The disappearing black teacher

Ebony, Jan, 1989 by Charles Whitaker

The Disappearing Black Teacher

WELL before most parents begin to suspect such things, Nora Brooks Blakely's parents knew that she was destined to become a teacher. A precociously bright child, Nora began preparing for her future at age three by marshaling the children of her South Side Chicago neighborhood into her make-believe schoolhouse for daily lessons. By age 20, when she earned a bachelor's degree in education from the University of Illinois, there was little doubt in anyone's mind--least of all Nora's--that she would spend the rest of her life surrounded by chalkboards and cherubs. "I assumed that I was going to be teaching until they rolled me out of the classroom in a wheelchair," she says.

But the reality of life in an urban school system proved to be unsettling. Discipline problems, chronically underachieving students, and an indifferent administration dimmed Ms. Blakely's enthusiasm for a long career in education. After eight years of teaching upper level elementary school pupils in a Chicago public school, she called it quits, and now directs her own children's theater company, Chocolate Chips

"It just got to be an overwhelming drain," she says of her years in the classroom. "Teachers were expected to be prison guards, secretaries and social workers. You got no respect or support from either parents or the administration. And when you're working with eighth graders whose reading scores ranged from the fifth-grade level down to first grade, you don't get those blinding success stories that make you forget about all the negatives."

Unfortunately, Ms. Blakely's is not an isolated case. More and more of the nation's talented Black teachers are abandoning careers in education. At the same time, increasing numbers of Black college students -- daunted by the low pay and poor working conditions -- are also turning their backs on teaching as a career option. To make matters worse, many states have instituted standardized licensing exams that have all but driven out many young, Black aspiring teachers.

As a result, Black classroom teachers are becoming a scarce educational resource. It is a frightening trend, and recent studies suggest that should it go unchecked, its effect on American education could be devastating.

Statistics bring this pending crisis into dramatic focus. Presently, Black children constitute more than 16 percent of the population of the nation's elementary and secondary public schools, according to a 1987 survey by the National Education Association. Yet, only 6.9 percent of the country's public shool teachers are Black. The survey also suggested that at the current rate of population growth and minority teacher attrition, Blacks may make up more than 40 percent of the children in public schools by the year 2000, while constituting less than five percent of the teaching force.

Adding to the problem is the rising rate of mass defections by Black teachers already in the field. A national survey conducted by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in 1988 noted that 41 percent of the Black and Hispanic teachers polled stated that they would leave teaching in the next five years, compared with only 25 percent of the White teachers who said they planned to leave the field.

Why is it that teaching -- once the mainstay of the Black middle class -- has lost its appeal as a career choice? The reasons are varied, and not entirely negative, many say.

One of the greatest drains on the minority teaching pool has been the windows of opportunity that have opened for Blacks in other, higher-paying fields. "When I came into teaching in the '60s, education was the province of women and minorities," says Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Association. "But as these opportunities have opened up in business and private in dustry, many of the talented people who may have gone into teaching were directed elsewhere."

It is the steering of academically talented students away from careers in education that continues to make many in the field bristle. "There often is this feeling in the Black community that if a student is bright, he or she is somehow too good to be a teacher," says Dr. Elaine P. Witty, dean of the school of education at Norfolk State University in Virginia. "The community will rain praise on students who say they are in engineering or pre-med programs, but the student who is in education doesn't get that kind of encouragement."

Joyce Nelson, 21, a senior at Grambling State University in Louisiana, says that when she told her high school teachers that she was interested in a career in education they were dumb-founded. "They all wanted to know why such a good student would want to be a teacher," she says. "Even now, people give me a puzzled look when I tell them I'm in education."

Part of the reason for the quizzical looks is the tarnished reputation teaching has developed. While it was never considered an occupation in which one could make a fortune, teaching paid livable wages and, in most corners of the country, was considered a highly respectable profession.