In a Denver Post Op-Ed, Wagma Mommandi, a doctoral student in the Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice program, describes her lifelong educational experiences with almost no teachers in whom she could see herself, and calls for systematic and sustained efforts to recruit and retain more teachers of color.
Read the article below, or read it in the Denver Post.
Committed to social justice, democracy, and diversity, the CU Boulder School of Education offers a variety of resources for students of color interested in education. For example, the Education Diversity Scholars (EDS) program offers scholarships, mentoring, and a supportive community for underrepresented undergraduate students in the Teacher Licensure, Education Minor, or Leadership Studies Minor programs. Graduate scholarships and student groups are also available.
Learn more about equity and diversity in the School of Education, and to connect with a faculty member or student.
Guest Commentary: The unbearable whiteness of teaching
In the 12 years I attended diverse public schools in Denver, I had three teachers of color. My first grade teacher was black; a teacher in middle school was of Native American heritage; and my high school chemistry teacher was an immigrant from India.
As an impressionable kid (the American-born daughter of Muslim immigrants spending my high school years in the shadow of 9/11) I never had an opportunity to look at a teacher and say, "Hey, you're like me. You understand me."
After college, where a white professor taught every single class I took for my major, I was drawn toward a career in teaching and applied to teach in Washington, D.C., through an alternate route certification program. The DC Teaching Fellows was overwhelmingly staffed by whites who taught an overwhelmingly white cohort of novice teachers preparing to teach in classrooms full of students of color.
I taught for five years in a public high school that was 100 percent non-white. These days, alternate route programs proudly tout recruiting a diverse teaching force, but my own experience in Washington, D.C., saw new teachers who were mostly white replacing veterans of color.
I left teaching last year to pursue a Ph.D. in education policy and now attend the University of Colorado. I spend my days in the same hallways as undergraduates who are being trained to be teachers. These novice teachers are also overwhelmingly white, and nowhere near representative of the students many of them will soon be teaching.
As a student, a member of an alternate-route cohort of new teachers, a teacher in a large district, and now a graduate student in a school of education that prepares teachers, I realize how pervasive the lack of diversity is in teaching. There is nothing wrong with teachers of any race. However, the demographics of our teachers have not fundamentally changed in 100 years, whereas our students are completely different. It is problematic, especially when research consistently shows teachers of color benefit all students.
So while much energy is spent these days debating teacher-evaluation systems, how to assign value-added scores to individual teachers, how to evaluate teacher prep programs and so forth, why is more serious attention not paid to recruiting teachers of color and retaining them? (That's another story entirely, as teachers of color are leaving the profession at much higher rates than white teachers).
Academics have made the analogy of the teacher pipeline collapsing on both ends. We are failing to bring in teachers of color and losing veterans of tremendous skill and community-based knowledge.
What can be done? There are examples of success from the innovative apprenticeship model of the Boston Teaching Residency, which has a track record of recruiting and retaining a diverse group of educators to the PEP service-learning program that partners universities, public schools and the community to develop critical educators. Even Teach For America has made a commitment to recruiting teachers of color, now eclipsing traditional programs by a wide margin.
Last fall, our public schools reached a significant milestone: For the first time in history, our classrooms are filled with more students of color than white students. It's more important than ever to focus on attracting, training and retaining teachers who can identify with and support the growing diversity in our schools.
I know the value of looking at a teacher and seeing yourself in her. I hope many more students will someday soon be able to do the just that.
Wagma Mommandi is a product of Denver Public Schools.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
Related Faculty: Wagma Mommandi