A Model for Recruitment and Retention of Minority Students to Teaching: Lessons from a School-University Partnership

Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Ayalon, Aram

School-university partnerships are effective devices for "bringing together institutions that need each other for the solution of tough problems" (Goodlad, 1988, p. 26). One such problem in American education has been the shortage of teachers in urban schools, and, in particular, the shortage of teachers of color. This shortage is becoming more acute as the student population becomes increasingly diverse. Currently, out of three million K-12 educators, only about 13% are people of color (U.S Department of Education, 1996); yet of 47 million school age children in the U.S public schools approximately 39% are linguistic or racial minority children (U.S Department of Education, 2002). This gap between the racial-ethnic makeup of the student body and the teacher workforce has widened as more options have opened up for students of color attending college (Hodgkinson, 2002).

Increasing the number of people of color in the teaching force has many benefits. Teachers of color are likely to provide positive role models to children of color (Clewell & Villegas, 1998), empower children of color to succeed in school (Cummins, 2001; Nieto, 1999), build bridges and a cultural match between the students' homes and the schools (Garcia, 1995; Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1995; Tyrone, 2001), and are more likely to be willing to work in urban settings than white teachers (Darling-Hammond & Sclan, 1996).

This article documents implementation and critically reflects upon the results of a partnership between a predominately white rural college and a multicultural urban school district. The partnership was intended both to recruit high school students of color from an urban school to teacher education and to encourage teacher candidates from a rural college to seek employment in urban areas. Establishing a school-university partnership is a challenging task, and the literature suggests that few school-university collaborations exist. Further, the paths to collaboration among the partnerships that do exist are not well documented (Shive, 1997). Quiocho and Rios (2000) discovered that few K-12 level recruitment

programs have been referred to in the literature. Furthermore, no literature was found on collaborations between rural colleges and urban K-12 schools with the primary goal of recruiting students of color to teaching. The present article describes the main elements of such a program and the most helpful and most challenging aspects of developing a partnership. It also lists lessons learned from this endeavor.

Models for the Recruitment of Minorities to Teacher Education

In order to increase the number of teachers of color it is necessary to increase the pool of students of color who enroll in teacher preparation programs. Villegas and Clewell (1998) list three non-traditional sources of potential candidates - paraprofessionals, junior college students, and middle and high school students. At the high school level, the recruitment programs usually consist of "teacher cadet" programs that include future educators clubs, introductory education college-credit courses, mentoring, and summer programs that offer students rigorous learning experiences accompanied by academic support.

Teacher education programs, however, have been criticized as ineffective in recruiting students of color to teaching and in preparing teachers to work in urban and diverse areas (Boyer & Baptiste, 1996; Darling-Hammond & Sclan, 1996; Haberman, 1996). A number of recruitment efforts in the 1980s provided for such initiatives as enhancing teacher candidates' test-taking skills, establishing offices for the recruitment of minority teacher candidates, and providing them with financial support. Yet, these efforts were described as piecemeal or ineffective because they failed to integrate such efforts into more inclusive programs and to enlarge the pool of minority teacher candidates (Clewell & Villegas, 1998). In the late 1980s, more focused and comprehensive efforts appeared, centering on expanding the pool of teacher candidates of color by targeting both traditional and non-traditional students while providing supportive strategies to increase retention and placement in teaching positions.

In 1988, the Ford Foundation supported an eight-state consortium focusing on recruiting minority paraprofessionals to teaching. The program provided money for tuition, books, and support services (Dandy, 1998). In 1989, the DeWitt Wallace-Readers' Digest Fund launched a more comprehensive national initiative. The initiative targeted four populations: paraprofessionals, returning Peace Corps volunteers, middle school students, and traditional undergraduate students. In reviewing the paraprofessional recruitment efforts, Villegas and Clewell (1998) concluded that strong partnerships between teacher education programs and urban school districts were "instrumental in helping program participants overcome barriers that, unless addressed, could easily have kept participants from becoming fully certified teachers" (p.48). Other studies about recruiting students of color confirmed these findings. Dandy (1998) found that having both the university and the schools assign liaisons to work closely together to find creative solutions to barriers within their institutions was one of the overriding factors contributing to the success of a program for the recruitment of African American paraprofessionals. Similarly, Genzuk and Beca (1998) discovered that a strong collaboration between a university and three school districts in Los Angeles was key to reducing institutional barriers and streamlining an efficient path for training Latino paraeducators to become bilingual teachers.