🎥 Teacher Truth Perspectives: Dr. Britte Haugan Cheng on the Data
At our Teacher Truth Perspectives Launch Party, researcher and Teacher Truth survey lead, Dr. Britte Haugan Cheng, provided an overview of some key findings from our initial work. Read on to learn what crucial truths have been affirmed, reinforced, and elevated by the data we’ve collected so far. We look forward to this addition to the body of scholarly work on the experiences of Black educators being leveraged to improve their working conditions. Learn more at www.teachertruth.org.
We all know the benefits of Black teachers for Black students, which can translate into student learning and higher standardized test scores in reading and math. We also know that there's deeper learning in the classroom that's not well measured by standardized test scores, as well as academic persistence outcomes.
In 2017, a study was conducted that showed that Black children who have at least one Black teacher in third, fourth, or fifth grade are 39% less likely to drop out of high school and 19% more likely to aspire to attend four year college. We know that Black educators have benefits for students of all backgrounds because they identify and disrupt conscious and unconscious racial and cultural biases and more often have an orientation to social justice in their instructional practices. We also know—and this is some of the work by Andre Perry—that the benefits of Black educators extend to neighborhoods and even local economies via community building and sustainability, including housing and land value, etc.
So we know the value of Black teachers in addition to the moral imperative to have Black educators as part of our education system, and—despite this knowledge—we’re facing a recruitment and retention threat. In 2019, Education Trust West conducted a study that showed us that:
more than 250,000 California students are in schools without a teacher of their same race;
over 100,000 students attend a school in California where every teacher is white; and
more than half the schools in California don't have a single Black teacher.
When we consider the moment that we're in--as Dr. Mosely said so beautifully at the beginning of the meeting--we're in this pandemic, and we know from a survey done in March 2021 that 54% of educators surveyed of all ethnic backgrounds said they were considering leaving the profession in the next two years. When we look at the intersection of the pandemic with our recruitment and retention of educators of color, we are really at an inflection point where it's absolutely imperative that we understand and support the experiences of Black educators.
When we look at educators in particular, the experiences of racism are double those in other labor sectors, so we have a very specific and extraordinarily rampant problem that we really must address. In hopes of illuminating some tactics for operating in the context of this problem, we asked our participants what strategies they use to navigate experiences of racism in the workplace? How do they manage in this environment?
The most common strategy that we heard from respondents fell into the category of caring for self—those things that we do to support our own physical and mental health, self-protection strategies, which include participating in support networks and religious and spiritual practices, as well as self-censoring, which refers to practices of shifting verbal language, body language, attire, and so on to de-emphasize differences between oneself and colleagues. The use of self-validation strategies was also reported—having a sense of pride in one's own excellence, but also enforcing boundaries between work and personal life. When we hear about how relational the work of teachers is, drawing those boundaries in order to self-protect seems really counterproductive to being an educator. We also saw that there are a lot of strategies that educators in the classroom are using to navigate issues of race in their workplace, including addressing themes of social justice in their instruction, identifying the roles of Black Americans in historical events for students, and also becoming more familiar with Black scholars and leaders in the field in order to fortify their teaching practices.
These survey findings just scratched the surface; even if you look at the full report, the survey really does just scratch the surface in this space. We really want to suggest that research into the institutional dynamics that reify but then also disrupt patterns of racism in the educational workplace are critical to the functioning of the education system. We need to be doing the work that's being done here this evening, talking about strategies of support and to address these experiences of racism. The strategies we heard about in the survey and that we also hear about here tonight—professional networks; voice in the workplace; instructional supports—are all key. What we really need to be doing is thinking about how to support teachers and educators in using those mechanisms in their day-to-day, which is to say we should be thinking about how to do Teacher Truth in the workplace, more broadly. And we are very, very, very excited to see Teacher Truth go out into the world. And for the role that we at Menlo Education have had in this project and for the role that we might be able to play in the future to support Teacher Truth, we are deeply grateful.
Related Resources:
Teacher Truth Survey Findings: http://www.blackfemaleproject.org/teacher-truth#survey-findings
Article by Andre Perry: https://hechingerreport.org/the-educational-value-of-a-black-teacher/
Article by Andre Perry: https://hechingerreport.org/black-teachers-matter-for-students-and-communities/
2017 survey cited above: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10630/the-long-run-impacts-of-same-race-teachers
2019 survey cited above: https://west.edtrust.org/resource/seen-heard-reflected-a-look-at-californias-teacher-of-color-shortage/