#hiremoreteachers

[progressiveparty]

Hire More Black Teachers

We have a teacher shortage crisis that we have got to address. It is unacceptable that there were 110,000 public school teaching vacancies last year. It is morally unacceptable and counter productive to the future of our country that teachers in America are paid inadequate wages. If we are going to have a strong education system in America our teachers must be the highest, not the lowest, paid in the industrialized world. Join us now.

White teachers disproportionately discipline black students, and lack the rapport that a black teacher could have with their students of color. Data showing black children in schools nationwide are disciplined more than other kids has been available for years, but this disgrace is still making headlines. This includes a recent article from New Jersey outlet NJ.com noting the disproportionate disciplining of black children in the state’s public schools. According to the Civil Rights Data Collection , during the 2013-2014 school year (the most recent state data available), black students made up only 16 percent of New Jersey’s student population but represented 35 percent of all students with an in-school suspension, 39 percent of all students with one out-of-school suspension, 50 percent of all students with more than one out-of-school suspension, and 37 percent of all school expulsions. These percentages are higher than the national statistics. To address the racial disparity in school discipline practices, the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee has advanced a bill to “create a ten-person task force to ‘analyze the effectiveness’ of the status quo in school discipline and determine whether they were contributing to racial imbalance.” Black students are more often than not without a black teacher despite the research showing the benefits of to all students of having teachers of color. What they are likely to find is what has already been discovered by other such inquiries: that black children are disciplined more than others because of zero-tolerance policies , a lack of school counselors , and an increase in police presence at schools. One way schools might reduce the disproportionate discipline of black students, and other students of color is by hiring more Black teachers. As a black man and former classroom teacher of black and Latinx students in the high-poverty city of Camden, New Jersey, I This Piece Originally Appeared in progressive.org Read the full article