The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

This picture is from the webpage entitled "True Heroes". Click the picture to visit the webpage (I really love this picture, btw)..

University of Chicago Press Journals
Study: Teachers choose schools according to student race

A study forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics suggests that high-quality teachers tend to leave schools that experience inflows of black students. According to the study’s author, C. Kirabo Jackson (Cornell University), this is the first study to show that a school’s racial makeup may have a direct impact on the quality of its teachers.

“It’s well established that schools with large minority populations tend to have lower quality teachers,” Dr. Jackson said. “But it is unclear whether these schools are merely located in areas with a paucity of quality teachers, whether quality teachers avoid these schools because of the neighborhood or economic factors surrounding a school, or whether there is a direct relationship between student characteristics and teacher quality.”

Dr. Jackson’s findings suggest that it’s not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it’s the students—and it’s directly related to their race.

“This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction,” Jackson said. “This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools.”

The study focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district in North Carolina. In 2002, the district ended its race-based busing program, which distributed the district’s minority population across its schools. When the policy ended, some schools had a large and sudden inflow of black students. Since the racial makeup of the schools changed suddenly but the neighborhood and economic factors surrounding them stayed the same, Jackson could test the impact the student body itself had on teacher quality.

Using data supplied by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, Jackson found that schools that had an increase in black enrollment suffered a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores. Teacher effectiveness, as measured by teachers’ previous ability to improve student test scores, decreased in the black inflow schools as well. The change in quality for each school generally occurred in the same year that the busing program ended, indicating that teachers moved in anticipation of more black students.

“This study implies teachers may prefer a student body that is more white and less black,” Jackson says.

Black teachers were slightly more likely than white teachers to stay in the schools that experienced a black inflow, the study found. However, those black teachers who did leave black schools tended to be the highest qualified black teachers. So the decline in quality was somewhat more pronounced among black teachers than white teachers.

Just what it is about black students that pushes high-quality teachers away is hard to pin down, Dr. Jackson says. It could be that teachers are reacting to notions about black students’ achievement or income levels. (source)

What’s funny that it took a study to find out what many of us already know, but do not want to say openly.  Teachers of all races (including Black teachers) are going to go to the districts where bad behavior is not an issue–just like folks avoid going to the Wal-Mart located in the ‘hood. 

Personally, I have met and known teachers of several races (including Black) who have told me that they are fed up with the excessive bad behavior they have to deal with in the classroom while trying to teach a lesson that took them half the night to prepare.

The reality that very few want to talk about because of the fear of being branded as a “racist”, “hater”, or “self-hating black man/woman” is that for the public school system, the Blacker the student body, the more problems you can expect. Some of the very same knee-groes that argue against that statement are the same knee-groes that no longer live in districts where the schools are mostly Black. And if they do, their kids are either being homeschooled or attend private school.

Allow me to make the explanation behind this bad behavior as simple as possible. A fractured family structure in most cases will breed children who not only do not respect themselves, but they will not respect authority. I wrote the following in a recent commentary piece.

In the recent MSNBC documentary “A Father’s Promise”, there was a school principal featured who said that 80% of her students do not have a father in their lives. Eighty percent.
[I think the reader needs to pause and think about that number for a while.]

So now we are placing good teachers in the classroom to not only teach, but to fill the voids that are left in the lives of children who come from a broken home. While teachers have the option of getting away from this added pressure of raising kids, the students have no other choice but to turn to the next thing that reminds them of a parent.

“Are you suggesting that Black children are innately bad?”

No. Children who come out of broken homes are susceptible to bad behavior. I found the following excerpt on the website for Prisonfellowship.org.

The overwhelming majority of fathers in prison are fatherless themselves.[2] Additionally, one study found that 85 percent of all incarcerated youth come from fatherless homes.[3] To provide rehabilitative services and benefits to these men and boys without seriously addressing the father wound is to leave a man lost, unhealed, and carrying significant baggage.

This is why all pumping all the money in the world in low-performing schools isn’t going to fix anything. Sure some kids do manage to make it through these seemingly hopeless school systems, but the majority do not.

“I get tired of hearing people always putting Black folks on blast for not doing “this” or “that”. Broken family structures are also found in the White community as well.”

The Black population makes up roughly 13% of the population here in the U.S. According to data gathered by American Community Surveys in 2004 and cited by the study (pdf) produced by ETS.org, 77% of out-of-wedlock births to women under the age of 30 come from the Black community. Whites (according to this study) make up about 34%. So in short, though we are smaller in demographic size, we are leading in out-of-wedlock births. We can no longer hide behind the infractions of other races. Our numbers are just too big. Does this excuse Whites? No. Instead, this gives us the opportunity to take the lead and show all races how to deal with this problem. But that will never happen if we continue to wait for “solutions” from government and Whites in general.

“And speaking of ‘solutions’, what are your solutions?”

One of the things I hear from teachers who made the move  away from troubled districts is that the because the parents are more involved, it makes their job a lot easier. Bottom line, parents need to be motivated to get involved in the education of their children. Some school districts have gone as far as paying parents just to show up to parent/teacher conferences. I strongly oppose this because any parent that would put money before their children has some serious issues (that’s putting it mildly). Bottom line, these children need some type of parental figures in their lives. While we do have programs like Big Brothers/Big Sisters, 100 Black Men, etc., stories like the one below from Newark Mayor Cory Booker I hear pretty often.

“I went to a Black fraternal organization with hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of members and I said to them ‘look, I need mentors’. It is proven in every study– every study shows that if you are an adult, especially if your are an adult male (I don’t care if you’re Black, White, whatever)– if you get involved in a child’s life at risk, you can have traumatically different results. And they told me ‘We’ll get you 50, 100, 150 mentors. I came back to see what they had and they barely had a dozen guys who were willing to sign up. And even less followed through.
So this is not ‘their problem’ or ‘these people problem’. This is our problem. (Quote from Mayor Cory Booker during his appearance on the MSNBC special, “A Father’s Promise”)

Bottom line, the solutions are out there for those who want them. We just have to be serious enough to carry it all the way through.

Teachers are paid to do one thing and one thing only: Teach. If the parents are not in place, what more can they do?

Related: “Where public school teachers send their kids”