in the colleges, but they aren’t going into teaching.”

Many educators believe non-white teachers would help improve the performance of nonwhite students. Only half of the state’s black and Hispanic students graduate from high school.

“It’s important for society to have broad representation on the teaching force. We have to get cracking on it,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

Some of the state’s schools are even tapping their student bodies as a possible solution to the teacher shortage. Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles has a teacher-training program in which students take college requirements, learn about child development and do supervised practice teaching at elementary schools and junior highs.

The San Francisco public schools and Pacific Telesis are sponsoring a program called Teachers for Tomorrow. The program pays the college tuition for 20 high school seniors a year, possibly for the next five years. The students will be hired as teaching assistants in summer school, and they will work as teachers in the city schools after they graduate.

The average California teacher is 42 years old, and many of the state’s school districts, including San Francisco, expect up to half their teachers to retire within the next five years. The state expects about 6,000 teachers to retire each year for the next decade.

At the same time, about 140,000 new students are crowding classrooms each year--roughly the combined totals of the San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose unified school districts.

A research group, Policy Analysis for California Education, said the combination of factors means California faces a shortage of between 21,300 and 34,800 teachers by 1990.

The state has begun to issue an “emergency credential” to teachers who have a bachelor’s degree but have not finished other required teacher-training programs. About 27,000 of the state’s 200,000 teachers held the special credentials last year, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

“That’s an awesome number--15% of the teachers in this state are not fully credentialed,” said Jim Guthrie, an education professor at the University of California-Berkeley. “It’s a problem of quality.”

Honig and others say the greatest challenge is to find minority teachers.

The Clovis Unified School District in the San Joaquin Valley has set a goal of hiring 350 minority teachers in five years. The district will spend $25,000 next year sending recruiters to colleges in an effort to double the number of minority teachers.

Factor in Racial Tension

Clovis Supt. Floyd Buchanan hopes the presence of more minority teachers will help calm racial tensions in the district’s schools. But he admits he may have trouble finding candidates, even at nearby Fresno State University.

Some educators say Clovis and other districts attempting to recruit minorities will have a hard time finding what they’re after.

“I know they want to do a good thing,” Guthrie said. “But they don’t have a hoot of an idea where they are going to find the minorities. And the probability is slim that they will be able to do it.”

Of the minority students who graduate from college, many choose fields more lucrative than teaching.

“For years, being a teacher, a doctor or a preacher was what minority youngsters, especially blacks, were limited to for careers,” said Fredna Howell, principal of San Francisco’s Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School in the Bayshore area. “But that has changed.

“Doors have opened, and now minority youngsters are going into all sorts of fields such as business, science and communication arts.”