Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights
Spike Lee (pictured), whose mother, Jacqueline Carroll, was an educator, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will be traveling to Morehouse College on Jan. 31 in an effort to encourage more minorities to pursue teaching careers.The focus is specifically on male teachers of color.
The event will be a town hall meeting, where recruiters will be present to court diverse and highly qualified teachers. Following the event, Duncan and others will announce a plan to recruit, train and place 800,000 male African American teachers by 2015, according to a press release.
Duncan will be touring historically black colleges in an effort to recruit black males, who currently make up 2 percent of the teaching population.
There's no doubt that we need more qualified black teachers in the public school system, but it's hard to recruit students to the teaching profession because of its low paying. And yet schools -- mostly charter schools -- that are headed by black men have proved successful.
Will having more black men teachers help solve the problem of poor student achievement in the black community? According to studies, the number of fathers actively involved in their children's lives has decreased dramatically over the past two decades. This has affected boys and girls, both in and out of school, emotionally and academically. At school, though, like in the workforce, you have to achieve no matter who your boss is.
I think the focus should be on making the curriculum more culturally reflective of blacks' contributions and achievements in this country. It wouldn't matter who was teaching it if black male or female children felt that what they were learning was culturally relevant.
In Baltimore, a predominantly black city, a survey conducted in 2001 by a task force revealed that only one in five Maryland schools taught students about African American culture.
When the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture opened a few years ago, it looked to remedy that problem by incorporating the museum's exhibitions into the curriculum of all Maryland public schools, a first-of-its-kind partnership in the country for students in grades 4 through 8. This is a good start in an effort to remedy this problem.
But it's long overdue.