DUBLIN — Colleges and universities should be much more aggressive in recruiting and preparing Black males to become school teachers.
That was one of the many sentiments expressed on Thursday among scholars and practitioners who gathered at the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education in Dublin.
The number of Black males in the U.S. teacher workforce continues to hover at about 2 percent – a dismal number — that former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tried to tackle back in March 2012 when he launched a national initiative aimed at recruiting and training 80,000 new teachers.
In other countries across the globe, the numbers are equally troubling.
Dr. Chance W. Lewis, the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Urban Education at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte said that colleges and universities in the U.S. could do more to steer Black male athletes at their institutions to consider pursuing teacher education programs.
“This is the opportunity for recruitment,” said Lewis. “All it would take is a conversation across campus.”
That conversation — between faculty, athletic advisers and coaches — is critical to increasing the numbers, said Lewis, whose book Black Male Teachers: Diversifying the United States’ Teacher Workforce that he co-wrote with Dr. Ivory A. Toldson, has been hailed as a roadmap for preparing administrators on how best to train Black male students for a career in education.
