Enough. Too much. No more. (1619-2021)
Title Slide: Recruitment is Not Enough: How School Organizational Conditions Affect Black Male Teacher Turnover
Partly funded by: The National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation The Albert Shanker Institute
Leah Gordon: Thank you all for joining us for the first talk in our new Education Research Speaker Series.
I'm really excited to see this lecture series getting off the ground. I'm hoping it will provide a setting for Brandeis students, faculty, and staff, from across the university to learn about recent research in the multidisciplinary field of education. Over time, I'm also hoping it will provide a space where Brandeis faculty and graduate students, as well as guests from other universities like Professor Bristol, will share and discuss their work.
So I want to start by thanking the many Brandeis departments and organizations that have helped to make this series possible:
The Education Program; the newly established Marya Levenson Fund for Education Equity and Racial Justice, and if you are excited about this fund, which I am as well, we will soon in the chat have a place where you can find out more about it and contribute to this fund as well. But it honors Marya Levenson, who is recently emerita, and was the head of the Brandeis Education Program for a long time.
I also want to thank the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy, the Brandeis History Department, the Brandeis Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the School of Arts and Sciences Co-curricular Fund.
And in addition, I want to thank a number of people who have helped to make this series possible: Eileen Kell, Manuel Tuan, Twama Nambili, Mennen Gordon, Danielle Igra, Susan Eaton, and Marya Levenson.
I hope many of you will join us for the next two talks in our series. The first by Crystal Sanders, Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies, at Penn State University, who is speaking on "A Forgotten Migration, Black Southerners and Graduate Education During "The Age of Jim Crow", on March 15th at 4:00 pm. And Stefan Bradley, Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Loyola Marymount University, discussing his most recent book, "Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League", on April 12th at 4:30 p.m.
So let me tell you now a bit about today's speaker who we're thrilled to have with us. Professor Travis J. Bristol, is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. Dr. Bristol received his A.B. from Amherst College, and M.A. from Stanford University, and a PhD from Teacher's College Columbia University. Before joining Berkeley's faculty, he was a Peter Paul Assistant Professor at Boston University.
Dr. Bristol's research is situated at the intersection of education policy and teacher education. Using qualitative methods, he explores three related research strands. One, the role of educational policies in shaping teacher workplace experiences and retention; two, district and school-based professional learning communities; and three, the role of race and gender in educational settings.
Dr. Bristol's research has appeared in peer reviewed journals, including Urban Education, the American Educational Research Journal, and the Journal of Teacher Education, Teacher College Record, and the Harvard Educational Review. He is currently co-editing with Conra Gist, the "Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color", which will be published by the American Educational Research Association.
Professor Bristol has received a number of different awards and fellowships: the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Ford Foundation, and AERA, all awarded Dr. Bristol dissertation fellowships in 2013. In 2016, he received the inaugural teacher diversity research award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. In 2019, Dr. Bristol received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and an emerging scholar award from the Comparative and International Education Society, African Diaspora SIG. And in 2020, he received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.
He is also directly involved in the world of education in many ways I think you'll hear about today. Dr. Bristol is on the Board of Directors of Teach Plus, the National Center for Teacher Residencies, and the East Bay School for Boys. He is a former student and teacher in New York City Public Schools, and teacher educator within the Boston Teacher Residency Program.
So, I'm thrilled to have Professor Bristol here with us.
We will save questions for the end of the talk, and I will give you a chance once Professor Bristol is finished, to raise your hand in the, using the reactions button. If you have pressing questions that come up and want to put them in the chat, I will collect them for after Professor Bristol has finished speaking, but I turn the virtual microphone over to you, Professor Bristol. Thank you so much and welcome to Brandeis.
Travis Bristol: Thank you, Leah, for that introduction.
I see that there are some familiar faces, Sharon and Danielle. And I should have noted that this is in some ways a homecoming.
Marya hired me in 2013 to teach the urban ed course that my friend and colleague Derron Wallace taught who is now in your faculty.
Most of the things that he teaches, so I know Brandeis well, and so I'm honored to be sharing some of my research.
I'm not sad that I'm here in California, where it's slightly warmer I hear than in Boston, having lived in Boston for many years.
My, let's see here. Are you seeing my screen? Yeah, okay. So my talk today, Recruitment is not Enough, examines how school organizational conditions affect Black male teacher turnover.
I just want to provide a brief outline for the talk and how I'd like to engage with you today. I'll share briefly maybe a research, my research agenda, the challenge as I see it, which is the persistence and the consequence of turnover for teachers of color. Typically, you'll hear me talk about teacher-student ethno-racial mismatching in U.S. Public Schools, what I have termed the "added value" for students of color when taught by a teacher of color, and turnover for teachers of color.
I'll briefly share some of my prior work and theoretical framework, the methods and data for this one study that is a slice of my work, findings, some of the implication for practice, policy, and research, some future work, then open it up for questions.
Like many researchers, there are formative experiences in my life that have influenced the questions I explore. One such experience was attending what Jonathan Kozol would call an apartheid school in New York City. Located in lower Manhattan, a neighborhood that was predominantly White, my peers were Black and Latinx extrapolate from various parts of the city, would attend Washington Irving High School. Every morning for four years, I entered this lobby. If you look closely, you'll see two metal detectors. Having to walk through these metal detectors, an example of what Carla Shedd calls, the extension of a universal carceral apparatus, was a microcosm of what it was like to be a student at this High School. Learning was primarily focused on control and compliance.
As senior body president, my assistant principal arranged for me to visit Stuyvesant High School, and meet with their student body president.
While the visit arrange, was arranged around the pretense of establishing some form of collaboration between our schools, I also know that my assistant principal wanted me to learn an early lesson in the nature and the persistence of ethno-racial inequality and its consequences in a racialized organization. I traveled 20 minutes south on the train to get to Stuyvesant High School. It's the city's flagship exam school. I was struck by the fact that I did not have to walk through a metal detector to enter Stuyvesant.
Stuyvesant was also deeply segregated. Predominantly Asian, White, and this school appeared significantly more well-resourced than my school. Here's a picture of a pool, that the student body president proudly presented during my visit.
My takeaway as a twelfth grader was that even in a progressive city like New York City, there were a tale of two types of schools. Each segregated, with resources inequitably distributed across ethno-racial lines. And while I was unaware of the post-secondary outcomes of students at Stuyvesant, I knew that less than half the seniors at my high school, entered college the following year.
Fast forward, when I moved to the left coast to do my student teaching at the Stanford Teacher Education Program, I saw similar patterns of ethno-racial inequality. But this time, unlike New York City Public Schools, where segregation existed between schools.
At Menlo-Atherton High School where I did my student teaching, segregation existed within the school. As a pre-service teacher, Black, as a Black male pre-service teacher, I was placed in the quote unquote college prep class in which students were predominantly Latinx, Pacific Islander and Black. The consequence I observed of the segregated classes was that the cognitive paths assigned to students in the college prep class, did not reflect what I was learning in my curriculum and instruction content methods courses, about supporting students to be college ready.
I did, however, see those high cognitive demand tasks, in the honors classes that I observed during my prep periods. And those students in the classes were predominantly White. Now, three months into the academic year at the very moment that I was trying to make sense of this tale of two practice schools if you will, I was offered a job at this high school. Administrators made it clear that they were in many ways recruiting me because of the high quality prep I received at the Stanford Teacher Education Program.
However, and they also made it clear that the school had a lack of Black teachers. There was only one other Black woman on the faculty. While MA administrators had done the necessary work to recruit me,I wasn't sure about their interest in supporting my growth and development as a Black teacher.
I ultimately declined MA's offer, and after teaching for five years in New York City Public Schools, what motivated me to pursue a PhD was a desire
to understand how segregation between and within schools, shaped Black and Latinx students' in and out of school outcomes.
Over time, that research interest shifted when then Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, launched the U.S. Department Black Male Teacher Recruitment Campaign.
Photograph: Arne Duncan with 6 Black male US politicians, including Rep. John Lewis.
Duncan described it as troubling that less than 2% of the nation's teachers were Black men. Now, while policy makers design recruitment efforts to draw attention to the persistence of the under-representation of Black male teachers in U.S. public schools, thinking back about my own experience about being recruited at Menlo-Atherton, I wanted to explore if policies aimed at recruiting Black male teachers were enough, without consideration to the supports Black teachers needed to stay at the blackboard.
Put simply, recruitment efforts of teacher and faculty members of color draw attention to the persistence of racial inequality and racialized organizations.
However, we understand why Black men are not at the blackboard, and the consequences of meso-level policies are focused solely on recruitment, requires, I believe, an examination of how school districts support and retain Black male teachers.
Now, before I continue, it's important to note that our country's long and storied preoccupation with Black men in public and private spaces, has led to Black women being understudied in educational research, and an absence of policies to address Black women and Black girls in and out of school outcomes.
I focused in this study, on how organizational conditions affect Black male teacher turnover to draw attention to the limits of a Black male teacher diversity effort.This focus on the organizational conditions of Black males has informed more recent work on the experiences of Black educators, both men and women.
My goal as a researcher is to inform teacher education, and to shape educational policy. So I'd like to use my talk today to demonstrate how one study on the school-based experiences and retention of Black male teachers in Boston Public Schools, informed past and ongoing pre-and in-service affinity groups for pre-service and in-service teachers of color. I will then discuss how I've used my research and work in practice, to shape federal, state, and local policy, and more recently to inform international policy, international policy discourse. During Q and A, I'd love to share some future directions of my work, that explores New York City's efforts to design a mentoring program to support novice male teachers of color.
When then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Morehouse and said it was troubling that less than 2% of the nation's teachers were Black men,
one of the reasons Duncan said it was troubling, is because there is an ethno-racial mismatch between teachers and students in U.S. public schools.
For example, there are three times as many Latinx and Asian students, as there are Latinx and Asian teachers.
In U.S. public schools there are two times as many Black students, as there are Black teachers in U.S. public schools. Now, of course, there is variation in these national percentages. For example, here in the state of California where I currently sit, we see a higher percentage of Latinx and Asian teachers when compared to their, to the national average.
And one question that I often got, particularly especially when I was in a place like Boston was, "Why does it matter? Why does the ethno-racial diversity of the teacher workforce matter? Is teacher, is ethno-racial parity the goal? Are we in a situation where we need Latinx teachers only, teaching Latinx students, or White teachers only teaching White students?"
One of the ways that I've attempted to answer this question is in this research synthesis, by highlighting what I termed the added value of Latinx and Black teachers for the Latinx and Black students.
Now for the purposes of this talk, I'll highlight just very briefly this focus on Black teachers but I invite you to read this research synthesis, to understand and to gain some insight into the added value of Latinx teachers for Latinx students. In that research synthesis, I draw attention to how Black teachers draw on Black students' cultural and linguistic experiences to increase engagement and learning for their Black students.
Much of the seminal qualitative work on Black teachers' capacity to attend to their Black students social and emotional learning, has influenced the growing body of causal in quantitative experimental research on achievement and social and emotional outcomes.
One of the most seminal pieces was an early piece that looked at the Tennessee Class Size Study, and found that increased achievement for Black students, taught by Black, increases in achievement for Black students, taught by a Black teacher, when compared to Black students taught by a White teacher.
There's also some emerging research, that teachers of color added value extends beyond their work with the students of color.
When recent study analyzed data from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, and found that White students had more favorable impressions of teachers of color when compared to White teachers.
Now, given the body of research on the added value of teachers of color for their students, a troubling trend continues. Teachers of color turn over at a higher rate than their White colleagues.
This bar graph presents data from the school and staffing survey, a nationally representative survey on the schooling experiences of teachers.
This graph in particular, compared the turnover rate for White teachers and teachers of color. Beginning in 1994, beginning during the 1994, 1995 school year, we began to see a disproportionate rate of turnover, for teachers of color when compared to their White peers. Since that last administration of the school and staffing survey, we see about a four percentage point gap, at the rate of which teachers turnover, when compared to their White peers. Now, these patterns regarding differences in turnover for Black and Latinx teachers when compared to their White and Asian peers, continue to hold.
In the state of Delaware, similar to the school and staffing survey, when looking at teachers across the state who began teaching in fall 2019, a higher percentage of Black and Latinx teachers did not return to teaching in the state in fall 2020, when compared to White and Asian teachers.
An even closer examination, one looking at the intersection of race and gender in Texas, as well as a re-analysis ofthe school and staffing survey found that Black teachers have a higher rate of turnover when compared to their Black female colleagues. So, while federal policy makers like then Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and state local, and state and local policy makers and practitioners seek to attack the 2% problem, focused on Black male teacher recruitment, it may be equally important when you frame the problem, not as one focused on recruitment, but more on understanding the nature of why Black men turn over, and the consequences of meso-level policies that focus solely on recruitment.
Now, given that Black male teachers represent less than 2% of the teacher workforce, Kanter's theory of numbers and group composition, provides a useful framework for understanding the experiences of those in the numerical minority.
Kanter, who cited the experiences of women working in a male dominated profession, found that the culture in that organization was defined by the proportion of individuals who belong to a social group. Kanter theorized that the men who were in the numerical majority in the organization, shaped the organization's culture, and the social group that is in the numerical minority, women in the Kanter study, exhibited three responses to their numerical minority status.
First one was performance pressure or the hyper-awareness of having to perform job-related tasks in ways that were different than colleagues in the numerical majority. Boundary heightening, or the perception by those in the numerical majority that all of their interactions with those in the numerical majority, are informed by the differences in social group status. And finally, role encapsulation, where those in the numerical minority believe they are constantly fighting stereotypes and pre-existing generalizations about their social group.
For Kanter, these three organizational responses, performance pressure, boundary heightening, and role encapsulation, are observed in skewed groups.
The one numerical minority composition ranges from 1% to 15%. Given that Black male teachers represent 2% of U.S. Public Schools, Kanter studied this organizational framework, becomes useful in understanding Black male teacher turnover and the school-based experiences in particular for Black male teachers.
Now, one important critique of organizational frameworks such as Kanter's that is colorblind, that it meant, that it imagines a world, in which one's treatment and the experiences of, someone's experiences are not based on their race. There's an absence of structural theory to explain race. Race is examined solely at the individual level, and there's a need for a meso-level framework to understand organizations as racial structures. And I'll get back and buildn the work of Victor Ray, who talks about and helps us understand racialized organizations as I build on Kanter's work.
There is of course a rich body of empirical research on Black male teachers, this research has found that Black men become teachers to improve the lives of Black children, that their dispositions and the importance that they place on enacting culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy, that they're positioned by school staff to serve as surrogate fathers, and that they're expected to reify heteronormative and hyper-masculine behavior by colleagues and students.
Now, given the previous finding that Black male teachers have higher rates of turnover than their peers, one gap in the research literature was an exploration of how the organizational culture in schools, shaped teachers' decisions to stay or leave. To fill this gap, with the support of a colleague, I designed a survey for the Black male, for Black male teachers in Boston Public Schools, which 32% of the Black male teachers in the district responded.
I should, it's important to note that a range of, that the mean 32% response rate falls between the range of a practical response rate for survey search.
One pattern that emerged from the data, was that Black male teachers who were the only Black member of their faculty, reported different organizational experiences when compared to Black men in schools with three or more Black male teachers.
For example, when I asked respondents if being Black caused people in their schools to fear them, Black men who were the only Black men in their schools, were more likely to agree, when compared to Black men in schools with three or more Black male teachers. This led to the, this led me to conceptualize "loners," are Black men who were the only Black men in their building, and "groupers," Black men in schools with three or more Black male teachers.
So here are some data here on Boston Public Schools and you'll see that some of these data around turnover continue to hold. Now, while the descriptive analysis that I just shared in, from that piece on the Black male teacher environment survey gave me insight into some element of how Black male teachers experienced the organizational dynamics of their schools, I was less clear about the mechanisms, or the "how's" that shaped their experiences.
I also wanted to test this emerging theory, that the school-based experiences of Black men vary by their numerical composition. So then I set out to answer the following three questions. How do Black male teachers experience the organizational dynamics of performance pressure, boundary heightening and role encapsulation? Do the in-school experiences vary for loners and groupers? And how does a school's organizational context, such as relationships with colleagues and school administration, influence loners' and groupers' decisions to stay in their schools or in teaching?
For the sake, maybe I'll just quickly just talk about, I'll share briefly some of the methods. I don't want to spend too much time on that because I do want to get to some of the findings. You can read some of this. This was published in Teacher's College Record, but I employed a phenomenological approach. Researchers who use the phenomenological approach are interested in understanding how an individual or groups of individuals experience a phenomenon. Here, the phenomenon in question is Black male teachers school based experiences. The phenomenon are observed through a researcher's exploration
of a study participant's living and interacting with the world. The unit of analysis in a phenomenological approach is a researcher, is a research subject in a relation to objects. So in this study, unit of analysis is an examination of Black male teachers in relation to their colleagues and their job related tasks. Interviews and observations become the primary tools for gathering data in a phenomenological approach, as it allows for the most reliable source of exploring participants' experiences with the phenomenon.
Now, Boston Public Schools becomes really an ideal setting to study the Black male teacher because of its ongoing efforts around recruiting and supporting these teachers. As many of you know, in 1974, the Garrity Decision mandated that at least 25% of Boston Public School teachers self-identify as Black. And that percentage was based on the percentage of Black students in the district. At the time of this study, 20% of the district's teachers were Black, while 45% of the students were Black. To explore how organizational factors influenced the ways Black male teachers experienced schools, and given the importance
of asking participants, to describe their experiences in relation to the phenomenon in question, I carried out two rounds of semi-structured interviews.
The schools for this study were selected using a purposive sample.
So based on human resource data and publicly available data, I interviewed 27 Black male teachers, across 14 schools, seven schools with one Black male teacher, seven schools with three or more Black male teachers, and I conducted 51 semi-structured interviews which lasted about an hour. Now, here in the seven schools that I selected, I was true in my sample and the larger district. There were some similarities in the organizational characteristics with schools with one Black male teacher. For example, schools with one Black male teacher were on average led by a White leader, and these schools also tended to be pilot or innovation schools who received greater flexibility around hiring and curriculum.
Patterns also emerged in the sample that reflected those within the district, around the school organizational characteristics were schools with three or more Black male teachers. For example, these schools were often led by a person of color, specifically, a Black principal. Schools with three or more Black male teachers were also turnaround schools. Those of you who remember a race to the top and school turnaround, will remember, will know that turnaround schools were low performing schools in the district. New schools were being reconstituted, principals were fired, teachers were fired, they had to re-apply for their jobs, and the principal had five years to turn the school around.
As I began selecting schools with three or more Black male teachers, I observed that some of the schools, I observed that many of the schools were turnaround schools. I was, I personally selected a school that was not a turnaround school, Crispus Attucks, and during the course of data collection that year, Crispus Attucks became, was designated to become a turnaround school.
First-round interviews took place in the fall 2012 fell across these seven dimensions.
Slide titled: Data Collection: First Wave of Semi-Structured Interviews.
1. job placement; 2. the school as an organization; 3. interactions with colleagues; 4. interactions with students and male students of color; 5. school emographics; 6. retention; 7. background characteristics.
Some of the work now questions included,who were some of the teachers you interact with when you are not teaching? Do you intend to stay or leave?
An analysis of first-round interviews influenced the second-round interviews that fell across these 10 dimensions.
Slide titled: Data Collection: Second Wave of Semi-Structured Interviews.
1. pathways into the profession and preparation; 2. hiring; 3. the school as an organization; 4. interactions with colleagues; 5. small learning community demographics; 6. school-based specific questions for Groupers; 7. school-based specific questions for Loners; 8. the experience of being a Black male teacher; 9. retention; 10. experiences with teacher certification exams.
Here are some of the sample questions that I asked participants. In particular, I asked if you were leaving the previous semester? Is that still true?
I should also note that at the end of the, at the end of the following year, I interviewed folks, participants fall 2012, spring 2013, and I looked back with participants fall 2013, to see if indeed they had stayed or left.
So I'll just put up, so there was, here goes some of my data analysis. To ensure researcher, to ensure reliability and validity, I had to acknowledge my own subjectivity as a Black male teacher and former high school teacher.
Given the phenomenological approach, I employed bracketing or setting aside my assumptions of participants' experiences, to focus on the experiences of Black male teachers. I bridled my understanding of how Black male teachers perceived their school-based experiences until second wave interviews.
To ensure validity and reliability, I triangulated my data by using multiple data sources to understand Black male teacher school-based experiences. Specifically I relied on human resource data across 118 schools. The analysis of 86 respondents from the Black male teacher environment, survey and nine month observation across 14 schools, and 51 interviews across 27 Black male teachers.
Again, here are the two, here are some of the two research questions. The first research questions. And this is what I found. Across participants, I observed that Black male teachers experienced, that Black male teachers experienced performance pressure.
But unlike the participants in Kanter's study, the pressures to perform did not come from colleagues inside of the organization. Instead, the pressures came from this internal recognition that as Black men, they had a unique responsibility and a calling to improve the social and academic outcomes of students of color.
For example, Jacob Collins, an elementary school teacher, said "Many times the kids we serve don't have males in their lives, or they don't have males who are like us. I've been called to do this work."
I also observed that Black male teachers experienced performance pressure, and they responded to this performance pressure by engaging in what Wrzesniewski and Dutton termed job crafting, or re-designing aspects of one's work, to increase job satisfaction. Black male teachers felt pressure to perform increased learning outcomes for students of color and engage in job crafting by creating roles not assigned to them by administrators, but that focused on improving the social, improving the students' school-based experiences. Specifically Black male teachers in this study crafted jobs that were designated to increase their engagement with the organization.
The degree to which participants were successful however, around job crafting, was associated with the number of other Black men on the faculty. Groupers were more successful with actualizing job crafting than loners.
So let me, let me give you some examples. At Clarke High School, study participants described creating and participating in a teacher work group, comprised exclusively of the school's Black teachers, with focus on, with focus on addressing Black students' social and emotional challenges.
At Clarke, Black male and female teachers believed that their colleagues were not doing enough to increase promotion rates and decrease suspension rates for the school's Black students.
Slaughter Gibson said, "So I proposed last year that we establish a Black caucus to deal with these issues."
Their colleague Samuel Soyinka said, "The intent was to see how we help Black kids.
We are concerned because many of them get suspended."
Kendall Robeson said, "And we met maybe twice, trying to bounce ideas off of each other and maybe to vent to each other a little bit to see if we can come up with some conclusions or ways to help one another and our students."
One factor that appeared to embolden Black teachers to pursue an unpopular agenda of creating a working group to improve the academic and social outcomes for the Black students at their schools, was the presence of many more Black male teachers.
Participants at Clarke talked about this idea of there being a critical mass. And so because of this critical mass, they were able to engage in job crafting to reshape the school's core mission to include a focus on supporting Black children.
In contrast, Black men in schools with only one Black male teacher had less success at engaging or actualizing job crafting. For example, Josiah Washington described how he voluntarily joined the school's hiring committee to increase the number of male teachers and male teachers of color on the faculty.
He said, "I was the only male of color. I wanted to see if there was a way to have more males, whether they be of color or not. We have basically a K-8 model where students very rarely have a male teacher."
Washington did not merely join the hiring committee to fill a vacancy. He crafted a job that included advocating for male teachers and male teachers of color in an attempt to diversify the faculty. Washington said that he even invited male colleagues whom he had worked with at a previous school to apply.
Colleagues he believed that would be effective teachers. However, the hiring committee comprised of all White women, said that these applicants were not a good fit.
If that reality, Washington said, "After we finished doing all the hiring, I felt as though my opinion wasn't garnered, because we ended up having all females. My push was for males. So why am I here, if it's not going to be considered? I have other things I could be doing."
Loners when compared to groupers, were less successful at job crafting. This I believe, was a result of the absence of a critical mass to change the organizational culture.
Here, I extend, next I extend Kanter's framework of boundary heightening, or the perception by those in the numerical minority, that all of their interactions with those in the numerical majority, are informed by differences in social group status. And I do that to include race theory of racialized organizations. And one tenet of racialized organizations, is a racialized hierarchy.
Ray posited that a consequence of people of color in organizations attempting to challenge the White racial hierarchy is racial discrimination.
When I asked Dennis Sangister what it was like to be a faculty member at his school, Dennis Sangister, a loner, responded and said, "It sucks, and if I could swear I would."
As I probed, I gained deeper insight into why it sucks. Then just to describe an organizational climate in which during faculty meetings, he pushed his colleagues to move away from harsh disciplinary practices to restorative justice practices, to design curriculum that decentered Whiteness. His colleagues routinely dismissed his ideas, which he viewed as racial discrimination.
Sangister went on to say, "They don't respect my professional opinion. Is it because I'm Black? Even now it still bugs me. If I'm saying it, are you not hearing me? It really messes with me sometimes. It makes you feel inadequate. Am I saying something that's crazy? I've been educated. I have a Master's. I pass all of these MTELs, just like everyone else. It's frustrating you know."
There were social and emotional challenges that characterized the school-based experiences of Black male teachers. And as it relates to boundary heightening and role encapsulation, the intensity in which Black male teachers experience these organizational dynamics, are associated with the numerical competition of Black men on the faculty. Loners experience these organizational dynamics more than groupers.
Again, I draw on race theory of racialized organizations to extend Kanter's conceptualization of role encapsulation. As you might remember, Kanter describes role encapsulation as the belief of constantly fighting stereotypes for those in the numerical minority, and pre-existing generalizations about their social group status. And I include race tenets on the diminishing agency of racial groups in racialized organizations. Agency over one's time is shaped by one's location within the racialized hierarchy. Racialized subordinates have less control over their time and their non-work time.
To illustrate this, Black male teachers in this study believed that their colleagues viewed them as police officers or behavior managers first, and teachers second. Teachers described how their colleagues would often interrupt their classes to bring a misbehaving student, often students of color, for them to manage. I can see that most people, one student, one participant, Jermaine Carter, who was a grouper,
"'Cause I can see that most people would feel enthused that they're helping out their colleagues, they picked me because they respect me. But it's also becoming a burden now because I have other things to do. I have to plan. I have to plan for my kids to be on a specific track, plan my scope and sequence, and correct papers. Just the regular things that teachers do."
Black male teachers, because of where they sit in the racial hierarchy, have less agency over their time. Jermaine Carter here reminds us, tells us that he's trying to just be a regular teacher. Just try to do the things that regular teachers do. Because of where he sits in the racial hierarchy, he has less agency over his work. Moreover, Black male teachers describe limited agency or opportunities to improve their practice, because a great proportion
of their time was dictated by having to do the work that their colleagues chose not to do. It was to take care of quote unquote, misbehaving students of color. While loners described experiencing the organizational dynamics of performance pressure, boundary heightening, and role encapsulation more intensely than groupers, I believed that loners would turnover at a higher rate than groupers. Counter-intuitively, all of the loners returned to their same position the following year.
In this table, I present each loner by name, school type, factors influencing their decisions to stay. While four of the seven loners actively looked for a job, they all stayed. And they stayed because of the school environment. Black male teachers in the study accepted that racism and, that racism and microaggressions were to be expected by the colleagues because of the, because the problem of the 21st century, continues to be the color line, but they could choose, but they could close their doors and teach, because of the organizational characteristics in their schools. As I described earlier, these schools were uniquely different than schools with a larger concentration of Black male teachers.
Wole Achebe was the chairperson of the English Department, and he described how his White colleagues had trouble accepting the fact that he, a Black man, a Black immigrant, was the chair of the department. And even though he looked for another job, he opted to stay. And he said, "I taught 90 kids. When I was teaching at my first two schools, I had so much grading to do. Right now, I teach only 50 kids. We call our school the Country Club. I spent the entire summer developing a 12th grade curriculum." Here Achebe describes the flexibility he had to teach smaller class sizes, and he could use his curriculum expertise to teach content that his students needed. In his school, Achebe can close his door and be a professional.
While loners stayed, older groupers moved schools, while younger groupers left the profession. Despite having less intense experiences with the organizational dynamic with performance pressure, boundary heightening and role encapsulation, because of an average critical mass of Black teachers on their faculty, groupers left their schools at a higher rate than loners. Out of the 20 groupers in my one-year study, nine or almost half, did not return to their teaching positions the following year.
Here in this table, I highlight these teachers' reasons for leaving, if they moved to a different school, if they left the profession, and their age. Groupers cited poor working conditions, namely weak administrative leadership, were their reasons for leaving the profession.
Adebayo Adjayi, whose age range was between 49 and 54, he moved schools. He cited an administrator more focused on policing, than in improving his practice. He says, "Right now, I don't think anybody really wants to be here, wants to be coming to this school. Myself in particular, because of the lack of appreciation of work and the principal coming in and looking at you to find faults. In observations, you have two things in mind. What is happening that is good, what is happening that needs correction, so you present them in the same report, but then you come to write one side of the whole story, negatives, it's demoralizing. I don't believe that you run a school blaming teachers." Adebayo Adjayi moves to another BPS school.
Dante Little, whose age range was between 26 and 31, left the profession. He cited an administrator who was more interested in policing the students
rather than supporting them. Dante described a scenario where students were taking the state's general exam, MCAS, and a Black administrator comes to his class and asked if he collected the students cell phones, not believing that all cell phones had been collected. The Black administrator tells students to stop the tests and then begins to frisk or pass into backpacks to see if the cell phone had been collected.
About this experience, Little says, "Even if you are trying to do the right thing, you are going to be harassed and treated like a criminal for no reason,
and I'm just done with it. This isn't prison. We can't run it like a prison. We can't treat our kids like they're criminals, especially when they're
not doing anything wrong. It creates tension, nobody really wants to be here. And I'm just done with it, personally, I'm over with it." And Dante Little leaves the profession.
This work I think makes several contributions I'll skip over here, but I want to just quickly move to talk about how I have taken up these ideas in practice and policy. Bryk reminds us that we improve organizations when we grow both the people, as well as the organization. One practice application has been to focus on the people. During Q and A I'm happy to talk about how I focus on the organization. But here I'm focusing on the people.
Now, given the finding that Black male teachers in my study described two experiences related to boundary heightening, or social and emotional challenges, and limited opportunities to grow their practice, I designed an affinity group for male teachers of color. We teach teachers to differentiate learning for students based on their social location. We are now only beginning to think about how to differentiate professional learning for teachers based on their social location.
So as Leah mentioned, for three years, I worked at BTR, the Boston Teacher Residency Program, as the clinical teacher educator. And during that time, I was able to put some of these research findings into practice, by designing this affinity group for male teachers of color. The mission of the group, it was open to pre-service and in-service male teachers of color, its mission was to provide social and emotional support for male teachers of color and a space to reflect on practice in service of student learning. We met from five to seven on Friday evenings. The first half was focused on social-emotional support.
The second half was focused on having a thought-partner solve a dilemma of practice. Each group, each section, each month, one person brought a dilemma of practice and got thought-partnerships on it.
I published a bit, I published a little bit on this. Here is this PDK piece where I talk about some of the work that we did.
I'll just play you this, play this quick clip. In this clip, you'll hear the facilitator, Greg, use the acronym SWAGG, to engage his students. Now, while SWAGG has multiple meanings, in this context it is not the stuff we get from conferences that might be piled up in our offices or in our home or work offices somewhere. Instead, SWAGG means cool, confident. Could we play this clip.
Greg's voice: Aligned with sort of my version of cool which is academically cool, is we have something especially in my classroom, called "Math SWAGG". So it's SWAGG is actually an acronym standing for students who achieved great gains. So we talk about what 'Math SWAGG' means and how it means like mathematical confidence. But when students come in, in students' context, it's something different.
What Greg was saying about putting that SWAGG at the front of his class or making space for students whose ... of knowledge to shape classroom culture. This isn't new. But if you are in a school where your colleagues view you as intellectually inferior, or have great agency over your time, you rarely have opportunity to improve your practice. Here in this affinity group, you are seen as a professional. In the area of practice, I've supported districts.
So when I launched, when I created this program in 2013, Boston Public Schools invited me to help them build what now is called MEEC. And MEEC, male educator, male executive coaching. Yeah, I've given acronym for MEEC, but much of the work in MEEC and WEEC was informed by some of this work.
In practice, I've supported other school districts, New York, in particular, and Compton, California, to develop what I've termed "differentiated professional support" for male teachers of color.
In 2015 I gave a keynote address at the U.S. Department of Education during the National Teacher Diversity Summit. There I shared my research and practice work focus on differentiating freshman development. As you might remember, President Obama had recently signed ... (indistinct) and the Department was in the process of writing guidance on how states should implement this new federal law.
And so I worked with colleagues in the Department to develop language entitled to non-regulatory guidance around providing time and space for differentiated support for all teachers, including the affinity groups. And subsequently, up to 2015, we saw a proliferation of state and local efforts organizing time and space to differentiate support for teachers, teachers of color in particular.
Let me just quickly end (with some of) the more recent work. Internationally, there continues to be an increasing ethno-racial demographic shift across the European Union.
This bar graph shows the percentage of 15 year olds with an immigrant background across some of the Organization of Economic and Cooperative Development, 30-plus members states. And so to respond to this shift, the OECD continues to organize policy forums through which to strengthen diversity efforts, where researchers from across the Organization's member states, share promising practices and policies to promote inclusion. I've had an opportunity to go to the OECD headquarters in Paris twice, to discuss how school districts or countries can support minoritized teachers.
My current work builds off of some of this previous work with the Spencer Postdoctoral Project, looking at how New York Cityis training veteran teachers. So, Sharon Feiman Nemser's work, is really influential here, thinking about the support for training veteran teachers to mentor and/or coach novice male teachers of color.
And another question asked is how do veteran teachers make sense of their training that they received from one urban school district in preparing them to mentoring or coach?
I will stop there. I will stop screen share. And I'm happy to answer any and all questions.
Leah Gordon: Great, well, thank you so much. And we can all give you a, I guess a silent round of applause. Thank you so much for being here and for that really enlightening talk. So for those of you who would like to ask a question, you can click on the reaction tab, and I believe we should be able to see the hands that are up. And I am actually going to, can you see them yourself?
Travis Bristol: Yeah, I see H.
Leah Gordon: Wonderful.
H: We went to Menlo-Atherton.
Leah Gordon: Yes, so go ahead. So Travis, if you want to field your own questions, I have one for you if we have a low, but go ahead and just call on the hands you see, or I'm happy to do the fielding for you if that's easier.
Travis Bristol: Maybe I'll start with H and then yeah.
Leah Gordon: Okay, I'll call in the next person after H. H, go ahead.
Question 1: Hi, thank you Professor Bristol. That was amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, my name's H, I graduated from M-A three years ago, and I certainly experienced being a White student from a very privileged background, a completely different educational experience than my classmates of color. And it's funny that M-A motto as you probably know is "Strength and Diversity," but that's definitely not the case in a lot of student's experience.
So, I would love to hear you speak more from a teacher's perspective about how systemic racism manifests in schools, and how you see that impacting students of color as well.
Travis Bristol: Yeah, so I would say that systemic racism, so it manifests in how you've experienced it, right? You have one school, but you had a school within a school. And I would say that it impacts not only just students of color, but H, I would say it impacted you as a White woman and your White classmates. White people in this country suffer because they live in a world where their lives and their experiences are centered and they have great,
it creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance, when they have to interact with or learn from, or be subordinate to a person of color.
One example I can give is during the State of the Union, president Obama's first State of the Union Address when, we've never seen this in the State of the Union where someone yells, "You lie," to the Commander in Chief. Why did that Congressman yell, "You lie?" Because it was disorienting to see a Black man, deliver the State of the Union. He had been led to believe that, like many White people have been led to believe, unfortunately, that Black people should always be subordinate to them.
And so, how, so, how does it, I think we should be asking ourselves, how does systemic racism hurt White people. The insurrection...systemic racism has hurt White people because they believe that President Biden's attempt to reshape the cabinet, the power structure in Washington DC should look and should reflect the rich diversity of this country. So I think, I think I would push you to think about how does it harm White people. I think that once we began to think about how it harms White people, then I think we can begin the work of forming this more perfect union.
Leah Gordon: Thank you, so I see D's hand. D, would you like to ask a question and then A after that?
Question 2: Yes, hi, hello. Thank you so much for the speech. It was very very wonderful and I loved your research and I loved how insightful it was. So I'm really grateful for you. I just wanted to ask a question about, early in the presentation you were saying how there's a lot of recruitment for students, teachers of color, but then there's not a lot of retention at the schools, and schools are not working as hard to maintain retention at their schools. And I'm wondering if you have any suggestions on how individual programs in individual schools and even in universities, how they can maintain and retain teachers of color and professors of color.
Travis Bristol: Yeah, great question. Thank you, D. So I think what I've tried to do in this project is to say that recruitment efforts are important but we have to pay attention to retention. We have to think about the structures in schools and the experiences of current, with this study, Black teachers, Black male teachers, how to improve those conditions. Because if we improve those conditions, then they will stay.
So for example, if we're finding as I found in this study that Black teachers or Black male teachers in particular are leaving because of poor working conditions, poor administrative leadership, how can we support administrators? What kinds of supports do we need to give administrators? What kind of ongoing induction, professional development, do we need to give administrators so that administrators can create positive work environments for their students or for their teachers?
We place the most novice teachers in the most challenging schools. We place the most novice principals in the most challenging schools. And so I think that your question, we have to, it's important to think about how you support administrators to create the conditions such that teachers, Black teachers will want to stay.
I think at the university level, I've been doing some work here with the California Teacher Residency Program. And I've been pushing my colleagues across the state to interrogate their curriculum. If you are only reading Pam Grossman, and Pam Grossman was my former instructor at Stanford, but if you're only reading Pam Grossman, and not reading Django Paris, then you're centering Whiteness. I think it's important to decolonize, right, the teacher ed curriculum. I often say that when I started teaching in New York City, on day one, I felt prepared to teach, but there were aspects of my teacher prep program that were not responsive to me. When we talked about White privilege, I couldn't engage in that conversation. So I think there's also this interrogation and this reimagining of in decentering Whiteness in the in teacher prep, that can create an environment where people see themselves and can see themselves in the profession.
Leah Gordon: Thank you, so A you are next. And then G is after that.
Question 3: So, hi, I'm A. I am teaching in the Waltham Public School System, so not too far from Brandeis, obviously. And I've also taught in BPS, and I've also taught in C, and then I've also taught in colleges and when what I've seen and I would love to hear what you think is that colleges have more control over really changing the atmosphere and choose not to...where, I almost, and I don't know. I feel as though there are so many restrictions when it comes to pre-K through 12, on the amount of time that can be served towards SEL and served towards really having conversations, and difficult conversations when it comes to teachers alone, students alone, or mixed. And I just, I'm curious to think, I'm curious to hear what you think. Is it more so the administration that are in the pre K through 12 section that are restricted by for example, DESE, and restricted by the state and federal, or is it building, per building?
Travis Bristol: Yeah, so I think you are right that this, that we should not, that we have principals who are teaching in schools or turnaround schools, where they have to in order to ... in order to turn the school around, they have to get the grades up. And to get the grades up means that they have to focus on getting students to pass MCAS and not view the social emotional work, to build engagement and learning. So it is a complex, it is a complex problem. And so it's important when we think about policy levers to say, well, here's what, here is how we may need to support principals, to create positive working conditions at their school. And at the policy level, it's also important to think about some of the dangers of, of merely seeing Black teachers as being the elixir for improving the outcomes of Black students, without providing a host of resources for those Black teachers.
And so someone has to do the, someone has to do the SEL work in a school. So if we're going to have some testing, we also have to have a large number of social workers who can the SEL work, but it can't just be on these teachers who have few resources. We have to support principals as well. And the people who are thinking about how you support principals is that coming from the district or from the state level.
So your question is a good one that it's not, that is, this is not solely an issue of a school building leader, it's also about the kinds of supports that local and state policy makers can provide to building leaders to create positive working conditions so that Black teachers stay.
Leah Gordon: Thank you. G, do you have a question as well?
Question 4: Hi, thank you. And thank you so much for sharing your research and talking about the experiences of the teachers that you interviewed for this project. I'm thinking more about the idea or the topic of affinity groups and other groups that can support and maintain teachers of color, and hopefully contribute to their retention, and them feeling more heard in a school or in a district.
I have talked to some colleagues who belong to these types of affinity groups, and sometimes they have mentioned that they feel kind of protective or guarded and reluctant to share the topics that they, the concerns that they have in the district with folks outside of that group, or with plans that they're talking about within the group with folks outside the group. And I can certainly understand some of the resistance and the reluctance to do that.
In part, some of the reasons they mentioned is that they're afraid that their work will be co-opted by the district and maybe used as a way to show how progressive we are, how much progress we've made, without really recognizing the ongoing concerns that they have. And there's, I'm sure there are other reasons as well.
What I'm thinking about as a White teacher is how to support that work when there is that reluctance and that resistance to talk outside the group, or maybe we're not there yet in terms of a school or as a district community. But I'm just curious about what you think about kind of communication within and without the group, and when is the time when we start cooperating on student goals, as opposed to just retaining and supporting the teachers.
Travis Bristol: Yeah, great question, rich question. First, I think it's important for teachers of color to have affinity groups. Here at the UC Berkeley program, we also have White affinity groups. Now, some people may say that these pre-teacher programs are sort of by their very nature White affinity groups, but I think that White people need a safe space to talk about Whiteness. White people need a safe space to talk about Whiteness.
And so as there are affinity groups for teachers of color or Black teachers or Latinx teachers or whatever the social group, but it's also helpful for that to happen. And so, as people, as White people work out their Whiteness, and how they have been socialized to have their experiences center, as that decentering happens and as colleagues of colors see that decentering happening, then that becomes a rich opportunity for folks to come together. It's an undue burden to say, you are doing your work, well, what work are you doing as a White person?
Being in this affinitive space could be one place to show that you actually care deeply about doing some of this necessary work to engage in some of the racial lift, if you will. So I think that that can be very helpful and what we are, and what my White colleagues are doing here at Berkeley is that every month they report out on what they have been sharing, what they have been reading, and I think that that kind of sharing publicly shows that I'm learning, you are learning, we're in a learning organization, because we're attempting to sort of learn together. But I think that's the first place.
And I would say that the work around thinking about curriculum, that should be happening in small SLC. So that should be happening. This other work I think is somewhat different. Although there should be work thinking about content as well. I think that one of the pieces that's missing from many of the affinity groups that we see on average with teachers of, or some teachers of color is that there's content pieces missing. Teachers absolutely need to talk about those social and emotional challenges that they experience.
And you'll see from the work that I did with BTR and other work with affinity groups I've done, is that teachers of color are also thinking about and interrogating their practice, to become a better teacher and you work on and think about and reflect on your practice. Yes, we have to talk about social and emotional challenges. We also have to become better teachers and serve better our students if we both can.
Leah Gordon: Thank you, so I'm hoping I can ask what may well be the last question because I have promised you that you can get to your teaching at 2:15.
So, my final question is, I was really, I expected one of the outcomes of your study when you started, to be the importance of cohort building and faculty diversification and maybe even sort of leadership diversification. And yet it seems like what you're saying about the difference between loners and groupers, tells a much more complicated story about the importance of building a large cohort of African-American male teachers in a school, to ensuring that there are, that the problems with retention are resolved. Can you talk a little bit about that complication and sort of the implications for the importance of cohort, but cohort, and I imagine also leadership and school climate too. It seems like one of the, some of what you're saying is that just having a cohort isn't enough if it's a, if it's a flawed school climate.
Travis Bristol: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. It was one counter-intuitive finding. I think that the groupers said that they enjoyed their colleagues. They enjoyed being able to go to watch the Superbowl on Sundays with their colleagues who watch football. Those things were important. We, these, their collegial relationships were important.
The Teacher's College Record piece, this somehow pushes against what Nicole Simon and Susan Moore Johnson find that both collegial relationships and administrative working conditions push teachers of color, push teachers out.
I, what I found in this study is that you could have positive or negative collegial relationships, but as Black people with Black teachers, you expect to, there to be microaggressions because that is the story of being Black in America. But Black people have become accustomed to suffering in silence, if you will, but closing their door and still doing their work. And to the point at which you could not close your door, the point at which administrators came in once your door was closed, and disrupted your work...when that happened, when you realized that you could not do the very thing that you were trained to do, then it became too much and people decided to leave.
So yes, cohorts are fine. Cohorts are great. And those are optimal, right? Universities have these cluster hires, and those things are great. But if the conditions, right? You can blow the water you want into a leaky pipe, but if there are holes in the pipe, where it's going to leak out...you have to think about how you create a structure that can hold the water.
And so, yes, cohorts are fine, but you have to pay attention to retention. And that's what I've tried to do in this research. We're spending millions of dollars on efforts to recruit people, without paying attention to the conditions that will keep them there.
Leah Gordon: Wonderful, well, thank you so much for sharing your research with us today and for sharing your time with us.
And we're deeply grateful and it's really wonderful to have you here. So, let's all give another virtual round of applause. Thank you very much for your time.
Travis Bristol: Yes, thank you. And it's so good to see you, Marya. Yes, it's been a while. I remember all those conversations in your office. Okay, I'm going to hop off now, take care.
Leah Gordon: All right, thank you all for being here and have a wonderful afternoon.