The Teacher Wars (19 page)

For black teachers, a transfer to an integrated school was considered a vote of confidence; for white teachers, it was considered a demotion.
Willie Mae Crews taught English at Hayes High School in Birmingham, once known as the “Little University” for the city's black community. In 1970 Crews, who was black, joined the Hayes integration committee and was dismayed by the white students—mostly those with disciplinary problems—and white teachers the city Board of Education assigned to the school. Some of the new white faculty members assumed they would have to lower their academic standards to teach poor black children—pretty ironic, Hayes thought, since it appeared to her that black teachers, many of them with graduate degrees and few options for employment outside of education, had been teaching at a higher level than their white counterparts who had attended only low-quality normal schools.

Meanwhile, administrators handpicked guidance counselor Helen Heath, also black, to leave Hayes and desegregate a middle-class white school in Birmingham, Glenn High.
Heath recalled that the white principal at Glenn was racist. He encouraged white students to avoid Heath and visit the white counselor instead. But she valued the opportunity to help high-performing black students in a newly integrated setting realize that they, too, were “college material.” It is impossible to know what role merit played in reassigning Heath and other competent black educators away from historically black schools, since the process was so corrupted by obvious
discrimination. But Heath believed historically black schools like Hayes had been “
stripped of their excellent teachers, and they were substituted by unprepared white teachers.” Education researcher Clifton Claye observed in 1970 that “
senile” white teachers were being assigned en masse to formerly black schools.

Several surveys of southern teachers during desegregation revealed that whites often expected little of their black students. White teachers were more likely than black teachers to report discipline problems with black children, and white teachers complained that black parents had “
different values”—that they were less supportive of education or of good behavior generally. In 1965, thirteen-year-old Gloria Register integrated the formerly all-white Guy B. Phillips Junior High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She and other black students were told by white teachers to wash their faces and brush their teeth each morning. “
It's not as though we were monkeys from the zoo,” she remembered, “but that is how we were treated. And I was angry.”

The mainstream social science of the day may have buttressed such attitudes among white educators. In his 1965 essay “
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor and future New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that “the tangle of pathology is tightening” over the black community, with increasing numbers of children born out of wedlock and raised in segregated neighborhoods far removed from the social norms of middle-class white America. Black children with absentee fathers, he wrote, demonstrated low scores on IQ tests, not because they were genetically inferior, but because they had less parental stability and support. The following year, sociologist James Coleman submitted to Congress his report on “
Equality of Educational Opportunity,” which attributed about two-thirds of the academic achievement gap between black and white children to family poverty and segregation. The two reports dovetailed in their suggestion that parents and neighborhoods were far more influential on children than teachers and schools. But they did not claim that education did not matter. The Coleman Report, in particular, continues to be misconstrued by both its supporters and its critics, who take it to assert that teachers are helpless in the face of poverty. What
Coleman's research really revealed was that compared to white students, the average black child was enrolled in a poorly funded school with less qualified teachers and fewer science and foreign language classes. Those black students who attended integrated, well-resourced schools, however, tended to earn higher test scores than black students in segregated schools, and reported feeling a greater sense of control over their lives. “
Just as a loaf of bread means more to a starving man than to a sated one,” Coleman wrote, “so one very fine textbook or, better, one very able teacher, may mean far more to a deprived child than to one who already has several of both.” Coleman's message was that although family income might be the biggest factor in student achievement, teachers and schools also mattered, especially for poor kids. Yet by calling attention to disparities like the relative lack of books in black homes—and by ignoring identical deficiencies among poor whites—the Moynihan and Coleman reports may have led some teachers to conclude there was little they could do in the classroom to help black students succeed. As research would begin to show definitively by the end of the decade, such low expectations for children could be self-fulfilling.

But prejudice and low expectations were not the only explanations for why too many schools failed to effectively educate black and low-income children. Many teachers lacked relevant experience or training in working with poor students of any race, and too many of them were ignorant of the strategies developed by African American educators, ever since the Civil War, to reach a student population simultaneously fighting racism, poverty, and political disempowerment. The education theorists Lisa Delpit and Gloria Ladson-Billings have articulated some of the tactics black teachers (like Charlotte Forten and Anna Julia Cooper) used throughout history to successfully educate black students. Strict discipline was employed less as a means of control and more as a way of demonstrating love for the child:
I help you understand the consequences of your actions
, teachers tell their students,
because I am personally invested in your success
. Effective black teachers sought close ties to their students' parents, often socializing with them outside school and engaging them in conversations about their children's education. Black teachers introduced black children to heroic figures from
African American history, to build racial pride. And because many poor black children did not speak standard English at home, their teachers spent extra time on phonics and vocabulary building.

As early as 1965, the Johnson administration acknowledged the growing problem of black students, especially in the South, being taught by too few black teachers. U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel worried that without black role models at school, black children would be forced to face the upheavals of school integration alone. “
We must not deceive ourselves that the exclusion of Negro teachers is not noticed by children,” he said. Even
President Johnson, in a speech to the National Education Association, said he was concerned about dismissals. Yet neither the executive branch nor the courts held school districts accountable for more than token faculty integration. In 1965, after the New York City school board hired five hundred southern black teachers displaced by integration, NAACP lawyer Jack Greenberg wrote a letter to
The New York Times
complaining that it wasn't enough. Policy makers must protect black teaching jobs in the South, he wrote, since black educators held a “
uniquely important place in Southern society.” The Health, Education, and Welfare Department “has, with reluctance, adopted the formal position that teacher integration is necessary … We have, however, seen no enforcement from the department.” Indeed, the following year the embattled Tuscaloosa school board received a letter from HEW suggesting that in a majority-white school,
one black teacher would suffice.

This painful episode in American education history has generally gone unacknowledged by today's accountability reformers, as they pursue policies, such as neighborhood school closings and school “reconstitutions” as charter or magnet schools, that lead disproportionately to the loss of teaching jobs held by African Americans. According to a federal lawsuit filed by the Chicago Teachers Union, 40 percent of the city's teachers were black in 2000, but only 30 percent were black in 2010. When the district reconstituted ten schools in 2012, 51 percent of the teachers dismissed were black, although black teachers make up only 28 percent of teachers citywide. In New Orleans between 2007 and 2009, the proportion of black teachers fell from 73 percent to 57 percent, a net loss of a hundred
jobs, as fast-track teacher training programs with comparitively low minority representation expanded their presence in the city's schools. Unlike in the past, today's layoffs are less a function of explicit racial animus than an outgrowth of the fact that black teachers are more likely to work in underperforming, segregated black schools targeted for closure or layoffs. And like other baby boomer teachers, they are beginning to retire in large numbers. But these figures are worrisome all the same, given a half century of research demonstrating that teachers of color are more likely to hold high expectations for students of color and are more likely to work in high-poverty schools over the long term—and both factors are correlated with higher student achievement and college-going rates among students of color. Competitive programs that offer alternative pathways into the teaching profession, like Teach for America, have made a concerted effort to recruit nonwhite teachers, and have had considerable success in attracting them—more success, in many cases, than traditional teachers colleges. Yet overall
the number of teachers of color nationwide has not grown in many years, and has declined in many high-poverty, minority-majority cities that have been undergoing massive school turnaround efforts. Only about 17 percent of American teachers are nonwhite, compared to 40 percent of American public school students.

Even as President Johnson declined to take regulatory steps to protect veteran black teachers, he aggressively pursued a strategy personally familiar to him from his year in Cotulla, Texas, and one that has been resurrected today by the growing organization Teach for America: recruiting elite young college students to teach for a short time in poor children's classrooms. One of Johnson's favorite Great Society programs, for which he mustered considerable political energy to pass through Congress and then reauthorize, was the National Teacher Corps, established in 1965 as part of the Higher Education Act. It was based in part on
a program founded two years earlier by a Washington, D.C., schoolteacher named Joan Wofford.

In 1962 Wofford, a graduate of Bryn Mawr and Yale, was teaching at Newton High School in the Boston suburbs, one of the
nation's most affluent and progressive public schools. Inspired by President Kennedy's call to public service, she became determined to find work in an inner-city neighborhood. When her husband won a judicial clerkship, the young couple moved to Washington, D.C., and Wofford was hired as the second-ever white teacher at Cardozo High School, in the working-class black neighborhood of Columbia Heights. The school's principal, Bennetta Washington, was married to the city's future mayor, Walter Washington, and was a politically connected reformer willing to take a chance on a young white woman.

At Cardozo, Wofford taught honors English, and she adored her students. But she was horrified by the pedagogical and disciplinary practices she witnessed at the school. An assistant principal spent most of his day running through the hallways, prodding boys to take off their hats. When Wofford sat down with a math teacher to select photos of classroom scenes for the yearbook, the math teacher refused to consider one in which students had exploded with great energy, every hand up in the air. “There was this idea of ‘keep the lid on, be well behaved,' ” Wofford told me. “That was not my thing. I wanted enthusiasm, excitement! I wanted people turned on, not sitting with their hands folded.”

Wofford admits that at the time she was arrogant, even “blind.” When she studied organizational development later in her career, she realized that if you want to change an institutional culture, you can't ignore the managers and employees who are enforcing the rules—you have to cooperate with them and get their feedback. If she had done so at Cardozo, she might have heard that for generations, strict discipline had been considered a hallmark of high-quality teaching in the black community, in order to prepare children for a prejudiced world in which they would rarely enjoy the benefit of the doubt. Yet Wofford's brashness effectively shifted the national debate about public school teaching.

National surveys showed that half of all teachers working in low-income schools hoped to transfer to middle-class settings. What if, Wofford wondered, inner-city teaching could become a coveted, glamorous job, even for the most privileged young adults? This idea had come to Wofford as she read a letter from her brother-in-law
Harris Wofford, a Kennedy adviser who was then working for the Peace Corps in Africa. Many Peace Corps members were assigned to teach in African schools and had developed a passion for the work, Harris wrote. Yet they wouldn't be able to continue teaching when they returned to the States, because they had not studied at education schools or earned teacher certifications, as state laws required.

Wofford rushed to write back to her brother-in-law. On lightweight blue airmail paper she sketched a plan for how much good Peace Corps veterans could do at schools like Cardozo. She never mailed the letter, which became, instead, a program proposal. She envisioned a special group of young teachers recruited from the Peace Corps or competitive colleges. They would be mentored by “master teachers”—people like Wofford, who also came from elite backgrounds but had already demonstrated success in the classroom. In their first year at Cardozo, the “intern” teachers would lead only two lessons per day. They would spend the rest of their time observing the master teacher, observing one another, and sharing feedback with colleagues within the program. After school, interns would take a class in urban sociology to learn about the challenges poor children faced, and they would work to develop new, culturally relevant curriculum materials that would renew children's excitement about learning. Through a partnership with Howard University, the recruits would earn a master's degree in teaching, thus circumventing the traditional role of education schools and their “Mickey Mouse courses,” in Wofford's words. This vision echoed that of former Harvard president
James Bryant Conant, who published the widely discussed
The Education of American Teachers
that same year, 1963. Conant warned that the nation's growing ranks of high school dropouts would become “social dynamite,” unemployed and prone to crime. He saw higher-quality teaching as the best way to keep low-income kids in school, and he called for deemphasizing undergraduate education courses for future teachers in favor of classes in the liberal arts coupled with “practice teaching” in real classrooms.