http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/why-teachers-of-color-quit/282007/
I grew up in a middle-class family with immigrant parents from Mexico and Ecuador. When I was four years old, we moved to a predominantly white, upper-class neighborhood in Tampa, Florida to ensure that my siblings and I would attend the best public schools in my district. While studying at these schools gave us great educational opportunities, it also exposed us to significant racism. Teachers placed my brother in English as a Second Language classes, even though he was born in the United States and a native English speaker. Teachers hesitated to place me in advanced classes, stating that “Latinos rarely do well in them” and laughed at my goal of going to Brown University. With little support from teachers and with my family’s inexperience with the public education system in this country, I struggled to find the resources I needed to get admitted into top-tier schools. Experiencing these educational inequalities firsthand made me want to solve them. I decided to join Teach for America.
I joined the Bay Area corps after graduating Brown in 2010 and taught ninth-grade English at a charter school outside Oakland. Yet after finishing my two-year commitment, I realized that though my background may have brought me to teaching in the first place, it now had become one of the factors that drove me to quit the profession.
Several recent articles—“Why Do Teachers Quit?,” “I Quit for Teach for America,” “I Almost Quit Teach for America”—raised reasonable concerns about the difficulties of teaching in predominantly black and Latino, low-income communities: the inadequate training, the poor classroom conditions, the inability to maintain work-life balance. Yet as I read these articles, I realized they still had not discussed some of the specific struggles I encountered as a teacher of color. A 2005 University of Pennsylvania study by Richard Ingersoll foundthat teachers of color left the profession 24 percent more often than white teachers. According to the National Education Association, “The declining numbers of Black and Hispanic students majoring in education is steeper than the overall decline in education majors” and “Minority teachers leave teaching at higher rates than white teachers do.” These statistics made me think about the unique difficulties I and other teachers of color I knew had faced. When discussing teacher turnover, it’s important to address these challenges in hopes of finding ways to make more teachers of all backgrounds stay in the profession.
The articles I just cited expressed the difficulty of teaching students when knowing little about their backgrounds. In the piece “I Almost Quit Teach for America,” the author wrote about how hard it was for her to teach students when she’d rarely had “meaningful exposure to anyone outside my social class.” She spoke of needing “some way to begin to understand where my students were coming from.” In contrast, many teachers of color struggle with knowing too much. Because our backgrounds often parallel those of our students, the issues in our classrooms hit us more personally. This ultimately places an extreme amount of pressure on us to be good teachers immediately, since we know or have experienced ourselves the consequences of an insufficient education. A Latino Teach for America alum in Miami told me: “While teaching, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I wouldn't have obtained the same level of success if my own teachers had not given everything they had to push me to where I needed to be. This intensified the pressure I already felt to do well. ”
I grew up in a middle-class family with immigrant parents from Mexico and Ecuador. When I was four years old, we moved to a predominantly white, upper-class neighborhood in Tampa, Florida to ensure that my siblings and I would attend the best public schools in my district. While studying at these schools gave us great educational opportunities, it also exposed us to significant racism. Teachers placed my brother in English as a Second Language classes, even though he was born in the United States and a native English speaker. Teachers hesitated to place me in advanced classes, stating that “Latinos rarely do well in them” and laughed at my goal of going to Brown University. With little support from teachers and with my family’s inexperience with the public education system in this country, I struggled to find the resources I needed to get admitted into top-tier schools. Experiencing these educational inequalities firsthand made me want to solve them. I decided to join Teach for America.
I joined the Bay Area corps after graduating Brown in 2010 and taught ninth-grade English at a charter school outside Oakland. Yet after finishing my two-year commitment, I realized that though my background may have brought me to teaching in the first place, it now had become one of the factors that drove me to quit the profession.
Several recent articles—“Why Do Teachers Quit?,” “I Quit for Teach for America,” “I Almost Quit Teach for America”—raised reasonable concerns about the difficulties of teaching in predominantly black and Latino, low-income communities: the inadequate training, the poor classroom conditions, the inability to maintain work-life balance. Yet as I read these articles, I realized they still had not discussed some of the specific struggles I encountered as a teacher of color. A 2005 University of Pennsylvania study by Richard Ingersoll foundthat teachers of color left the profession 24 percent more often than white teachers. According to the National Education Association, “The declining numbers of Black and Hispanic students majoring in education is steeper than the overall decline in education majors” and “Minority teachers leave teaching at higher rates than white teachers do.” These statistics made me think about the unique difficulties I and other teachers of color I knew had faced. When discussing teacher turnover, it’s important to address these challenges in hopes of finding ways to make more teachers of all backgrounds stay in the profession.
The articles I just cited expressed the difficulty of teaching students when knowing little about their backgrounds. In the piece “I Almost Quit Teach for America,” the author wrote about how hard it was for her to teach students when she’d rarely had “meaningful exposure to anyone outside my social class.” She spoke of needing “some way to begin to understand where my students were coming from.” In contrast, many teachers of color struggle with knowing too much. Because our backgrounds often parallel those of our students, the issues in our classrooms hit us more personally. This ultimately places an extreme amount of pressure on us to be good teachers immediately, since we know or have experienced ourselves the consequences of an insufficient education. A Latino Teach for America alum in Miami told me: “While teaching, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I wouldn't have obtained the same level of success if my own teachers had not given everything they had to push me to where I needed to be. This intensified the pressure I already felt to do well. ”
But her dad is a doctor and she lives at home.
