Articles

Minorities Miss Quality Teachers

Laura Diamond, Maurice Tamman, AJC Staff
May 17, 2004

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, students at majority black schools in Georgia are much more likely than students at majority white schools to have inexperienced teachers.

Across Georgia, teachers with fewer than four years of experience are twice as likely to work in schools with a high percentage of minority students, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In metro Atlanta, the problem is more extreme. The worst example is in Atlanta Public Schools, where 88 percent of the students are black and more than half of their teachers have fewer than four years of experience.

Black parents say they know schools have to hire new teachers, but some are tired of seeing high-minority schools getting an unfair share.

Julia Allen, whose children attend Conley Hills Elementary, a south Fulton County school where 97 percent of students are minorities, joined other parents to complain a few years ago when they learned that all of the school's fourth-grade teachers were inexperienced. The principal responded by adding a more senior teacher to the team.

"I want what is best for my children, and I know that means a balanced teacher staff," said Allen.

Arthur Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, calls the situation the "dirty, little secret of education."

"This is not news to educators," Wise said. "They may say they're working on fixing it, but we really fail to make the commitment."

Focus on better quality

Georgia is trying to improve teacher quality at low-performing schools, which are often high-minority schools, said Cyndy Stephens of the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, which oversees teacher recruitment, training and certification.

"Yes, there are some circumstances where the children who need the best teachers aren't getting them," Stephens said. "We are all working hard to improve this, but it takes time."

The teacher disparity bothers many because schools with the highest percentage of minority students typically have a high concentration of poor students and low test scores. Many experts argue that a highly skilled teacher is the key to helping lower-performing students catch up.

Gwinnett County parent Yvette Byrd said having an experienced teacher matters. Her two children attend Meadowcreek Elementary, where 30 percent of the students are black and 46 percent are Hispanic.

"I would say that 90 percent of what my child gets is from the teacher," Byrd said. "You can have a lousy curriculum. You can have a crumbling facility. You can have no resources. But if you have an experienced teacher who knows what she's doing in the classroom, you're set."

Most parents don't think about teacher quality, Wise said. But wealthy white parents are more likely to demand experienced teachers, and administrators respond to that pressure, he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling improved educational opportunities for black students, but it led to the loss of many experienced teachers from the public schools, said Vanessa Siddle Walker, author of "Their Highest Potential: An African-American School Community in the Segregated South."

Integration cost jobs

In the years shortly before the Brown ruling in 1954, black teachers in Georgia and five other Southern states were better educated than white teachers on average. Data from the National Education Association shows 85 percent of minority teachers in the South had college degrees, compared with 75 percent of white teachers. Data from that era did not track years of experience.

As schools started to integrate, many black teachers lost their jobs because most white parents didn't want black teachers in their children's classrooms, Walker said.

All children suffer when they have weak teachers, but the problem is worse for minority students because they generally score lower on tests. For example, 75 percent of white students passed the science section of the Georgia High School Graduation Test compared to only 40 percent of black students last year.

That achievement gap is caused by economics, parents' education level, teacher quality and other factors. The best way to eliminate the gap, researchers say, is to guarantee that minority children have experienced teachers.

New teachers are not as able as peers with more experience, said economist Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow on education policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Some classroom teachers agree. Amy Camp taught for nine years in Clayton County before transferring to Fayette County this year. She rarely meets inexperienced teachers in Fayette, but came across many in Clayton. Those new teachers struggled because they didn't know the curriculum and couldn't control rowdy students.

"Those teachers were not bad people. They just didn't have the skills," Camp said. "Take me for example. I don't think I was ever a bad teacher, it is just that I am a better one now."

Lauren Nichols, a first-year teacher at Atlanta's Benteen Elementary, said new teachers can still be good teachers.

"I think it is important for people to understand that just because you're new to a job doesn't mean you can't do it," she said.

High turnover troubles

Hanushek's research shows that having a very good teacher instead of an average teacher for five years in a row closes the achievement gap in math.

Minority schools are less likely to have experienced teachers because of high staff turnover, said Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies teacher quality.

"Suburban schools have higher growth rates but they're not getting higher numbers of new [inexperienced] teachers," Ingersoll said. "The reason why minority schools are getting it is because of the revolving door."

For teachers, high-minority schools often are seen as a stop on the way to a better school, he said.

A Georgia State University study found that white teachers are more likely to leave mostly black schools than mostly white schools.

During the 2000-01 school year, about 20 percent of Georgia's white teachers left schools with small black-student populations, the study found. The turnover rate was about 31 percent for white teachers when black students were in the majority.

Stephens said teachers leave because of poor working conditions such as discipline problems, weak school leadership and a lack of supplies. She and other experts say that federal, state and local officials finally are starting to address the problem.

In DeKalb County, school officials and a teachers' organization started the New Teacher Academy in an effort to reduce teacher turnover in the district, which has a 90 percent minority enrollment. The program brings together novice and veteran teachers, who meet twice a month to discuss curriculum, discipline and other issues that often bewilder new teachers.

Some systems have reduced turnover through policies on teacher transfers. Gwinnett County requires teachers to work at a school for three years before they can transfer to another school in the system. In Fulton County, teachers must work at a school for two years before transferring.

Still, experts say the experience gap robs minority students of a fair shot at a quality education.

"The real concern is you have a lot of rookie teachers where you need experienced teachers the most," Hanushek said. "Unless we make some changes, the problems will still be with us when we celebrate Brown's 100th."

Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution. Further reproduction, retransmission or distribution of these materials without the prior written consent of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, and any copyright holder identified in the material's copyright notice, is prohibited.

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