Cultural Mediators : The Search for Minority Teachers

When Albert Thibodeaux is graduated from Xavier University in New Orleans two years from now, recruiters from all over the country will be lining up scores deep to offer him a job. Before making his final decision, he will attend employment conferences where there will often be more recruiters than students.

The prospects are similar for Lisa Carrasco Laue at Cal State Los Angeles, for Sharon Mosely at Norfolk State University and for hundreds of other minority students like them. But, paradoxically, few of their fellow students want to be in their shoes.

Why? They are studying to be school teachers.

Among education students, Laue, Thibodeaux and Mosely are a rare breed. Fewer and fewer minorities are choosing to enter the teaching profession. The consequence is that as the student populations in the nation’s schools become increasingly black, Latino and Asian, the teaching and administrative staffs are becoming increasingly white.

Critical Need

Members of the nation’s education community warn that there is a critical need for minority teachers. Such teachers, they say, serve not only as role models for both minority and non-minority children, but also as cultural mediators between minority students and white teachers and students.

“No population group has solved all of the problems that students in training come across,” said Harvard University professor Charles Willie, who has studied the impact of largely white teaching staffs on minority students in college. “This means a diversified teaching staff gives the learning environment a better chance of dealing with the full range of human issues.

“Often, very fine teachers with the best intentions violate some cardinal cultural rules in trying to instruct students which they would not violate if they had peers who they could turn to for advice,” Willie said.

A False Signal

Dr. Elaine P. Witty, dean of the school of education at Norfolk State University in Virginia, said the absence of minority instructors can send a false signal. “Children look at the composition of the faculty and conclude that those people who are white are the people we can look up to for the dissemination of information, for being in charge of things, for showing authority, making decisions and exerting leadership. That’s a dangerous and damaging message.”

It also means, she said, that “you lose the resource of minority teachers to serve as mediators of their culture for other students. For white students, we are teaching them a false view of the world. In a world that is not predominantly white, they grow up experiencing and seeing a white-controlled school system. And, since we live in a global society and most of those are people of color, they need to learn there are values and intelligence in a variety of cultures and people.”

There are a growing number of efforts to reverse the trend and some signs that students may be renewing an interest in teaching. And there will be a sharpened national focus on public education this week, with President Bush meeting with all 50 governors today and Thursday at the University of Virginia for a summit conference on the subject. But against this hopeful backdrop, school systems that are trying to make their faculties more reflective of society at large are finding it increasingly difficult to hire minority teachers.

“It’s a problem nationwide,” said Ben Lujan, director of certificate recruitment and selection for the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose teaching staff is nearly 70% white and whose student body is 80% minority.

“Our underlying theme when we go recruiting is that we are vying for minority teachers. But we find that universities do not have the minority numbers in their programs to serve the needs of the nation’s school system.”

Across the nation, as minority teachers who are now at work reach retirement age, the concern becomes more pressing. Currently, minorities make up just over 9% of all teachers, down from 17% in the mid-1970s. By the turn of the century, the National Education Assn. predicts, only one public school teacher in 20 will be a minority, while nearly one of every three schoolchildren will be black, brown or Asian.

Brief Surplus

A brief oversupply of teachers in the 1970s led to a substantial decline in the number of students of all races who went into education schools. But, minority enrollment plunged even faster and has remained depressed because of a number of other factors, educators said.

For one thing, they said, the minority teacher shortage is actually a tribute to affirmative action and the increased job opportunities for minorities over the past 20 years.

“When I was coming out of school, teaching was about all you could do,” said Lois Pointer, a teacher for nearly 33 years in Memphis where nearly half of the instructors are black. “You could be a teacher, a preacher, maybe a nurse or work in the post office. Now students have a wide range of opportunities.”

As students have considered careers that were closed to their parents, they have turned away from teaching because of its decreased status and comparatively low pay. The average teacher salary in the United States in 1988-89 was $29,629, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

“When I tell people I’m a teacher, they say: ‘You couldn’t pay me enough money to teach,’ ” said Adriann Wilson, 29, of Memphis.

In many cases, minority students are steered away from the profession. Wilson recalls that nearly every teacher she had at Melrose High School urged her to go into another field.

“They said engineering, medicine, business--anything but teaching,” she said. “They told me there was no money and too many hassles and too much hard work and you don’t get paid for the amount of time you put into your schooling overall.”

Children of teachers are especially likely to hear such words of discouragement.

“I would prefer my children to try something else,” said Doris Buchanan, a Memphis teacher. “You don’t get rewarded for what you do.” Both of her children are now in college, neither pursuing education as a career.

“I encouraged my son and my daughter not to become school teachers,” added Lois Gilder, a Memphis teacher whose daughter expects to finish college in the spring with a degree in marketing. “Years ago, teachers had the utmost respect from the community and the families. Now the teachers seem to be way down the ladder on the respect list.

“The thing that really bothers me is that everybody seems to be making extremely more money than we are, and yet if it weren’t for good school teachers, they wouldn’t be where they are.”

She cites the case of her younger brother, who was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 and started immediately at Hughes Aircraft, making $29,500 annually. After a year, the company sent him to the University of Southern California to get his master’s degree while continuing his pay and cutting his hours in half to allow for school.

“He’s now making $32,000 and he’s only 28 years old,” she said. “My income is $34,000 and I have been working 27 years and I have a master’s degree plus 45 hours.”

The advent of teacher testing in the early and mid-1980s contributed to the drop in minority students in education programs, educators said, because minority teachers initially failed the tests at a much greater rate than whites. For example, in Louisiana in 1981 only 21% of black teachers passed examinations compared to 78% of whites.

Issue Disappears

Testing has disappeared as an issue, but it exerted a “chilling effect on minority teacher enrollment,” said Antoine Garibaldi, dean of arts and sciences at Xavier. “Lots of students turn away from teaching because the feeling was that even after you got through everything else, you might not be able to get by the test, so why bother.”

Another major reason for the decline is particularly disturbing to many educators: while a larger percentage of blacks and Latinos are finishing high school, a smaller percentage are attending college. According to the American Council on Education, 20% fewer black high school graduates enrolled in college in 1985 than in 1976. During the same period, 25% fewer Latino high school graduates enrolled.

Educators say that the reason has to do with money. As grants and aid for college education declined, minority students, most of them first-generation college prospects, simply couldn’t afford school. That trend is particularly disturbing for education schools because teachers are usually first-generation college students, educators said.

“Normally persons who have gone into teacher education have been persons who come from the lower middle class and it’s the first time for the family into a profession,” said Dr. Eugene Eubanks, professor for education and urban affairs at the University of Minnesota.

At the School of Education at Norfolk State University, Witty says, “The largest percent of my enrollment of black students are first generation college-goers and I have a larger percentage of first generation college-goers than any other school at the university. If we could get more students in the school, we’d get our share of teachers.”

Mosely and Thibodeaux are first-generation college students, as, they said, are many of their fellow students.

As the number of minority college students going to other professions has increased and the percentage of minority students attending college has declined, minority enrollment in education schools has spiralled downward dramatically.

Predominantly black colleges, which have produced over half of the nation’s black teachers, saw their education school enrollments drop from 25% of the student body in 1977 to less than 10% today. In Louisiana, the number of black students who were graduated from teacher education programs fell by two-thirds from 1976 to 1983. Norfolk State, which averaged 250 black education graduates annually in the 1970s, produced only 78 last year.

Consequently, the nation’s school systems find themselves scrambling for their share of minority teachers.

“It’s real competitive,” said Dr. Michael Acosta, head of administrative personnel for the Los Angeles school system. “Our recruiters have gone all over the country. We’ve gone all over the South, gone to the career fairs, gone to large urban cities where there are large populations of blacks and Latinos. We advertise in journals. We use Spanish-language publications. Our recruiters end up meeting at the same places all the time.”

It’s so bad, said Linda Sumners, director of hiring for the Fulton County Board of Education just outside of Atlanta, that during a recent recruitment conference at Florida A&M; in Tallahassee there were 120 recruiters and only 50 students.

“It’s like a student walks through the door and you jump on them,” she said.

Hopeful Signs

Nevertheless, a few hopeful signs have begun to appear.

Across the country, educators are beginning to design programs that encourage youngsters to become teachers. The Los Angeles school system, for instance, in 1985 began the Teachers Training Academy, a magnet program at Crenshaw High School for students interested in pursuing the teaching profession. It has become a model for other school systems, such as Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

“I think it has been a mistake on all of our parts not to promote teaching as a career,” said Jewell Boutte, principal of Crenshaw. “Educators have a responsibility for encouraging children to go into education.”

The American Council on Education reports that the percentage of minority high school students enrolled in college is beginning to creep back up. Teachers’ salaries are up significantly in some areas--Los Angeles teachers won a 24% increase in their new three-year contract and Rochester, N.Y., teachers can earn up to $70,000--and many schools are pushing teaching as an interim, rather than a lifelong, profession.

“Teaching is not going to be a lifetime career that it has been for the majority of individuals who are in the profession today,” Garibaldi of Xavier said. “The idea is that many students will teach for awhile and then go on to other professions.”

Meanwhile, some colleges report a changing attitude among students that could mean more will enter teaching.

“Teaching has been hard to sell, particularly at a time of the ‘me’ generation,” Witty said. “We’re finding that those who are going into teaching have almost a Peace Corps mentality. They are going forth to serve.”

Thibodeaux, 20, a social studies education major, and Mosely, 27, a former justice administration major, reflect that new attitude. “I felt that there was a need particularly for black male teachers,” said Thibodeaux, who wants to teach in his hometown of New Orleans. “I went to an all-male Catholic high school. My most influential teachers were black men. I found this throughout my educational career, that my most influential teachers were black teachers.”

Mosely said she had heard the arguments that her salary would lag behind those in other professions, but after two years of substitute teaching in the Virginia Beach school system she found her enjoyment of teaching was more important than the money she would earn.

“I’m the kind of person who makes decisions for herself,” she said of those urging her to pursue another profession. “What really makes up the difference for me is seeing the children progress. That’s like getting paid all over again.”

COLLEGE GRADUATES RECEIVING TEACHING CERTIFICATES

The number of college graduates receiving teaching certificates has declined, as has the percentage of such graduates within each major ethnic group.

Number Percentage WHITE 1977 125,148 15.5 1979 108,949 13.6 1981 93,724 11.6 1985 77,531 9.4 BLACK 1977 12,992 22.1 1979 11,509 19.1 1981 9,494 15.6 1985 5,456 9.5 LATINO 1977 3,050 16.3 1979 3,029 15.1 1981 2,847 13.0 1985 2,533 9.8 INDIAN 1977 707 21.3 1979 645 18.9 1981 569 15.8 1985 483 11.4 ASIAN 1977 894 6.5 1979 785 5.1 1981 723 3.8 1985 770 3.0

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics

PUBLIC SCHOOLS: CHANGING ETHNIC PICTURES

Percentage of minority and white students in public schools.

Whites Minorities 1970 80.0% 20.0% 1972 79.8% 20.2% 1976 76.0% 24.0% 1978 75.3% 24.7% 1980 73.3% 26.7% 1984 71.2% 28.8% 1986 70.4% 29.6%

SOURCE: National Center for Educational Statistics