Can Arne Duncan Make America's Teachers More Diverse?

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants to recruit you to be part of the next generation of American heroes — our teachers. Yes, you. He'd also like it if you could bring along a few of your black, male friends.

The Obama administration has set some lofty education goals, which Duncan is now setting his sights on through teacher recruitment. Hiring and retention of high-quality teachers are among Duncan's top priorities. To get America's best and brightest into the classroom, he knows that he must be a fierce teacher's advocate, and fight to ensure that teachers are regarded like the heroes they are.

That means not allowing them to be treated as an expendable resource when economic times are tough. This month, when Duncan asked Congress for an additional $23 billion dollars in emergency funding to help save up to 300,000 teaching jobs, he was joined by President Obama, who also backs the measure.

But Duncan also knows that the best teachers America can offer are diverse. Unlike Arizona and Texas, which have both recently displayed a disturbing preference for whitewashed curriculum, Duncan argues — rightly — that the frighteningly low percent of minority teachers nationwide is bad news for American kids. Just how poor is minority representation? Well, consider the fact that less than 2% of teachers today are black and male.

It’s more than a big problem. It’s big f#&*ing problem.

Unless we change the situation and bring more diversity to our schools’ leadership and faculty, the project of advancing our youth through education — what Duncan calls "the civil rights issue of our generation" — will fail. If we want to raise a nation of free-thinking, egalitarian voters, we must first demonstrate to children our own capacity for diverse school leadership. I mean, come on: the civil rights movement wasn't led entirely by white people, was it?

Last week, a friend of mine told me that even her 7-year-old black, Cuban-American son told her, “Mom, all the teachers are white.” It was a poignant reminder of the fact that children learn from what we do, not what we say. The lessons kids absorb from the fact that they're taught by exclusively white teachers may be just as damming as schoolyard bigotry. As the new AC360 baby doll study suggests, children are no less susceptible to subtle messages about race today than they were 50 years ago. Though some attitudes have changed, the impact of 21st-century racism in our schools is no less profound.

Which is why it's great to see Duncan show a real commitment to recruiting minority teachers. This month, Duncan visited Louisiana — the first of a series of stops at historically black colleges to deliver a targeted appeal to black graduates. As he put it to students, a career in education is a kind of national service that fundamentally strengthens our civic capacity as a country. He's exactly right. It's high time we started thinking of teaching as something that's equally important as military service, and at least as equally well-funded.

Photo Credit: Anna Hirsch