Black Teachers Vital Amid U.S. Race Tensions, At Risk

Millions of U.S. students are returning this month to schools that are struggling with strained resources, immigration crackdowns and divisive culture war fights. Teachers are under intense pressure - and UC Berkeley scholar Travis J. Bristol says that stress often falls most heavily on Black teachers.

In recent decades, initiatives to bring Black teachers into the classroom have achieved great success, according to Bristol, an associate professor of teacher education and education policy at Berkeley's School of Education. While that's been a plus for students, he says that classroom conditions, especially at urban schools, are at the same time driving Black teachers out of education.

Bristol and co-author Desiree Carver-Thomas, of the Learning Policy Institute, surveyed the research in an essay last year and found striking insights: In classes led by Black teachers, Black students were more often happier and more academically successful, less likely to be suspended for infractions and more likely to enroll in honors courses. Black teachers had positive impacts on the achievements of other students, too.

But there were troubling signals: While the number of Latinx and Asian American teachers rose, the proportion of Black teachers in the U.S. was 8.6% in 1990 but only 6.1% in 2020 - a decline of nearly one-third. Another study found that 41% of Black teachers would leave teaching for a higher-paying job, compared to 34% of white teachers. Too often, the authors write, school administrators slotted young Black teachers into the most challenging urban classrooms without sufficient training or support.

Bristol is also the faculty director of Berkeley's Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity and holds an appointment in the Department of African American Studies. A former student and teacher in the New York City public schools, he knows firsthand the conditions that produce success for Black teachers and their students, and the potential risks.

UC Berkeley News: In a paper you co-authored last year, the "second nadir" in American race relations was an essential context for considering the importance of Black teachers. What is the second nadir, and why is it important?

Travis J. Bristol: "The nadir" and "second nadir" are not my ideas or my words. I'm just agreeing that we're living in this second wave of the lowest point of race relations since the end of chattel slavery in the United States. The first, of course, was the rise of the KKK, and the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson.

The second nadir - I would say it began right at the moment that we elected the first Black president of the United States. Almost ironically, the very moment that this country awakens to a Black man, Barack Obama, being inaugurated and becoming the most powerful person in the world, it also awakens the cognitive dissonance with the racial order somehow shifting.

The response has been a move to reestablish a racial order in which Black people are the lower caste, or one of the lower castes. In response to the election of President Obama, we began seeing this new wave of race relations in which people are more likely to be publicly lynched by members of law enforcement and by rogue vigilantes.

We began seeing rollbacks of affirmative action, then the first and second elections of President Trump. President Trump says of Obama, 'This Black man wasn't even born in the United States.'

Why is that context important for understanding the role and importance of Black teachers today?

While we're seeing this ascendance of Black people entering the power structure in the U.S., their presence in public schools simultaneously continues to decline. It's during the Obama administration that we begin to see the clear and convincing evidence that Black teachers improve outcomes for Black students. So that's one reason why this second nadir is particularly concerning, particularly when there continues to be an assault on the progress we've made as a country.

Let's take a step back: When you think of the decades after the U.S. Civil War - reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation enforced by law - what roles did Black teachers play in schools and in the wider community?

Black teachers in segregated classrooms tried their best to equalize the kind of learning environments that white children may have been having. They tried to create rigorous academic spaces so that, at the moment that we became an integrated society, these Black children could compete and excel when compared to their white peers.

In these segregated communities, in a country that Black people knew didn't view them as people, Black teachers provided a balm for their Black students. I imagine across the South, it was quite commonplace for Black children to know about and see Black people being lynched.

And so what these Black teachers did was to create a safe space. It helped to reify messages that Black children probably heard at church, and that they heard in their homes and that they also heard at school: that you are not three-fifths of a person, even though you may be treated as such, but that you are Black and brilliant and gifted.

On average, Black teachers continue to create this environment for Black children.

Did that role change as civil rights and integration advanced starting in the 1950s and '60s?

Once Black students integrated into schools serving exclusively white students, Black teachers, and primarily principals, did not follow them. We know that about a third of Black teachers lost their jobs. Most of those Black educators were actually men, because the misogynoir, or the sexism toward Black women, meant that Black women couldn't get these leadership positions.

That meant that when Black students entered into these in many ways violent white spaces, that they didn't have this balm to help them navigate.

That was the historic value of Black teachers before Brown vs. the Board of Education [the historic U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down segregation in 1954], and that is one of the consequences when we quote-unquote integrated schools.

What has been the importance of Black teachers for the academic achievements of Black students?

Before Brown, we didn't have robust data to make causal claims about Black teachers' impact, or to say that a Black teacher improved test scores relative to a white teacher. But we did have qualitative data - adults who point to the fact that they had these Black teachers who set rigorous environments, so that when they integrated into white spaces, into college or post-secondary spaces, they felt adequately prepared.

Then, as we point out in our paper from last year, from the 1970s through the '80s, through the 2000s, the evidence is clear: Having a Black teacher meant increased likelihood that the student would come to school, increased likelihood of scoring higher on a standardized test when compared to having a white teacher, increased likelihood of going on to college. There's also a lower likelihood of being suspended when you had a same-race teacher.

Do the benefits go beyond Black students?

For people who hold anti-Black views, it's easy to dismiss those findings and not to support policies that seem to only benefit Black people.

But there's other recent research that shows decreased suspension rates for Latinx students when they have a Black teacher, also for Asian American students. Or white students who look around and see that we live in a flat and interconnected world. White students prefer Black teachers when compared to other teachers. Why? Because, these white students say, Black teachers expect more from us in terms of academic rigor.

This is the point that I often underscore in my work with policymakers: There is a value for all students when they have a Black teacher.

You've said that, for students who aren't Black, one of the values of having a Black teacher is that they get a sustained look at Black competence and leadership.

Having Black educators really allows people to experience that they live and function in a society that is interconnected. We do white children a disservice when they get to my class, freshman or sophomore year, and they say to me very quietly, "Professor Bristol, you're the first Black teacher I've ever had."

If I have exposure as a high schooler, as an elementary school student, to Black people who are my intellectual superior, then I am more able to function in an interconnected global community where I see Black people as being like me, not being different or othered. So that when they become college professors at Cal, they've had a lot of exposure to Black people and they're able to imagine them as having the same rank, if not higher.

A few years ago, a lot of your work was focused on Black men as teachers. Have you now expanded your focus?

I do think the focus on Black men is important. The outcomes are clear: Black boys perform less well relative to Black girls in K-12 schools. And that's true, clearly, in higher education. There have been news stories this year about the disappearance of Black young men from historically Black colleges and universities.

There's a space to continue to bring attention to the experiences of Black men and boys. I don't want that to be lost, and I want to be clear that my work in some ways perpetuated the focus on Black men. But this hyper-visibility prevents us from also thinking about the experiences of Black girls.

When compared to Black boys, yes, they seem to be doing well. But when compared to Asian American young women and girls, white women and girls, Black girls are not doing so well. And so if we're focusing on Black boys and on programs like My Brother's Keeper, then who are my sisters' keepers, if you will?

Would it be fair to say that in the last 10 or 20 years, it's been a difficult time for teachers generally, but a particularly difficult time for Black teachers?

It's been a difficult time for teachers more broadly, and particularly teachers who are teaching in urban settings. We've also seen that there have been a lot of investments, public and private, into increasing the number of teachers of color.

In some ways, those investments have paid off. I became a teacher in many ways because the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a foundation started by the Rockefeller Group, gave me a $25,000 grant and loan forgiveness to go to Stanford to get my teaching credential. We're actually seeing more people of color enter the profession over the last 20 years.

But what is also true, across these last 20 years, is that we've also seen a decline in Black teachers. We don't know necessarily what caused the decline, but what may have been some of the contributing factors were federal policies, dare I say, from a Black president that punished or closed underperforming schools.

Who were the students who underperformed in these schools? They were disproportionately Black children. And who were the teachers who were attracted to those schools or tracked into those schools? Black teachers. When those schools closed during the Obama administration, just like during Jim Crow, those teachers lost their jobs and had difficulty being rehired.

Particularly in urban settings, there have been policies and programs to increase the number of teachers, and teachers of color in particular, and those policies have been successful. So let's keep those policies, but let's also examine what's happening in schools. Once those Black teachers arrive, why is there a revolving door?

That seems like a crucial question.

Black teachers leave just like any other teachers may leave - because of the working conditions in their school.

Well-intentioned policymakers are attracting Black teachers and giving them incentives, and placing them in the most challenging schools, believing that just by dint of their race, that creates a superhuman-ness that might allow them to succeed.

Black teachers are attracted to these kinds of schools because they want to return to places that were similar to those from whence they've come, and to uplift students. But the conditions aren't present for them to succeed.

What can we, as a society, do to provide the support needed to retain the Black teachers who are recruited, and help them to have long, productive careers?

This conversation has to start with leadership - essentially, the individuals who are running the school.

We're doing some of that work in California. There's a grant program that provides a 90% scholarship for people to receive a high-quality credential to become a principal. So you're ensuring then that people who are becoming school leaders are adequately prepared to engage in that work.

We need to continue focusing on high-quality teacher preparation. It's unfair that we're going to place the most novice teachers in the most challenging conditions and expect that teacher alone to address centuries of historic discrimination and marginalization.

This means that we should be placing social workers in schools where students have a great deal of challenges. It means that if families don't have enough food, that we're ensuring that students have access to food so that they aren't hungry, they can pay attention and their teachers can teach them.

We're seeing some of this with the community school model here in California.

How optimistic are you that there's political will make a sustained commitment to these promising programs?

I am forever an optimist. At this moment, however, the easiest thing to do would be to capitulate to the strongman and to these ideologies which seek to take us back in time.

But if we keep front and center this idealized notion of what America could be or should be - a society that is inclusive, diverse and equitable - then efforts to diversify the educator workforce should not be viewed as a threat. They should be viewed as means to fulfill the American project.

That project centers diversity: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Learn more:

Read "Facing the Rising Sun: Black Teachers' Positive Impact Post-Brown," by Travis J. Bristol, of the UC Berkeley School of Education, and Desiree Carver-Thomas, of the Learning Policy Institute.

Listen to Bristol in the podcast Berkeley Talks: Berkeley scholars unpack what's at stake for U.S. democracy.