Schools Seek Help On Teacher Diversity

Thwarted by budget cuts, New Haven’s school leaders are looking for ​“partners” to help find more black and brown teachers.

Top school administrators told alders about the partnerships they’re pursuing at a Wednesday night Education Committee meeting in City Hall’s aldermanic chambers, in a follow-up to a 2018 hearing about what the district has been doing to recruit, train and retain more teachers of color.

As of last school year, 72.5 percent of New Haven’s teachers identify as white — way off from what classrooms look like, where only 12.9 percent of students identify as white.

Even though New Haven has one of the most diverse faculties in the state — pretty much tied with Hartford and Bridgeport — that ​“racial gap” between teachers and students consistently ranks among the largest, at least for the 14 districts that the Connecticut State Department of Education tracks.

Over the past five years (as the New Haven’s faculty has contracted by 94 teachers, once the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant ran out), the demographics have become a closer match. Since 2014, the district has hired 23 more Hispanic teachers, while it lost 138 white teachers and 14 African-American teachers.

The staffing demographics do vary across the district. No school had an outright majority of teachers of color last year, though L.W. Beecher Interdistrict Magnet School, Columbus Family Academy, John C. Daniels Interdistrict Magnet School, King-Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School, Engineering & Science University Magnet School and James Hillhouse High School came close, according to state data.

New Haven has consistently received far more interest from teachers of color. Non-white candidates represented at least 40.8 percent of those who sent in résumés last summer.

But in a repeat response from the last time school administrators appeared before the Education Committee, Lisa Mack, the district’s human resources director, said she didn’t know whether New Haven’s hires actually matched the applicant pool.

Why do the schools care about these statistics?

Research has consistently shown that students of color do better when they’re taught by a diverse faculty: not only scoring higher on short-term exams, but also changing their long-term ambitions.

One study, for instance, found that black students growing up in poverty are 39 percent less likely to drop out if they have just one black teacher before they enter middle school.

Experts say that’s because, with what’s known as ​“race-match effects,” expectations for students are set higher, especially for Black boys, and students report feeling that they have someone who cares for them and with whom they can communicate.

But, like in New Haven, teachers of color are a rarity in public schools across the country.

There’s a number of different explanations, including racial disparities in who can get in to masters programs, pass certification exams and afford to live on a flat-lined teacher’s salary.

Even after the hiring process, research says that teachers of color are also slightly more likely to call it quits early, largely because of the difficult schools they’re often assigned to and the additional tasks of discipline or translation they’re often asked to take on without compensation.

To change that, administrators talked, last time around, about visiting historically black colleges in the South and school districts overseas in Spain and Puerto Rico. Two years later, they said they haven’t been able to afford to keep those trips going.

“We haven’t branched outside Connecticut this year,” Mack said Wednesday night. ​“Again, funding has been difficult. But we’re figuring out other ways [to reach candidates], without exhausting funds. We’re trying to innovate.”

Instead, they’ve been pursuing partnerships with foundations, universities and even public-housing agencies to see if they can find new ways of diversifying who’s on staff.

“To be very candid, over the years, we’ve noticed our students are not interested in education. Financially or otherwise, teaching is not the easiest thing these days,” Iline Tracey, the district’s interim superintendent said. ​“We’re trying to make sure we’re working with different organizations, with [New Haven Promise scholarship recipients], to make it more attractive, to become part of the teaching force in New Haven.”

Mack said that they’re looking to the Connecticut State Department of Education to recruit certified staff from Puerto Rico, and Southern Connecticut State University to take high-schoolers who express an interest in becoming an educator (or maybe even middle-schoolers, Tracey added).

Keisha Redd-Hannans, an assistant superintendent, said the district is also looking to reopen a teaching academy in the city’s high schools, as it used to have at Hillhouse.

An additional $100,000 grant from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund might also allow Elm City Communities, the city’s public-housing agency, to put up the security deposit and first month’s rent for teachers moving in from out-of-state this fall, said Kanicka Ingram-Mann, the district’s new senior talent recruiter.

The district is also subsidizing what it calls ​“alternative routes to certification,” Mack said.

That includes 18 teachers who are earning cross-endorsements to teach English learners with ACES, the state-funded regional education services center; about 18 slots for new teachers recruited by Teach for America, the national non-profit that recruits recent college grads to teach for at least two years; and 6 teachers-in-residence who are working toward their certification through Relay Graduate School’s yearlong program.

Those programs can still be tough to pay for, between the $5,000 tuition and $240 tests, according to two Relay participants, Yajaira Alamo and Lygia Davenport, who spoke at the hearing.

“I’ve seen my classmates drop out because they don’t have the funds,” said Alamo. ​“I went to New Haven Public Schools. I want to stay here and teach, but there are no open positions in the school that I’m currently working at. What can be done? We are in this program because we want to work for New Haven.”

Near the end of the meeting, Upper Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr., a former social-studies teacher at Lincoln-Bassett School, told the rest of the Education Committee that they could become one of those partners.

He said that the Board of Alders usually doesn’t have much control over school district spending, but he hinted that it could allocate a special line-item to cover tuition and testing costs for New Haven teachers in alternative-certification programs, like Relay.