Editor’s Note: Anti-racist education was the topic of a recent NPR broadcast. Following is a report about the broadcast from the NPR website as well as a partial transcript of the broadcast interview.

In the wake of ongoing protests for racial justice, young people in America are demanding change from their schools.

Petitions are circulating all over the country in support of creating anti-racist education. One petition, written by alumni of Xavier College Preparatory in Phoenix, Ariz., calls on the district to “review and advance its curriculum, goals, and objectives as they related to social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

“Education is the most valuable tool to dismantle racism and create a more equitable society,” the petition reads.

Sumaiya DeLane, along with Khadijah Adamu and Samiza Palmer, started a petition in Montgomery County, Md., where they went to school.

“These are longstanding issues that need urgent solutions,” DeLane says. “It needs to be total transformation versus reform.”

Palmer says she doesn’t think there can be “a truly anti-racist curriculum unless the teachers have gone through that same sort of training themselves.”

Travis Bristol, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley, agrees. He says that for students to receive an anti-racist education, teachers need better training and students need more diverse teachers.

All of this is in service to what he calls “the American project” of, in part, forming a more perfect union.

“I believe that to begin the work of forming a more perfect union requires us to enact anti-racist teaching, but it also requires us to prepare teachers to think about how to design anti-racist teaching,” says Bristol, who is also a former New York City teacher. “And that is what gives me hope.”

Here are excerpts from his interview on All Things Considered.

When we say anti-racist education, or anti-racist teaching, what does that mean to you?

So for me, anti-racist teaching means a fundamental disruption of the way in which teaching and learning happens in our schools today: It centers whiteness and white people. And so we have to start with the preparation of teachers.

You looked closely at how diverse teachers can reshape education and how, in particular, Black teachers can play a role. Why is having Black teachers inside classrooms important — not just for Black students to get a quality education, but for all children to get a quality education?

There is convincing evidence that Black children perform better in school that they are able to persist through high school that they are less likely to get suspended and expelled if they have a Black teacher compared to a white teacher. So there’s clear evidence that for Black students there is this added value for Black teachers. There is a growing body of evidence that for white students, that there is a preference for having a teacher of color when compared to a white teacher.

But at the same time, I understand that you found school systems have a really tough time retaining African American teachers. Why?

In my own research, I have found that school districts have done a remarkable job of recruiting Black teachers. But they have, in many ways, placed at the feet of Black teachers the undue expectation that they can somehow fundamentally address 400 years of oppression.

School districts concentrate Black teachers in the most challenging schools, without giving those Black teachers the necessary resources to address the 400 years of marginalization and subjugation.

And so because Black teachers are placed in the most challenging schools without the necessary resources to teach Black children, Black teachers are leaving their schools, not their students. They’re leaving the poor working conditions, the conditions that do not give them the tools, the resources, the ongoing training to teach Black children.

And so out of frustration, while doing good work, while raising test scores, while allowing Black children to persist, they also leave because they recognize, at the end of the day, that they do not have the tools and resources to do the work of teaching.

Please visit www.npr.org to listen to the full interview.
Jonaki Mehta, Elena Burnett and Justine Kenin produced and edited the audio version of this story.

The New Haven Independent reports (July 9, 2020) that the New Haven public school system will launch two new programs aimed at increasing the number of teachers of color and also to promote awareness of racial bias among school administrators.

Grants from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund will support the initiatives.

The grants come at a time where 72.5 percent of New Haven’s teachers identify as white, compared to 12.9 percent of students who identify as white.

David Addams, executive director of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, explained the reason for the programs this way:

“You have a school system that is burdened with centuries of explicit and implicit racism which has yet to ever fully grasp how to educate children of color, how to represent the history and contributions of people of color in its curriculum,” he said. “There needed to be some really intentional work to address both of these issues.”

The programs are the culmination of more than a year of work by the District Equity Leadership Team (DELT), formed in the 2017-2018 school year to help districts become more conscious about promoting equity, with funding from the State Education Resource Center and the Graustein Memorial Fund. DELT applied for the two grants from the fund more than a year ago.

“As a community, New Haven is ready for these constructive conversations about change,” said the school system’s leader for the DELT, Carolyn Ross-Lee, who co- authored the grant application. “Obviously it is hard work. It’s easy to say and sometimes hard to do. But we know right now that we are poised and ready to engage in the work.” Ross-Lee also serves as the school system’s Title IX coordinator and climate coordinator.

The first grant is for minority talent development and recruitment. It provides $100,000 for the public school system to establish a teacher certification program that will support predominantly Latinx and African-American paraprofessionals in becoming certified teachers.

Some money will also go supporting new teachers by covering some of their rent and providing homeownership training and financial literacy training for them.

A study by economists at Johns Hopkins University and American University found that non-black teachers have significantly lower educational expectations for black students than black teachers do when evaluating the same students.

“This is a big concern since teacher expectations likely shape student success, not just in school, but in life as well,” said co-author Seth Gershenson, an assistant professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs. “It’s important that all teachers maintain and convey high expectations for all students.”

The study illustrates the importance of hiring of a more representative teaching force and allowing for more teacher training to nurture, support and encourage all students, regardless of their innate ability, talents, behaviors, or home circumstances, the study authors said.

The findings highlight the need to better understand how teachers form expectations, what types of interventions can reduce or eliminate biases in teacher expectations, and perhaps most importantly, how such expectations and biases affect the long-run student outcomes, they said.

The study found:

• White and other non-black teachers were 12 percentage points more likely than black teachers to predict black students would not finish school.
• Non-black teachers were 5 percentage points more like to predict their black male students would not graduate high school than their black girls.
• Black female teachers are significantly more optimistic about the ability of black boys to complete high school than teachers of any other demographic group. They were 20 percent less likely than white teachers to predict their student would not graduate high school, and 30 percent less likely to say that than black male teachers.
• White male teachers are 10 to 20 percent more likely to have low expectations for black female students.
• Mathematics teachers were significantly more likely to have low expectations for female students.
• For black students, particularly black boys, having a non-black teacher in a 10^th grade subject made them much less likely to pursue that subject by enrolling in similar classes. This suggests biased expectations by teachers have long-term effects on student outcomes, the researchers said.

The research, led by Gershenson and Johns Hopkins professor Nicholas Papageorge, identifies systematic biases in teachers’ expectations using data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. 10th graders. In the study, two teachers per student were asked how much education they expected the student to ultimately complete.

Having two teachers per student was central to the research strategy. Distinguishing biases in teachers’ expectations is difficult, since students who have black teachers may differ from students who have white teachers in systematic ways (e.g., living in different neighborhoods, attending different schools). The researchers eliminated these concerns by comparing the expectations of two teachers — one black and one non-black — for the same student, at the same point in time.

“We found that a non-black teacher is about 30 percent less likely to expect that the student will complete a four-year college degree than the black teacher,” said Papageorge. “This isn’t meant to lay blame, since bias is part of human nature, but it provides a place to start a dialogue between educators, policymakers, parents, researchers, and other stakeholders.”

The  study was published March 30, 2016 in The Economics of Education Review. The study was conducted by economists from American University’s School of Public Affairs and John Hopkins University’s Department of Economics.

• Woody Exley