Turnover is real and with the teacher shortage happening in universities, districts, and specific schools, you cannot afford to lose any good teachers.
School Leaders Are Dealing with a Crisis
And if there is any teacher shortage, this also means that shortages of Black teachers is also an issue. Lack of Black teachers in schools promote the following problems.
Overdiscipline.
Through methods that are familiar in Black and Brown communities, Black teachers are more susceptible to using kinship methods to hold high expectations for these students, while also understanding that some behaviors are just cultural and should not be punished. Without them, cultural behaviors are punished and the urge for punitive measures to behaviors are typically the go to.
Underachievment.
In classrooms, much content poses a disconnect for students due to the inability to connect with the vocabulary or abstractness of books, math problems, and science concepts. Black teachers have shown to take the curriculum and modify it to make deep cultural connections, which breaks down barriers of inexperience, so children can visualize and understand concepts. This also increases overall performance.
Disconnection.
For all children, the connection is prioritized over the content. All children cannot learn from someone they do not love. The intuitiveness and nature of collectivism is are traits that Black teachers bring into the classroom, inherently and authentically, resulting in children wanting to learn from them, admiring them, and knowing that this connection is an investment in them as human beings.
“Black students who had at least one Black teacher in elementary school were 29% less likely to drop out of school.”
And I am sure you have either tried several methods of recruitment or have not even been aware that it makes a huge difference for Black teachers to be within your schools because “teachers are teachers.”
You’ve probably:
reached out to local universities and colleges.
reached out to HBCUs.
Leveraged your social media groups, especially Facebook pages.
Asked other colleagues how they are implementing their recruitment efforts.
You Probably Have Tried Many Strategies
Even if you have Black teachers, they are either quiet, disengaged, or they make up a small percentage of your school, less than 30% of your staff population. But our children nor school communities can afford to have this disengagement as their success depends on the high engagement and the adequate population of Black teachers in schools.
…And you want something different for your students, staff, and community because you understand the direct impact, as well as the greater impact of equity of our society.
Modeled after the Continuous Improvement Framework, the Equity Transformation Framework is the method I use to shift cultures within schools so that Black teachers want to come and they want to stay. My approach to retention is different than others because it prioritizes the experience they have within schools, rather than incentivizing them for their presence. We want teachers to do more than survive, we want them to thrive! Ensuring that mid-level and senior leadership has the training they need to shift culture is vital. They will go through ongoing training on equity topics related to staff culture, engage in quick actions that I call “mini-transformations” where they apply the training, and coaching to support reflection, this is how we shift your culture in 1-3 school years!