Closing the Achievement Gap by Closing the Hiring Gap
Think about a school’s principal. What is the first image that pops into your head? If you’re like me I’m sure it was a middle aged white guy. Maybe he’s balding maybe he’s not. But I’m sure our images aren’t too different. Now imagine the average teacher. Again, I’m fairly certain the person you imagined was white but this time she is a woman. Why is that? Surely there are people in the education system that are in the minority racially but still have power. Sadly however this is often not the case. It is important that there is diversity within the power structure of our education system because if the voices of minorities are not taken into account, the gap between them and the students in the majority will only continue to increase.
In The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other Peoples Children, Delpit (1988) talks about an encounter with a Black elementary school teacher in which the teacher says of White people “they think they know what’s best for everybody, for everybody’s children. They won’t listen, White folks are going to do what they want to do anyway” (p. 119) she goes on to mention a few more encounters with people but they all seem to follow the same general theme. That theme of course being that White educators often do not listen to Black colleagues and parents when it pertains to their experience with education. After reading that passage I was interested to see how many public schools in the United States had an African American Principal and how many had a White principal. According to the U.S. Dept. of Education (2012), a whopping 80% of schools had a White principal while a measly 10% of schools had a Black principal.
The numbers get even worse when we look at teachers by race. 81.9% of teachers in the United States are White and only 6.8% are Black. It is no surprise that we are dealing with such a big achievement gap when the people who understand and best know how to help these students get ahead are vastly outnumbered by their White coworkers. One might argue that this is not really an issue since the achievement gap has closed over time but as Hochschild and Scovronick (2003) pointed out “the gap between black and white achievement grew during the 1990's” (p. 3). So, unfortunately, this is actually a problem that is worsening not improving.
If schools would start hiring more non-white educators and administrations perhaps we would see a shift in the rules of the culture of power. Perhaps Black students and other non-white students would feel more comfortable at school instead of feeling the need to conform to a culture they are not a part of, and maybe, just maybe with students finally feeling comfortable within their learning environment we could start to finally close the achievement gap that has plagued our education system for far too long. Just think it’s not unreasonable to say that right now these students aren’t learning since they haven’t even gotten past “love/belonging” on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Delpit, L. (1988). The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 119 — 139.
Hochschild, J. L., & Scovronick, N. B. (2003). The American Dream and the Public Schools. New York: Oxford University Press.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), “Public School Principal Data File,” 2011 — 12.
