A teacher recruitment and retention program under New York City’s Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) is actively working to diversify the teacher workforce to reflect the city’s diverse student population.
Launched in January 2015 and backed by a $16-million pledge from Mayor Bill de Blasio, NYC Men Teach is in its third and final year of a strategic plan to recruit, support and retain 1,000 more Black, Hispanic and Asian male teachers in the city’s classrooms.
Currently, 8.3 percent of the NYC teacher workforce is men of color, a stark contrast to the majority of students that come from various cultural backgrounds.
“One place where we lose students in the [teacher] pipeline is actually in the K-12 setting,” said Dr. Travis Bristol, primary researcher for the program and Peter Paul Assistant Professor at Boston University. “It’s no surprise that Black and Brown children, and boys in particular, fail at a higher rate than their peers. Those students exit the pipeline before they even have a chance to become teachers.”
Efforts to boost teacher diversity have increased as research shows that learning increases for students of all backgrounds when they have a teacher of color.
Men participating in NYC Men Teach receive teacher training and professional development through collaborations with the NYC Department of Education, City University of New York, the Center for Economic Opportunity and Teach for America. The program works with the men of color to overcome some of the common barriers and challenges they face in the teacher pipeline.
These challenges, Bristol said, include coming from “historically marginalized and disenfranchised schools” that do not equip the men with the needed skills for higher education, biases in hiring practices and school placement of teachers of color and the fact that a disproportionate number of candidates of color fail to pass teacher state-certification exams.
