Paul Bass Photo
Breland, center, at Thursday’s announcement with NAACP’s Dori Dumas and Harries.
A renewed effort to hire more black and Latino schoolteachers rests in part on Debbie Breland finding Southerners to make the same move north that she made three decades ago — to teach in a New Haven public school.
NHPS
Breland is the new minority teacher recruitment coordinator for the city school system.
She joined local government and NAACP leaders outside the Board of Education on Meadow Street Thursday in announcing a renewed determination to lure more teachers of color, a quest that has proved difficult for many school systems like New Haven’s.
The announcement came on the day when the governor signed Public Act 16 – 41, a new law aimed at making that quest easier, by, among other efforts, eliminating some teacher certification requirements considered outdated and irrelevant to needed skills; and by easing the way for qualified teachers to transfer their certification to Connecticut, especially from southern states.
New Haven officials said at the Thursday event that they plan to use those tools to build a “pipeline” to the 30 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that have teacher certification programs. Those schools tend to be located in southern states from which until now it was difficult to transfer teaching certification to Connecticut.
Cicarella, Joyner, Esdaile at announcement.
The state and local NAACP announced that it will help build that pipeline by co-hosting a minority teacher recruitment conference at Yale on Dec. 1 and 2. Invitees will include presidents and deans from HBCUs, along with school principals and human resources officials, according to state NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile.
“Students will learn more readily when they make a connection with a teacher and with the way in which a teacher presents information,” Mayor Toni Harp said. “When a student of color walks into a classroom and sees a teacher of color, a connection is likely to be made more readily and a student / teacher relationship can more quickly grow to become that between a student and a mentor. The ability to ‘identify’ with one another is the key in these interactions.”
Talk about the southern pipeline took Breland’s mind back to 1987, when, as a 22-year-old Fayetteville State University graduate in North Carolina, she received a recruiting call from New Haven.
The city’s then-schools superintendent, John Dow, had made recruiting black teachers from HBCUs a priority. Breland was flown to New Haven to attend a recruiting event sponsored by Yale and the Urban League. When she signed on to teach English at Career High School, she received help finding an apartment where the landlord agreed to waive the security deposit.
Breland has remained in the system ever since, recently ascending to the teacher recruitment post, where she said she’s working with her colleagues in the school system to revive that pipeline.
“I’m growing my own,” she added. Her daughter, a Coop High senior, plans to attend Southern Connecticut State university next year with the intention of earning her teaching certification in order to work with children with autism. Breland said her dream is for her daughter to teach at the new $45 million K‑4 Strong “lab” school New Haven is building in partnership with SCSU.
Data Revelations
HR chief Mack.
Most New Haven public school students — 82 percent — are black and Latino. Most New Haven teachers — 77 percent — are white.
Data released Thursday by the school system cast doubt on assumptions made by those on the left and the right about why the city doesn’t have more black teachers.
Affirmative-action critics have charged that the school system plays racial favorites, meaning that white candidates can’t get hired for teaching positions. The school district has publicized its efforts to recruit more teachers of color. And yet it’s still hiring more white candidates than black and Latino candidates. Recruitment efforts have produced some results: 18 percent of teachers hired over the past year are black, and 13 percent are Latino, Superintendent of Schools Garth Harries announced Thursday. That means the vast majority are still white.
Some critics in town have charged that school officials prefer to hire white teachers and bypass black and Latino candidates. It turns out that the district doesn’t receive many applications from teachers of color. District human resources chief Lisa Mack estimated that only 25 percent of applicants are black or Latino.
Board of Education member Edward Joyner and teachers union President David Cicarella agreed that the problem lies not in an intention to avoid hiring blacks and Latinos, but rather in the need to develop more of an applicant pool, in part through that south-to-North pipeline. “You can be a great teacher in North Carolina,” Joyner remarked, and not get permission to teach here in New Haven.
He said New Haven would benefit by changing that. Just ask Debbie Breland.