Читать книгу More Than an Ally - Michael L. Boucher Jr. - Страница 13

Before explaining the framework that will allow White teachers to succeed across the color line, it is important to examine the current state of teaching and learning in the United States. In order to understand the moral imperative of dismantling the school to prison pipeline and to solve the current crisis in the education of African American children, we must look at who is teaching, why they are teaching, and how they are teaching.

The American teaching force, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), is 80 percent White, middle-aged, and middle-class (Feistritzer, Griffin, & Linnajarvi, 2011; Loewus, 2018; Taie & Goldring, 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.