More Than an Ally. Michael L. Boucher Jr.
2017). That is slightly down from 82 percent in the last survey in 2012. About 77 percent of teachers are women. In pre-K through sixth-grade schools, nearly 90 percent are women; in high schools, women make up around 66 percent. Thus, it is safe to say that most teachers are White women. Nine percent of teachers identify as Hispanic, slightly up from 2012, and the 7 percent of teachers who identify as Black has not changed in the last seven years.
In 1972, the first year the U.S. Department of Education collected demographic data for the newly desegregated schools, students of color accounted for 22 percent of total enrollments, and teachers of color constituted 12 percent of the teaching force, a ten-percentage-point gap between the two groups. A decade later, the disparity had grown to seventeen percentage points, with students of color making up 27 percent of total enrollments and teachers of color accounting for only 10 percent of the teaching workforce (p. 283). In 2017, students of color made up 40.6 percent of the total U.S. public school population, and in the largest cities, a much higher percentage (Ingersoll & May, 2011; Musu-Gillette, de Brey, McFarland, Hussar, & Sonnenberg, 2017). Given the overwhelming percentage of teachers who are White, it is not uncommon that students of color will spend their entire day taught by White teachers. This fact makes the ideology, behavior, and position of White teachers a priority if we are to structure schools to meet the needs of all students.
The Quick Fix?
Systems and their leaders look for quick fixes to intractable problems. One answer put forth to make schools more diverse and to increase the buy-in of students of color is to bring more teachers of color into the classroom. Education leaders work to bring new teachers from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds into the profession, but their efforts have not been enough. Once teachers of color are in schools, they face challenges from students and adults, and schools of education are often not ready to aid teacher candidates of color in dealing with the micro- and macroaggressions that teachers of color experience.
Research has indicated that Black students who have even one Black teacher in their[1] schooling experience in low-income schools have 29 percent greater interest in school and are 39 percent less likely to drop out before completing high school (Gershenson, Hart, Lindsay, & Papageorge, 2017). But as Milner (2006) explained, having a Black teacher in the classroom is not necessarily the panacea it is often hoped to be unless they are also culturally competent and refuse to engage in deficit models. Also, the assumption that Black students are merely in need of role models is also insufficient and again assumes no responsibility on the part of White teachers (Brown, 2012; Milner, 2006; Williamson, 2011).
It is imperative to approach the problem of student disenfranchisement from as many angles as possible. As the number of students of color continues to outpace the pool of teachers of color, increasing the number of teachers of color in our schools is an important aspirational goal (Stotko, Ingram, & Beaty-O’Ferrall, 2007; Villegas, Strom, & Lucas, 2012). However, White teachers are the predominant demographic of professionals working in schools, and there will not be enough teachers of color to change that experience for many years (Milner, 2006). So, it is crucial that these White teachers be the ones who work to break the structures that impede students of color (Sleeter, 2001b). Schools need more counselors. They need more and better multicultural curricula, more teachers of color, and more administrators of color, but if White teachers are not part of the changes, they will not be implemented in time to catch this generation.
Is the New Generation of Teachers the Same as the Old Generation?
Scholars have noted that White teacher candidates wrap deeply held racism in the language of care, believing that students of color do not value education and need to be motivated to learn with external reward systems like prizes, candy, or money. Often these preconceived deficit notions range from a clinical model of pathology, to wholesale condemnation of students’ culture, to an appeal that students should learn whiteness as a way to success (Osei-Kofi, 2005; Payne, 2013; Valencia, 2010). When candidates then go into the field, these stereotypes are often reinforced through teacher talk, an incomplete understanding of what they are seeing in classrooms, and a lack of awareness of their own biases (Sleeter, 2001b).
The cycle is perpetuated from candidacy to teaching to mentoring, and even as teachers join the professorate in schools of education, many still cling to their deficit models and seek to help candidates get “good placements,” meaning in wealthy White schools in the suburbs, and do not ask the larger questions about oppressive structures (see Mervosh, 2019).
As Valencia (2010) clarified, “deficit thinking typically offers a description of behavior in pathological or dysfunctional ways—referring to deficits, deficiencies, limitations, or shortcomings in individuals, families, and cultures” (p. 14). These models are not only the default for many teachers and teacher candidates, but they also blame students for a lack of success in the classroom (Boucher & Helfenbein, 2015; Gorski, 2006; Osei-Kofi, 2005).
According to Eslinger (2013), teachers fall victim to a savior mentality and a White supremacist belief structure that must be quelled in order to create a culturally responsive classroom. While teachers come to the profession as caring individuals, their models of care are often missing the aspects needed by Black students, that of solidarity with them, and deep knowledge of who students are—culturally, racially, and individually.
Teachers live in the intersection of theory, practice, societal forces, and economic realities. The data are clear that many White teachers see students as a bundle of deficits or as a threat to the learning environment. Britzman (2003) explained that teachers come to the profession with “chronologies” negotiated through their own classroom lives both as students and as teachers. When combined with their frames around “power, knowledge, dependency, and negotiation,” teachers negotiate their own socializations depending on their many interactions with culture and identity. If White teachers have not interrogated their own position as White people, they carry frames of White normality and supremacy into the classroom.
Britzman rejected the notion that there is one monolithic culture of teachers, stating, “Within any given culture, there exists a multiplicity of realities—both given and possible—that form competing ideologies, discourses, and the discursive practices that are made available to them” (p. 70). The ability to transcend racial divisions is not embedded in the potential teacher as an innate talent. Instead, teachers develop the required skills in a process that can take years depending on their understandings and experiences.
Because of the need for White teachers to stand in solidarity with students of color, it is crucial that while discussing teachers, they are portrayed as able to move into antiracism and caring solidarity no matter where they start. Casey (2017) extends this caveat: “We often make the mistake of treating white people who have little experience thinking through issues of race and racism as resistant racists, rather than as learners. We would never fault someone who had not taken geometry for not being proficient in their first efforts in a geometry course; why do we insist on faulting white people for not being proficient in their first efforts to understand what it means to be white in a white supremacist society and what this means for them as social actors?” (p. 96).
Having an awareness of the world is a crucial aspect of being educated and, even more so, of being an educator. Through writing, activism, and political action, people of color and White allies are purposefully making it increasingly difficult to argue that someone can justifiably be ignorant of racism, privilege, and White supremacy. Therefore, it is incumbent on White teachers to educate themselves and heed the perspectives of people with funds of knowledge in the communities where their students are living.
This is especially true for those White teachers who teach across the color line. Conversely, to avoid all discussion of race and whiteness while interacting with Black students means that teachers are not listening to their students and are finding ways to avoid the onslaught of information about activism and social change. Thus, rather than adopting a default position of approaching teachers as racists who need to be cleansed, teacher educators and researchers should approach teachers as learners who are more or less resistant to the understandings that must be achieved to be successful in their chosen field (Jupp, Berry,