Clearing a Path for Teacher Diversity

NEA Today, Feb 2005 by Kochuk, Nancy

A Nevada affiliate makes strides with novel recruitment effort, while NEA and the Tom Joyner Foundation start scholarship program.

Like a lot of school districts across America, Clark County in Nevada has plenty of students of color-and not many teachers who look like them. But unlike in many other places, NEA leaders there have a plan to fix the disparity.

And they're not looking far.

Prospective teachers already can be found in local classrooms: More than half of students in Clark County are non-white-and a partnership between the Clark County Education Association Community Foundation, Nevada State College, and the school district hopes to tap the most highly motivated among them to become tomorrow's educators.

The Student to Teacher Enlistment Project, or STEP, is offering free college credit classes this year to 150 high school juniors; who want to become educators. The students take courses at the high schools so they can remain with their peers and participate in high school activities. But by the time they receive their high school diplomas, these selected students will have completed about a third of their college coursework and can transfer to Nevada State College, where they'll continue to have their tuition and books paid for by the Foundation.

The only hitch: they have to commit to return to Clark County classrooms as teachers once they graduate.

It's this kind of innovative program, says NEA President Reg Weaver, that is critical to getting more minority teachers in the pipeline. For years, Weaver has been promoting the message that the teaching force must be not only well-prepared but also ethnically diverse. And for good reason.

Today nearly 40 percent of national public school children are minorities, but just 11 percent of the teachers are. Indeed, more than a third of America's public schools have no person of color on staff at all.

It's a trend Weaver is hoping can be reversed with model programs such as Nevada's-as well as through a new joint program of NEA and the Tom Joyner Foundation, whose chair is nationally syndicated radio personality and philanthropist Tom Joyner. The latter partnership, announced last month, is aimed at keeping more minority teachers in the classroom by helping them boost their qualifications and complete their teacher certification (see "New Help for Minority Teachers").

"With public schools redoubling their commitment to closing achievement gaps and ensuring that all teachers are highly qualified," Weaver notes, "recruiting and retaining more teachers of color can be crucial to our success in these areas."

That notion was affirmed in a recent report by the National Collaborative on Diversity in the Teaching Force, a group of education organizations of which NEA is a part. In the report the Collaborative analyzed the relationships among educational opportunity, educational achievement teacher diversity, and teacher quality. It found that teachers of color have higher performance expectations for minority kids and that students of color tend to perform better-academically, personally, and socially-when taught by teachers from their own ethnic qroups.

NEA and its partners in the Collaborative say they are making it a priority to increase the recruitment and retention of teachers of diverse backgrounds. But Weaver notes it will also require states and school districts developing more programs that support teachers of color both in the pipeline and in the classroom. Which is why the Nevada program, he says, is such a groundbreaking model.

Because the scholarships begin in high school, leaders there believe the program will likely attract students who might never have considered college as an option. Already some 90 percent of the students in this first STEP class are first-generation college students, reports John Jasonek, executive director of the Clark County Education Association Community Foundation. "Clearly, we're breaking cycles here."

-NANCY KOCHUK