'Kids do better when they're taught by teachers who look like them. That's just the way it is,' David Kretschmer, an education professor, says. - NBCBLK
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Charles King remembers in his third year teaching a parent called him aside and told him to be more authentic, to let some of his roots show because the black students in that urban Houston school needed to know he was one of them.
It also said that some of the latest research found that assigning a black male student to a black teacher in the third, fourth or fifth grades significantly — nearly 30% — reduced the probability that the child would drop out of high school. It's a statistic of great interest to public school leaders who for decades have searched for ways to improve the graduation rate for minority students and close their achievement gap with white schoolmates.
Kretschmer helps lead the Future Minority Male Teachers Across California Project, which for the last three years has been recruiting, preparing and retaining male teachers of color at the elementary level throughout the state."We need more men of color in American classrooms, period," he said."There is a cultural impact and it's shared. A teacher of color has an easier time understanding the cultural background of the students in their classroom.
Barrett remembers his first encounter with his English teacher, Troy Butler, one of Center's black male teachers."It was my freshman year," Barrett said."I didn't know him, but he came up to me and was like, how are you doing, how's your family? He just kept it real. It was like he just looked at me and he saw me, you know?" Even though Barrett has good relationships with most of his white teachers, it wasn't the same.
Seneca Benjamin, 17, is another one of Butler's students at Center High School. He aspires to become an engineer and said his inspiration to be successful came from watching the four black male teachers he's had since elementary school."I look at someone who looks like me and I see myself. I see that they came from the same place I came from, from the hood, the ghetto, and they are doing something. They are not those guys I see on the news who did a crime," Benjamin said.
The absence of role models of color, Butler said,"creates a certain distance from authority. That can create defiance or can create, even among the teachers, a certain sense of distance that makes them not connect with students. So it can have a lot of unintended consequences for students and staff."
For men, he said, particularly men of color,"being a teacher is not seen as the profession for family support. Right? And so we have to rebrand what it means to be an educator and beyond the monetary aspect." "When they see themselves reflected in certain professions then they tend to think, 'Hey I want to do that, or I think I can do that.' Versus if you never really had teachers of color it is never something that crosses your mind as something that you would want to do."The KCK, Raytown, North Kansas City and Lee's Summit school districts have launched grow-your-own teacher programs that direct high school students toward the profession.
African American teachers in Lee's Summit, including one of the 11 black male teachers in the district, are working on recruiting. The KCK district is partnering with Kansas State University, University of Kansas and MidAmerica Nazarene University to place new teaching graduates in KCK classrooms. It's paying off, Foust said. Two young men of color — one black and one Hispanic — from MidAmerica Nazarene have just started with the district.
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