Mensah M. Dean, Philadelphia Daily News, June 25, 2009
While Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has promised to fire teachers who don’t make the grade, there is a group of educators that she is desperately seeking: African-Americans.
The School Reform Commission yesterday approved a request from Ackerman’s administration to spend $250,000 to hire the Florida-based consulting firm Gans, Gans & Associates to recruit up to 50 “qualified” African-American teachers for the 2009-10 school year.
Prior to the 4-0 vote, Ackerman and district talent development chief Estelle Matthews explained that the number of black teachers within the system dropped from 28 percent in September to 24 percent this month.
{snip}
She added that initiatives also are underway to boost the number of Latino and Asian-American teachers.
Nearly 70 percent of the district’s 10,700 teachers are white, while Asian and Latino teachers together comprise about 5 percent of the teaching force, according to district data from April.
Of 984 teachers hired in September, 73 percent were white, 17.2 percent were black, the rest were Latino, Asian or other, the district data showed. Ackerman told the commission that 68 percent of the district’s students are black.
{snip}
Original article
Email
Mensah M. Dean
at deanm@phillynews.com .
(Posted on June 30, 2009)
Comments
Non-black districts want the black teachers, too. The advantage they have is that they can offer higher salaries and better working conditions (i.e. more white students) than the inner city schools.
They’re not worried about getting the best teachers for their children’s education. They’re just worried about “keepin it real”.
Arlene Overpaid Ackernan was the school Superintendent in San Francisco for a number of years.She never missed an opportunity to play the Race Card whenever the subject of blacks in education came up.If so few blacks want to become teachers, it is because they do not want to be victims of the kind of abuse that they gave out to white teachers when they were students.Can you blame them?
As I reported before, in an interview, a black female teacher admitted that there are few black teachers because blacks don’t want to teach black students. Blacks know the score.
Just as blacks don’t want to live in black communities and get out when the opportunities arise, blacks don’t want to teach blacks.
Given the caliber of Philly’s city school system, I’d think just hiring the first 250 blacks they find on the street would do the trick. It doesn’t really matter, since Philadelphia schools routinely pass those who can’t read even at the HS level:
http://www.northjersey.com/opinion/ahearn_062409.html
At the very least, I hope they aren’t planning on any testing procedures to vet the recruited teachers.
There will never be enough school teachers to bring about diversity, as long as the black population is so heavily represented in the younger age groups. I suppose this is whites fault too.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdorn/3253447063/
And there above, is a link to a photo of the charming Comrade Ackerman.
How odd that her “enriching” leadership, has brought about an actual decline in the percentage of black teachers in Philadelphia? Well, I guess that the $250,000 will be a key into solving that “mystery.”
As always, God help us all!
I will probably take some heat from the readers of this forum for saying this, but from my standpoint as an ex-teacher from a school with a high number of minority students, this is not a totally bad idea.
I am a middle age white male, and to be blunt, the cultural divide between me and my black students was too great to overcome. I was unable to provide that hook needed to draw my minority to be active learners in my science classroom, and they let me know they hated me every day for insisting on high standards of academic achievement and classroom behavior that I had experienced as a student 30 years earlier.
If a highly trained black teacher is able to come into the classroom, relate to the students, engage them in a positive fashion, and make them want to learn, it will be well worth the proposed $250,000.
The flip side of this is that it will free highly qualified white teachers to teach white students who still have some degree of interest in learning and using appropriate behavior. I am now in this category, and I am much happier.
Jared from Pa.—
“It takes $250,000 to find “qualified” black teachers for Philadelphia.”
And it takes another $250,000 to find ones that can pass a test in their field.
Remember the teacher’s test for practicing teachers reported a while back? In one state alone 63% of teachers failed the test on subjects that they were teaching.
Because white mean IQ is one standard deviation above blacks, most teachers anywhere with a significant white population will naturally be white. If schools boards want unqualified , stupid pseudo-teachers to teach in their schools just to fill a quota, they aren’t any smarter than the rejects this program will find to fill the quota. Maybe they can find teachers like one a friend of mine told me about. A man of COLOR, who slept through every day of school, and never even tried to teach his second grade students. The only attention he gave them was to pay the second graders not to bother him while he slept.
“I am a middle age white male, and to be blunt, the cultural divide between me and my black students was too great to overcome.”
There is an alternative. Cheaper than $250,000. Stop teaching black kids to hate and be racist towards whites.
hope all of the white teachers lose their jobs to minority teachers, after all, white teachers have pushed multiculturalism for years. let them reap what they sow.
You know, I thought race was not supposed to matter in a “colorblind” society. Yet it obviously plays such a role that there is strict data kept on the racial make-up of both the staff and student bodies.
Why?
If it is necessary to make policy decisions based on any considerations other than personal achievement levels and morally responsible behaviors, then we’re living in an unjust society.
We still have this big race problem after all these years?
Something’s deeply amiss with our political philosophy.
Achievement, making a personal contribution to society, and behaving in morally acceptable and responsible ways — these are the only things that are supposed to matter in a just society.
In this context, ‘qualified’ means little more than ‘literate’. Simple literacy can take virtually any black virtually anywhere. Why should literate blacks stop at being school teachers, making fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year, when they can become college ‘professors’ and ‘administrators’. Check into the salaries offered at college level, today.
I suspect that Philadelphia cannot find enough black teachers capable of functioning on even the most rudimentary level. ‘Qualified’ for black teachers means about as much as ‘graduated’ does for black students.
“I am a middle age white male, and to be blunt, the cultural divide between me and my black students was too great to overcome.”
Why can’t the ones who tell us to see beyond race, see beyond race. They always have to tell us We’re the ones who can’t see beyond race, and then say that makes us ignorant.
When I entered the teaching profession I had no racial bias at all, but after two years in a school with a 40% black enrollment I can tell you this. I would rather walk across the Sahara Desert without food or water than ever be exposed to what I had to put up with involving black students. My experience cause me to change my mind about different races and to place blacks at the very bottom of the barrel. There are VERY RARE exceptions I am sure, but I never saw even one of them.
I am a male teacher of Asian descent with masters degrees in Education, Math and Science, a Ph.D. in Ed Technology, and teaching certificates in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics. I have 15 years of exemplary teaching service in a mid-western state, and I have the teacher evaluation sheets to prove it. When I moved to the Philadelphia area and applied for a teaching position with the Phila. School District, I was APPALLED to learn that schools in this city hire according to a blatantly racist AAO (African American Only) and NAAO (Non-African American Only)policy! — with AAO candidates being assigned the best schools (such as they are) while NAAO candidates are relegated to the very worst. I was dumbfounded! My PSD hiring interview was utterly subjective, inane, and rendered by HR personnel who had not been in an actual classroom in decades (if ever!) My interviewer was very nice and extremely young and clueless. I scored a 70 out of 100 points. An African American candidate who interviewed shortly before me (22 years old and, again, very nice, but his grammar was truly appalling, and he wanted to teach ENGLISH!)scored a 96! I was told that I could select my teaching assignment only after those who’d scored higher than me had selected theirs. I thought the personnel officer was joking; when I discovered that she was not, I vowed that I would do ANYTHING —work in Burger King, pump gas…you name it — before I’d EVER teach for the Philadelphia School District. However, I quickly found employment with a first-rate (98% white) private academy, where I may earn less money, but I am highly respected. The moral of my story: NAAO teachers need to stop propping up a school system that frankly deserves to collapse. (And I truly hope I’m around to see it happen!)
To Enough is Enough:
Didn’t it occur to you WHY you were given an ORAL interview instead of a written examination? Blacks historically score very low on objective written exams. However, a school district interviewer is free to assign whatever score he/she likes to an oral interview—and grading “Whitey” (or, in your case, an Asian) 26 points lower than an inexperienced, inarticulate Black man is the best way to ensure that competent whites/asians do not grab up the most promising teaching assignments. The Philadelphia School District has grossly discriminated against white/asian teacher candidates for years. But I do not blame the blacks for this; I blame the white, largely female (and I am female) teaching force who go along with this disgusting policy by continuing to work for the Philly school district. As for me, I left before my interview, and I got a higher-paying job in private industry. Perhaps you ladies should do the same—before the new black superintendent strikes down teacher seniority rights (which, believe me, she WILL) and starts reassigning all you “experienced” (read WHITE)teachers to all the worst schools. When you play with the devil, you’re bound to get burned.
