Education Week - June 3, 2019 - 17

Thousands of Black
Educators Lost Jobs
After Brown v. Board
By Madeline Will
Sixty-five years ago last month,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
racial segregation of children in
public schools was unconstitutional.
That decision for the first time
afforded black children access to
the same educational opportunities
as white children. Although many
schools remain de facto racially segregated today, the decision is still
heralded as one of the country's most
significant milestones for civil rights.
But Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka also had an unintended
consequence, the effects of which
are still felt today: It caused the
dismissal, demotion, or forced resignation of many experienced, highly
credentialed black educators who
staffed black-only schools. Tens of
thousands of black teachers and
principals lost their jobs as white
superintendents began to integrate
schools but balked at putting black
educators in positions of authority
over white teachers or students.
For instance, in 1953, one year before the Supreme Court decision in
Brown, teacher Darla Buchanan received a letter from the Topeka, Kan.,
superintendent, Wendell Godwin,
telling her that her teaching services
would no longer be needed: "The majority of people in Topeka will not
want to employ Negro teachers next
year for white children."
Shortly after the Brown decision,
the Moberly, Mo., school district
closed a segregated black school,
which led to the dismissal of 11 certified black teachers, including at
least one who had a Ph.D. Some of
the white teachers in the district who
kept their jobs had less experience or
fewer college credits than the black
teachers who were dismissed, according to court documents. Seven of
the dismissed black teachers sued,
claiming they lost their jobs because
of their race. The courts sided with
the district, and the Supreme Court
declined to hear the case.
In the book The Lost Education of
Horace Tate, author Vanessa Siddle
Walker tells the story of a black
man in north Georgia who had been
a principal for 14 years. Once the
district began to integrate, administrators transferred half the principal's students and half his teachers
and docked $3,000 from his salary.
Eventually, the principal lost all his
students and was transferred to
the superintendent's building. He
was given a windowless room in the
attic as an office-where he turned
in his resignation, humiliated.
Those types of stories were common. Today, many scholars say the
persistent lack of black teachers in
the profession can be traced to the
aftermath of the Brown decision.
"We decimated the black principal and teacher pipeline and we've

never rectified that," said Leslie
Fenwick, the dean emeritus and a
professor at the Howard University
School of Education. "It is the unfinished promise of Brown that we
have not integrated our faculty and
school leadership."
Prior to Brown, in the 17 states
that had segregated school systems,
35 percent to 50 percent of the teaching force was black, said Fenwick,
who has researched the displacement
of black educators for her upcoming
book, Jim Crow's Pink Slip: Public
Policy and the Near Decimation of
Black Educational Leadership After
Brown.
Now, no state has anywhere close
to those percentages of black teachers or principals, she said. According to the most recent federal data,
about 7 percent of public school
teachers and 11 percent of public
school principals are black.
"Not having these models of intellectual authority and leadership in
schools is detrimental to children,"
Fenwick said. "All children deserve
to have diverse models of intellectual authority in the classroom via
their teacher or diverse models of
leadership in schools."

'What We Lost'
Before Brown, the segregated
black schools were under-resourced
and underfunded compared with
the white schools. In some places,
black students were forced to travel
long distances to school without provided transportation. Black teachers were often paid less than their
counterparts in white schools, and
they taught with outdated textbooks
that were handed down from white
schools in their district. Some of the
school buildings black children attended were crumbling and had inadequate heating and cooling systems.
Despite those challenges, most of
the black teachers and principals in
segregated schools pre-Brown had
better credentials than white educators, Fenwick said.
Though they were barred from attending many Southern, segregated
institutions of higher education,
many black educators received tuition scholarships to earn master's
and doctorate degrees at integrated
institutions like Columbia University, University of Michigan, and
New York University, she said.
"We lost these credentialed, qualified people who had experienced
integration in educational environments, who had played by the
rules and come back [to teach in the
South]," Fenwick said.
Black educators were advocates
for students, said Walker, a professor of African-American educational
studies at Emory University in Atlanta, who researched the records of
black educators during this period.

65 years later, schools still feeling effects

Teacher Ella J. Rice talks to one of her pupils, all of whom are white, in a 3rd grade classroom at Draper Elementary
School in southeast Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13, 1954. It was the first day the school system's staff and students
were not segregated. Rice was the only black teacher in the school at the time.

An entire network of black educators organized efforts to desegregate
schools and provide equal access to
transportation and school resources,
even though they knew their efforts
could result in job loss and even
threats of violence, said Walker, who
is also the president of the American
Educational Research Association.
And inside the classrooms of segregated schools, there was a focus on
civics and democratic ideals. Black
children were taught to aspire to
greater things than the status quo
of segregation, Walker said.
"They taught these children not to
believe the wider societal messages
but to really believe they could be
full participants in American democracy," she said.
That purposeful education-including strong interpersonal relationships between teachers and
black students-went away when
black schools were closed and "you
got rid of the people who knew how
to do it," Walker said.
"The losses were so much greater
than just the individual teachers,"
she said. "It matters that they lost
their jobs, but the loss we need to
contend with in this era is so much
broader. ... We need to reclaim that
additive model of what it means to
educate all children."
A growing body of research has
found that black students benefit
from having a black teacher, both
academically and socially. Black students are more likely to both graduate from high school and enroll in college when they have had at least one
black teacher in elementary school.
What's more, black students are
more likely to be placed in gifted
education programs if they have
a black teacher and are less likely
to be suspended, expelled, or given
detention when taught by a black
teachers. Research has found that
black teachers have higher expectations for black students.
"I think in general, black students
benefit from working with teachers who deeply understand and
are invested in their educational
progress and success," said Rich
Milner, a professor of education at
Vanderbilt University. "With the

decline of teachers post-Brown, we
see that these students are often underserved and are not supported in
ways that would be advantageous to
their academic and social success."

A Continued Diversity Gap
Increasing teacher diversity has
been a talking point for some time
now, especially since about half of
public school students are nonwhite.
During the past 30 years, the number of nonwhite teachers has gone
up faster than the number of white
teachers, said Richard Ingersoll, a
professor of education and sociology
at the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education.
However, that growth has been
driven by a significant increase
of Hispanic and Asian-American
teachers. The number of black teachers has increased by about 34 percent over the past three decades-
a smaller increase than any other
group of teachers, except for Native
American teachers (whose numbers
have decreased over that time).
Moreover, black teachers are not
evenly distributed across jobs. According to 2012 federal data, half of
black teachers work in urban public
schools, while 27 percent work in
suburban schools. Nearly 70 percent
of black teachers teach in high-poverty schools, Ingersoll said, and only
1 percent of black teachers work in
predominately white schools.
One barrier to recruiting more
diverse candidates into the profession is the licensing test that states
require prospective teachers to
take. Black and Latino candidates
have lower scores on average on
certification tests than their white
and Asian-American counterparts.
Some experts attribute that discrepancy to a lack of strong preparation and test anxiety. (Licensure
exams are often expensive to take
and retake, an additional burden.)
Linda Tillman, a professor emerita of educational leadership in the
School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, said after the Brown decision,
standardized tests were used to
"deny black educators the opportu-

nity to teach." States implemented
certification measures that led to
black teachers being fired or to
school districts not renewing their
contracts, she said. Between 1984
and 1989, about 21,500 black teachers were displaced because of new
requirements for teacher education
programs and certification, she said.
Another challenge for the persistent teacher-diversity gap is retention: Black teachers are more likely
than their white peers to quit teaching. Vanderbilt's Milner attributes
that in part to the additional responsibilities that are often placed
on black educators' shoulders-for
instance, many black teachers report
being pigeonholed as disciplinarians.
Another possible reason for the
continued diversity gap is that children of teachers are more likely to
go into teaching themselves, according to a recent study from American University. Overall, children
whose mothers were teachers were
9 percentage points more likely to
become teachers than other children. That holds true for both the
sons and daughters of white female
teachers and the daughters of black
female teachers.
Sixty-five years after Brown,
Walker said she hopes focus is renewed on both diversifying the teaching ranks and embracing the rich
pedagogy and practices that were
common among black teachers in
segregated schools.
The legacy of those black educators
exists in schools today. Pamela Benford, a regional superintendent for the
DeKalb County district near Atlanta,
was mentored by her former principal, who grew up in the pre-Brown
era of segregated schools and carried
the pedagogical practices of those
schools into her own instruction.
"I think the biggest thing I learned
from her was the way she encouraged
and modeled ... what it means to be
student-centered," Benford said.
Benford's principal had high standards for her students and employees, but it all came down to making
sure children had everything they
needed to succeed, she said.
"I saw her exemplify that," she said,
"and I did strive to be like her."

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