Persistence Despite Structural Barriers: Investigating Work Environments for Black and Latinx Teachers in Urban and Suburban Schools

Research suggests that work environments are associated with turnover patterns for teachers of Color. This study investigates variation in work environments using longitudinal administrative data from 20 large urban and suburban K-12 school districts. Results indicate that teachers of Color are more often employed in “hard-to-staff” work environments compared to their White colleagues. Despite this, findings demonstrate high relative levels of teacher experience in schools where teachers of Color, specifically Latinx educators, represent a majority of the teaching staff. These results have implications for educational policy and practice, specifically in the areas of teacher preparation, recruitment, hiring, and retention.

On the Mis-Education of Teachers of Color: A Letter to Teacher Educators

Although teacher education researchers have long claimed their commitment to successfully preparing teachers to educate students of Color—a growing majority in U.S. schools—notably absent from their attempts are the voices of teachers of Color. This silence often results in pathological portrayals, positioning teachers of Color as the problem while obscuring the pervasive, problematic, and harmful Whiteness of teaching and teacher education. In this context, inspired by James Baldwin’s letter-essays and centering truthtelling as theoretical framework, eight tenured New York City public school teachers of Color and a teacher educator of Color engaged in collective analysis of a truthtelling exercise focused on what practitioners and institutions of teacher education can and should learn from teachers of Color to develop an antidote to the overwhelming Whiteness of teaching and teacher education, which has been shown to disproportionately disadvantage students of Color. Herein, we offer a composite counter-story—a letter to White teacher educators and, in fact, teacher educators of any racial identification who are in any way aligned with protecting and upholding Whiteness—revisiting our own nuanced memories of becoming and being teachers, unveiling teacher education’s epistemic violence, and issuing a call to action.

Navigating the Double Bind: A Systematic Literature Review of the Experiences of Novice Teachers of Color in K–12 Schools

A robust body of U.S.-based research demonstrates the importance of teachers of color to promote positive outcomes among students of color, and recent policies aim to increase the proportion of teachers of color. These policies are unlikely to succeed if they ignore how educational systems currently marginalize teachers of color, particularly early in teachers’ careers, when they are more likely to leave. Thus, we conducted a systematic narrative review of the experiences of novice teachers of color in K–12 schools. We identified 72 relevant studies, from 1996 to the present, and qualitatively analyzed themes within them. We found that novices’ experiences of their socialization into K–12 educational institutions were deeply racialized, through their interactions with every aspect of K–12 educational systems. Novices’ experiences often placed them in a double bind, as they experienced tensions between their personal commitments as people of color and their professional commitments in schools that perpetuated oppressive systems. Welcoming novice teachers of color into K–12 schools thus necessitates broader efforts to dismantle the many ways oppressive systems are embedded within and perpetuated by schools—efforts to which novice teachers of color can contribute, but for which they should not bear sole responsibility.

Righting the Literacy Teacher Education Debt: A Matter of Justice

The literacies of Black and other communities of Color have long been narrated pathologically in literacy teacher education. Literacy teacher educators have been complicit in upholding linguistic injustice and enacting linguistic violence in and through their practices, devaluing the practices, marginalizing the experiences, and interrogating the humanity of Black and other teachers of Color. In this article, extending Ladson-Billings's concept of the education debt, I assess the literacy teacher education debt, unveiling how white English and whiteness in general have been (over)valued and positioned as currency in literacy teacher education. After (re)examining and (re)assessing offenses and harms inflicted by literacy teacher education across historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral realms, composing the literacy teacher education debt, I take a restorative justice approach and offer an invitation to right literacy teacher education by addressing obligations and committing to healing as a matter of justice.

Teacher Leadership for Love, Solidarity, and Justice: The Invisibilized and Contested Practices of Teacher Leaders of Color

Despite widespread acknowledgment of teachers of Color as critical agents of change, white supremacist, colonial, and cis-heteropatriarchal ontologies of “teacher leadership” marginalize the counterhegemonic leadership they embody. Guided by critical leadership and feminist of Color scholarship, I develop and employ an embodied raciolinguistic analysis to examine how a Latina teacher leader of Color facilitated organization-wide action in the educational interests of Black students. My analysis demonstrates that her discursive and embodied practices as a non-Black woman of Color and “official” teacher leader were simultaneously (re)constructed as catalysts and hindrance for racial progress within and across social spaces. Grappling with these possibilities and tensions at interpersonal, institutional, and societal scales, she reflexively adapted her practices to recenter Black leadership while facing professional consequences. Arguing for radical social change by amplifying the multi-faceted and contested nature of counterhegemonic teacher leadership, I offer implications to foster the critical ingenuity needed to lead in love, solidarity, and justice for and among communities of Color.

Expressions of Authentic Voice: Urban High School Students’ Perceptions of Teaching as a Career Choice While Participating in a Pipeline Program for Aspiring Teachers of Color

Students of color do not pursue teaching careers as often as their white counterparts. Project Teacher Development (PTD) is a partnership between a large urban school district and a public regional university to recruit and prepare students of color as future educators. The goal of PTD is to identify, mentor, and inspire high school students to pursue careers in education using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as an interpretive framework. Results from this longitudinal qualitative study indicate increased awareness of teaching skills and expectations for college. Too often, programs in education expect future teachers of color to divorce themselves from their racial and ethnic identities. Participants in this study expressed authentic voice, which is essential to develop autonomy, relatedness, and competence—the foundational elements of SDT. While the challenges of recruiting and preparing teachers of color remain multifaceted, specialized pipeline programs that maximize success for marginalized students are essential.