Education Week - February 17, 2016 - 9

BEYOND BIAS
Countering
Stereotypes
In School
---------------------------------

ABOUT THIS SERIES:

This package is the third
installment in a yearlong
series on efforts to
recognize and overcome
discrimination in schools.

Change Is Hard

---------------------------------

As often happens in higher education, the work of pioneers takes a
while to spread. A handful of Self's
peers at Vanderbilt have embraced
the simulations and are creating
new ones in other content areas and
disciplines. And since 2004, ISU
faculty have had help in rewriting
their courses from Lee's team and
from community partners in the
now five city neighborhoods where
the university places teachers.
Among other elements, each of the
redesigned classes now includes a
relevant clinical component in Chicago. Aspiring Spanish teachers, for
example, often come to city schools
on report card pick-up day and work
as translators for parents and teachers who can't speak one another's
language.
Not all faculty have been receptive, but more have come on board
as they've seen teacher candidates
become more engaged in their work,
according to Lee. There's enough of
a critical mass that his center is now
moving to redesign entire course sequences, such as special education.
Broadly speaking, scholars hail
the innovations.
"That attention to fine detail and
classroom interactions, I think, is
really important for this work, and
it hasn't been done extensively,"
said Thomas Philip, an associate
professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles,
who studies teachers and ideological change.
He warns, though, that as culturally responsive teaching enters the
mainstream, so to speak, it risks
losing its sociopolitical edge. "If you
de-politicize it, culturally responsive
pedagogy is no different than tapping into students' prior knowledge,"
he said.
For practitioners, the work remains challenging. Self recalled one
teacher in the Darius scenario who
asked probing questions, but then
talked for four minutes straight trying to convince him that race wasn't
a factor in the encounter.
On the other hand, Clayton, the
actor who plays Darius, says he's
been giving more of the aspiring
educators the benefit of the doubt-
especially when, after the scenario,
he sees the light dawning for them.
"Some of them come up to me and
tell me later: 'Thank you. I did not
realize I was doing that.' "

THIS WEEK

Coverage of policy efforts to improve
the teaching profession is supported by
a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at
www.joycefdn.org/Programs/Education.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

Articles this week explore new
strategies to help preservice
teachers become more culturally
sensitive and describe black
male teachers' experiences in
a profession that is still mostly
white and female.
COMMENTARY: High school
writing teacher Patty Smith
discusses the importance of
building an LGBT-inclusive school
climate. "You come out because
you can't not," she explains.
www.edweek.org/go/smith

--------------------------------

FIRST INSTALLMENT
Stories in the September package
focus on schools' efforts to root
out discriminatory practices and
revisit Ferguson, Mo., a year after
the shooting death of a black
teenager by a white policeman
sparked days of riots and
protests there.
MULTIMEDIA: Try an online quiz
to test your own biases and
watch middle school students
in a district neighboring
Ferguson discuss what bias
means to them.

-------------------------------SECOND INSTALLMENT

Stories in the October package
explore strategies for expanding
students' access to advanced
coursework, initiatives to buffer
students from the harmful
effects of implicit and explicit
biases, and programs aimed at
bridging cultural divides between
educators and the families of
minority students.
VIDEO: Author Alexandra

Zapruder discusses how
children's accounts of genocide
offer a counterweight to the
dehumanizing effects of bias
and prejudice.
www.edweek.org/go/
zapruder

To see all of the articles and
features in the series, go to:
www.edweek.org/go/bias

Chrissell Rhone moved from New Orleans to his grandmother's home in Picayune, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina.
As a minority on Picayune's mostly white teaching force, he said he thinks about race more often now.

Lone Black Teachers Face Biases, Too
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

where race was an afterthought for
him to one where race is more frequently on his mind.
"I wouldn't say every day, but
much more frequently than it had
ever been when I lived in New Orleans," Rhone said. "I have run
into some problems and situations
[where] I wondered, 'Had I not been
a black man, would it have been
such a problem?' "
The fact that he's among a dwindling demographic, both nationally and close to home, isn't lost on
Rhone. Nationally, black males represent roughly 2 percent of all public school teachers.
"Sometimes we're just overlooked
and sometimes we're just not there,"
he said.

Failing to Keep Pace
America's K-12 schools have
never been more diverse, with nonwhite students now outnumbering
whites, but efforts to diversify the
nation's teaching corps haven't kept
pace. As a group, U.S. teachers remain overwhelmingly white and female-and black men are the most
underrepresented demographic in
the teaching ranks. And surveys
and anecdotal information show
that teachers of color can feel the
sting of bias in schools as easily as
minority students in mostly white
educational environments.
The shortage may be even worse
in places like Picayune that have
historically struggled to attract
nonwhite teachers. In the district,
60 percent of students are white and
34 percent are black.
Even when teachers of color find
work in the classroom, many end up
fleeing in frustration, according to
"The State of Teacher Diversity in
American Education," a 2015 report
from the Albert Shanker Institute.
Nationally, the report says, nonwhite teachers are being hired at a

higher proportional rate than other
teachers, but they're also leaving the
profession at a higher rate.
The research by the Shanker Institute, a think tank supported by
the American Federation of Teachers, raises questions about whether
districts are doing enough to hold
onto nonwhite teachers.
Fueled by his own experience as
an English teacher in New York
City's public schools, Travis Bristol,
a research and policy fellow at the
Stanford Center for Opportunity
Policy in Education, has explored
what it takes to keep minority male
teachers in the classroom.
Bristol and other researchers
studying teacher retention have
landed on some common findings:
Many nonwhite educators feel voiceless and incapable of effecting change
in their schools.
In documenting the experiences of
27 black male teachers in the Boston
public schools during the 2012-13 and
2013-14 school years, Bristol found
that "loners," those who were the
only black male teachers in a school,
more often stayed in their current
school because of favorable working
conditions and school environments,

despite feeling "disconnected from the
mission of their school," a sensation
akin to what nonwhite students experience in schools where they're the
racial minority.
In Boston, the loner teachers
felt frustration because colleagues
often sought their help in dealing
with student discipline issues, but
rarely asked them for advice when
it came to actual teaching. In other
words, they were viewed as behavioral managers first, and teachers
second, Bristol said.
"Many of them felt their colleagues considered them intellectually inferior," he said.
Rhone, for his part, shares stories
of having his suggestions ignored or
discounted by colleagues, pondering the motivations behind personnel decisions and perceived slights,
and serving as a frequent sounding
board for the concerns of black parents and students.
By contrast, "grouper" teachers,
those who worked in the same school
as other nonwhite males, were usually clustered in low-performing
schools and were more likely to leave
their schools or the profession altoPAGE 10 >

Photos by Edmund D. Fountain

be out in the world. They aren't as
closed off as people think they are,"
she said.
Like all STEP-UP participants,
Martin lived with a host family in
the neighborhood where she was
placed during her internship.
"She looked out for me like I was
blood," she said of her host mother.
"I remember coming into my host
mom's house, and she made a little
'hoo-hoo!' noise. And my grandmother used to do the same thing."

Flags fly in front of Picayune's city hall. More than a third of the district's
students-but only a handful of teachers-are black.
EDUCATION WEEK | February 17, 2016 | www.edweek.org | 9

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Education Week - February 17, 2016

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