Education leaders and researchers discussed the vast disparities in the number of educators of color and potential ways to help recruit them during a panel of the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) Equity Assistance Center-South’s (EAC-South) Educational Equity Indicators Professional Learning Series.
Sharif El-Mekki
This second session of the “How to Improve Educator Recruitment and Retention: Stories from the South” series took virtually on Tuesday.
The U.S. is facing a severe shortage of teachers, and the need is particularly present for certain populations of color, said Dr. Donna Elam, senior adviser for EAC-S.
"The need for good teachers is even more dire for certain populations,” said Elam. “More than 50% of students in U.S. public schools are children of color, yet only about 20% of teachers are people of color. Most Black students in the U.S. attend 13 years of public school without having a single Black teacher."
Raymond Pierce, President and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation has said that the U.S. needs 280,000 more Black teachers in public schools to be proportional to the number of Black students.
Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED), said that while less than 2% of public-school teachers are Black men, teaching was the top career choice for Black men who attended HBCUs and have a college degree.
“There are Black men who are interested,” El-Mekki said. “So how do we get more of them into college, particularly HBCUs, where they express an interest in becoming teachers?"
