There once was a time when many children wanted to grow up to be teachers. More often than not, the reason for this vocational choice was because of the experience a person had with a teacher or teachers in their own childhood. Coupled with a sense of wanting to serve their community, teaching in the same school, neighborhood, or school system where a person grew up was once part of a norm. That norm, which is quickly fading away across the country, is more acutely felt in black communities. Mother Jones has done a rather thoughtful piece on that vocational choice and what it looks like nowadays—particularly in the Philadelphia area, where the number of Black teachers “declined by 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012.”
Many of these departures came as part of mass layoffs and closings in schools with low test scores, a policy promoted with federal and state dollars since 2002. In Chicago, 49 out of about 500 schools were closed in 2013, and in Washington, DC, 38 out of 111 schools have been shuttered since 2008. And since 2002, 140 out of roughly 1,800 New York City schools have closed. In each of the nine cities the Albert Shanker Institute studied, a higher percentage of black teachers were laid off or quit than Latino or white educators. Nationwide, according to the federal Department of Education, African Americans made up 6.8 percent of the teaching workforce in the 2011-12 school year, down from 8.3 percent in 1990. (Nearly 83 percent of the teaching workforce in 2011 was white, down slightly from 1990.)
In all, that means 26,000 African American teachers have disappeared from the nation's public schools—even as the overall teaching workforce has increased by 134,000. Countless black principals, coaches, cafeteria workers, nurses, and counselors have also been displaced—all in the name of raising achievement among black students.