Maureen Downey's Learning Curve: Black men as teachers

Filmmaker Spike Lee wants poor black kids to realize that there are more career choices out there than sports, rap or the corner.

“Our vision is so narrow,” he said. “Black children have to see more options.”

Lee joined U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Congressman John Lewis and other leaders last week at Morehouse College, the filmmaker’s alma mater, to urge students to broaden their options to include teaching. Today, less than 2 percent of the nation’s teachers are black males.

In a phone interview prior to his Morehouse town hall meeting, Duncan said the nation’s teacher work force does not reflect the diversity of its students when only one in 50 teachers is a black male.

“This is a national problem,” he said, “and one in which most schools of education have not shown leadership or foresight.”

So, Duncan has been traveling the nation to appeal to students of color “to consider coming back to the community and making a difference by becoming a teacher.”

The problem is that it’s far more enticing for black students — and all students — to dream about coming to New York and becoming Spike Lee.

Consider Morehouse, which expects about 500 students to graduate this year.

Of that number, only six will graduate with majors or minors in education.

In talking to Duncan, I relayed the complaints of a woman married to a black male teacher who told me about the stress on her husband to not only raise academic performance of his students, but to be a role model to the many fatherless boys in his school.

Isn’t that asking too much of a black male teacher, to teach boys algebraic equations and how to be a good and decent man?

“It wouldn’t surprise me if her husband was the only black male in that school,” said Duncan. “We have to make this much more the norm. We need everybody to step up and help. We need more men of color in our schools, especially at the elementary schools.”

One of the long-standing challenges that the Morehouse panel addressed was how to get bright college students to step up when they are well aware of the low pay and the lack of prestige in teaching.

And now, under new accountability measures, America’s classrooms are far more pressurized environments, toxic according to some teachers. With the prospect of being evaluated and paid on the basis of how well their students perform, Georgia teachers will face even greater pressures in the future.

(The most visible proponent of performance standards and pay for teachers, former Washington, D.C., chancellor Michelle Rhee, meets this week with Gov. Nathan Deal and then with the House Education Committee.)

Duncan acknowledged the challenges of teaching, telling the 500-person audience, “I think teachers are underpaid and undervalued in our country today.”

But he reassured students that teacher pay systems will change to highlight and reward excellence, citing a few performance pay programs around the country that enable top teachers to earn six figures.

While teaching jobs may be scarce now, Duncan promised the students that positions will open up.

A million of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are at or near retirement, he said, and the time will come soon when schools will be hiring 100,000 to 200,000 new teachers a year. He also talked up the Income-Based Repayment, which forgives eligible federal student loans for teachers after 10 years of payments and employment.

Lee told the students that not every student can or should be a business major. Nor can everyone be in the spotlight, Lee noted, saying that some people perform their magic behind the scenes.

He emphasized the power of teachers to change lives, recognizing two of his former college professors in the front row for encouraging him in film and writing.

Lee reminded the audience that at one time in American history it was a crime to teach black slaves to read and write. “If you were caught, you could be whipped, castrated or hung. And if the massa was having a bad day, it could be all three,” he said.