“We lost a significant number in the teaching force” after that decision, said Denise Taliaferro Baszile, director of diversity affairs at Miami University’s School of Education, Health and Society, “because they didn’t want black teachers in a desegregated public school.”
A JournalNews analysis of teacher demographic data over the last decade shows that the percentages of teachers of color are dwindling at local schools, while the percentage of students of color has risen or remained steady.
School officials in Hamilton and Middletown have been criticized by leaders in the black community for not actively recruiting black teachers.
In Hamilton City Schools, the percentage of black students has remained a steady 10.7 percent since the 2001-02 school year, while the percentage of black teachers has dropped from 5.2 percent to less than 2 percent.
The data from Middletown is not as strikingly different as both black teachers and student percentages have dropped by a half a percentage point, but the discrepancy has remained steady: The percentage of black students is nearly three times that of black teachers.
The most notable difference can be seen in Lakota and Fairfield schools.
In Lakota, the number of black students has doubled from 860 in 2002 to more than 1,700 students (10 percent of the school’s population) in 2011, the latest Ohio School Report Card number. The number of black teachers has risen from six to 10 in that time, representing only 1.1 percent of the teaching force.
Comparably, Fairfield City Schools reported a 6.3 percent black student population in 2001-02 and a 13.9 percent population in 2010-11. Black teachers, however, represent only 1.6 percent of the teaching staff.
School officials say that they’re doing what they can to rectify the discrepancy, acknowledging the importance of having a teaching staff as diverse as the student body, but there simply aren’t enough candidates of color to bring those numbers up, and that schools can’t afford salaries to be competitive with other professions, especially in math and science where the private work force’s starting salaries can be two or three times higher.
“It’s not that we’re not looking for qualified applicants, but it’s just hard for us to find them,” said Larry Bowling, president of the Hamilton Board of Education. “Our charge to the staff is to get the most qualified applicants, and we try to be color neutral on that.”
District spokeswoman Joni Copas reported that of the 5,677 applications in the database of resumes the district draws from, 360 indicated a minority demographic. Once screened for grade point average, school activities and other qualifications, however, those have not been able to make the cut.
Last year, the district hired 56 teachers and certified support staff, this year 27, and of those only one school psychologist was a minority. He is Hispanic.
Last year, Middletown hired 19 new teachers. Two were minorities, said director of human resources Lisa Lowery.
Fairfield spokeswoman Gina Gentry-Fletcher said Fairfield recently hired five new teachers, three of them minority.
Fairfield is the only district contacted for this story that reports a formal, concerted effort to recruit and retain minority teachers, part of the district’s diversity plan adopted last year.
The 15-page plan outlines short-term and long-term strategies for accomplishing a number of diversity goals regarding both students and staff, including to “recruit, hire, retain teachers, administrators, and staff of color; increase and improve cultural competency of all teachers, administrators, and staff; improve communication with community regarding diversity initiatives; and develop student engagement and learning opportunities regarding diversity.”
There seems to be a disconnect between minorities and colleges’ teacher education tracks. “We don’t really have a clear understanding of the many issues that contribute to the low enrollment of minorities in teacher education programs,” Baszile said. “The pattern I’m seeing is that a lot of students of color are going for careers in business and the hard sciences.
“When you ask a lot of students in (teacher education programs) why they want to be a teacher, it almost always goes back to one teacher who had an impact on them, or they’re trying to rectify a problem they saw with their own education.”
“Teachers liked school” when they were students, Moore said, “and they had positive relationships with their teachers. You’re not going to find a teacher who didn’t have a good K-12 experience.”
The education research and Moore’s own experience at Hamilton show that for minorities, having minority teachers correlates to them being more engaged and successful in their education.
“I’m the only minority in this building who teaches standard curriculum material, and it’s been that way for a long time,” he said. “My experience is that the impact is not just about what I do in the classroom, but about the side conversations I have, whether a student comes to me or if I pull them aside in the hallway to have their ear.
“There are other people in the building who are able to communicate these things, but a lot of it comes to me, and it’s not just something about me, but what I represent in a larger context. Kids will seek out someone out, so if they haven’t had a chance to interact and connect with someone else, they will go looking for someone who is like us.
“I know we need some more (diverse) faces, because kids look for that,” he said.
Ellen Hill, Miami University’s director of clinical experiences, said because teacher education candidates have to be motivated by something other than money, one long-term way to increase diversity in a district is to “grow your own” with teacher academies such as the ones in place in Hamilton and Middletown.
“Teachers tend to go to work in districts where they feel more comfortable,” she said, “so a lot of them go back to the schools they came from.”
Bowling agreed, saying, “For us to be successful at hiring minority teachers, there has to be some connection to Hamilton. We do pretty well when somebody already knows about us.”
In Hamilton’s Teacher Academy class of 2012, there were two graduates of color, but only Bobby Perry is planning to continue his teacher training, at Ohio University, where he wants to study to be either a fifth-grade teacher or a ninth-grade math teacher.
“I wasn’t a good student when I first started school,” he said, “but when I got to the fifth grade, I had a teacher who helped me take care of my behavior problems and take control of my education.”
But he never considered becoming an educator himself until the ninth grade, when a teacher told him that enrolling in the Teacher Academy would be good for him. Even so, it wasn’t until he actually got out into the schools to work with younger kids that he set his goal.
And although he never had a black teacher, he believes that his education would have been enhanced by one.
“Some teachers were probably holding back, moving on to someone else when I was having trouble,” he said. “I think an African-American teacher might have pushed me to be more a part of the classroom.”
Having a diverse teacher population not only provides role models and a positive educational experience for minority students, but the whole system benefits, Baszile said, because of the growing diversity in society as a whole; white students can use diverse role models as well.
“You can’t learn how to deal with many situations in a culturally diverse society from a book,” she said. “Even our suburban communities are becoming more diverse, so the more diversity we have in our teachers, the better we can prepare students for the world.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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