Research has shown that minority students perform better when they have minority role models as their teachers, so recruiting them is an issue of educational reform.   According to U.S. Education Department “More than half of the students in American public schools are minorities, but the teaching force is still 80% white” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 25, 2019).

Imagine yourself as minority college student today viewing the a vibrant job market and hoping to exceed the economic level of your parents. As you survey the headlines, you notice that teachers in four states (Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Kentucky) are striking for more pay and better working conditions [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/30/teachers-striking-oklahoma-west-virginia-arizona-kentucky/472742002/]. 

You read that the current Secretary of Education has no professional education background and promotes school choice as a means to support charter schools, which reside in a lower tier for teachers’ salaries. “In a January 2018 speech, DeVos said the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) found that ’60 percent of its teachers reported having moderate to no influence over the content and skills taught in their own classrooms.’ In response, AFT noted that in the same survey of around 5,000 educators, 86% felt DeVos had disrespected them.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_DeVos]

What are the incentives for a competitive minority undergraduate to enter the teaching profession in an excellent job market? How will a teaching job raise the economic level of a middle class minority student in today’s economy? Why would this student want to take a job where professional respect is an issue?

I taught future secondary teachers for twenty years in a university with Michigan’s highest percentage of African American students and the largest number of education graduates. To our dismay, we oversaw the decline of minority teaching candidates. By the time I retired in 2018 less than 1% of my students was black.  It is hard to know why we couldn’t recruit black students in the most diverse four-year university in the state, but we had our suspicions.

Teachers’ salaries have never been competitive with other professions, but now we have evidence of a continued decline over the past twenty years. The Economic Policy Institute has documented the salary decline compared with other college graduates

• Average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted for inflation) decreased $27 from 1996 to 2017, from $1,164 to $1,137 (in 2017 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,339 to $1,476 over this period.
• For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression-adjusted for education, experience, and other factors known to affect earnings) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty was 1.8 percent in 1994, grew to 4.3 percent in 1996, and reached a record 18.7 percent in 2017. https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-gap-2018/

To her credit Senator Kamala Harris has made recruiting African-American teachers with college scholarships part of her platform, but she is ignoring the elephant in the room. Minorities of the middle class in this country want a more lucrative career for their children.  They want them to find respect in a profession when they graduate.  They can see the climate for public education is poor and other issues such as health care and the infrastructure are dominating the Presidential campaign.  There is little hope for recruiting minorities to teaching until the salaries, benefits, and the respect for the profession improves.

Really, there is no mystery to the absence of minorities in education. Teachers are known for working for less pay and respect, but that is a big ask for a minority student, whose family has been underpaid and under-respected. It is a big ask for anyone who wants to raise a family in today’s economy.  It is a big ask for an aging population to support those salaries and benefits with their taxes.  As a retired teacher and professor, I am among them.

But if you want the teaching profession to be respectable and attractive to bright minority graduates, you will have to reward them at least as much as their fellow graduates and pay the taxes and elect a school board that will support them. That is the big ask to make America great in public education, and the only answer to minority recruitment of teachers.