You can’t get blood out of a turnip. —American proverb, I think
The NAACP is threatening a lawsuit charging that public schools in Springfield, Ill., have not complied with the terms of a consent decree filed with a 1976 desegregation order, the State Journal-Register reports.
The decree stipulates that the proportion of African-American teachers in the district’s schools must be on par with the proportion of residents living in the district. As of this year, the proportions are as follows:
- Minorities: 11% of teachers, 51% of students, 25.5% of residents
- African-Americans: 9% of teachers, 38% of students, 18.5% of residents
The source for the school numbers above is the Illinois State Board of Education, and the source for the proportions of residents in the district is the US Census Bureau, the paper reported.
“We want to give (the school district’s minority recruiter) time to work on changes with the new superintendent coming in, but if we don’t see something happening real soon, then we are going to take them back to court,” the State Journal-Register quoted Teresa Haley, the president of the local NAACP chapter, as saying. “Right now, they’re not in compliance, and we can’t keep doing the same old dance.”
Yes, the numbers look bad, but what’s really going on?
Some organizations, such as the National Center for Teacher Quality, have argued that black students achieve at higher levels if they have black teachers. Such a conclusion, of course, has absolutely no data to support it, but NCTQ stands by its claim, which appears to rely on mostly anecdotal evidence. I don’t want to just throw out the idea, but NCTQ’s findings have largely been called into question because of the survey methodology they used to determine the composition and strength of the nation’s teacher education programs. However, other groups say pretty much the same thing. Just last month, in fact, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, issued the following press release:
An Illinois Education Research Council (IERC) study released (on Oct 16) focuses on the racial diversity and academic composition of Illinois’s teachers and the factors that influence the makeup of the state’s teacher corps.
Bradford R. White and Eric J. Lichtenberger, both from the IERC, and Karen J. DeAngelis from the University of Rochester, collaborated on the study and found that several factors contribute to the composition of the state’s teacher corps.
“Research has found that academically skilled teachers have positive impacts on student achievement and racial/ethnic minority teachers have a positive impact on minority student outcomes,” White said. “As a result, there are currently numerous efforts underway to improve the selectivity and the diversity of the teaching force, both nationally and in Illinois.”
The study cites the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), which calls for recruiting candidates that reflect the diversity of the nation’s students. CAEP proposes admission standards for teacher preparation programs to require entering candidates have an average achievement in the top one-third of a national assessment.
“Some evidence suggests that efforts to improve the academic skills of the overall teaching force can have a negative impact on teacher diversity, without a parallel commitment to maintaining such diversity,” White said. “Therefore, our goal in this study is to inform the design of policies and practices to improve the supply of academically skilled, diverse individuals into teaching.”
In order to do this, White notes the researchers conducting the study used a unique, longitudinal state database to track two Illinois high school cohorts from the classes of 2002 and 2003 through college and into the workforce. These students were tracked through five stages in the new teacher supply pipeline:
* College entry
* Enrollment in a four-year college
* Completion of a bachelor’s degree
* Achievement of teacher certification
* Employment as Illinois public school teachers“We examine how each stage in this pipeline affects the composition of new entrants to K-12 public school teaching in Illinois, with particular attention to academic skills and racial/ethnic diversity; two characteristics of the teaching force that are at the forefront of local and national policy concerns,” White said.
The study found that only 3.2 percent of the Illinois public high school students studied became public school teachers by roughly a decade after completing high school.
Another important finding was that teachers from these cohorts were stronger academically, but less racially/ethnically diverse than their high school classmates who did not become teachers.
However, “those who obtained teaching certificates had notably weaker academic qualifications compared to other bachelor’s degree earners,” White noted. “But those who actually became teachers were quite similar academically to non-teaching college graduates.”
The study concluded that the transition from certification to employment was one of the most critical stages in the new teacher pipeline. The researchers were surprised to learn that although one in five bachelor’s degree recipients across all disciplines became certified to teach, less than half of all certified teachers gained employment as a classroom teacher.
Achievement of teacher certification
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to minority teachers entering the profession has been the successful completion of the Praxis exam. Renee Moore, an English teacher at Mississippi Delta Community College and a member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, says minority students often enroll in teacher prep programs but can’t pass the Praxis exam to get the license. “The Praxis itself is a whole issue in the question of diversity and bringing teachers of color into the pipeline because a lot of our teacher candidates get stopped right there,” she said.
In support of this claim, a 2011 report by the Educational Testing Service, titled “Performance and Passing Rate Differences of African American and White Prospective Teachers on Praxis Examinations,” found that African-American first-time test takers had a “significantly lower pass rate than White first-time test-takers” on the Praxis I exams in reading, writing, and math.
I’m saying that while the problem in Springfield may be bad—it certainly shows a huge gap between the minority and African-American student and teacher numbers—it may not be the school system’s fault. If one of the other factors in the pipeline is to blame, such as the reduced ability of minority students to achieve teacher certification or complete a bachelor’s degree, those problems will need to be addressed from organizations outside the Springfield Public School District. A judge can order increased hiring all he wants, but if not enough minority or African-American teacher candidates present themselves for an interview, the problem is bigger than the district itself.
So, when the NAACP says, “When the hiring is left exclusively to the building principals, the building principals do not always use the consent decree as their governance,” as one committee member was quoted as saying, we may be missing the point. Better to find out what the real problem is, address that, and leave the courts alone to do their important job in our communities.
