Johanie Hernandez was absolutely certain she didn't want to become a teacher. She had enrolled in the pre-teaching academy at Walton High School in the Bronx mostly because her friends were in it and they seemed to enjoy it. But when the time came to actually teach a lesson, "I thought I was going to die," Hernandez recalls. "You can't believe how shy I was."

When the dreaded day arrived, a nervous but confident Hernandez survived her initial teaching experience and went on to become an enthusiastic, successful graduate of the program. The academy is a cooperative venture with the City University of New York's Lehman College, located right down the street from Walton High. Hernandez's student-teaching debut was back in 1986, just a couple of years after the program started. Today, she not only is a full-fledged New York City teacher, with a decade of experience behind her, but she also coordinates the pre-teaching academy at Roosevelt High School. The United Federation of Teachers member sees herself in her young charges, such as junior Jessica Rivera, who says she's "really, really nervous" about the prospect of teaching an English lesson as part of the program.

"I see my story repeating itself," Hernandez says of the 33 students in the academy, virtually all Latinos like herself. "They're put in situations that they don't think they can do, and in the end, they feel so good about it when they succeed. Looking at them reinforces my commitment to this profession and assures me there's nothing else I would rather do."

In a small but vital way, Hernandez and the other teachers and faculty involved in the project are addressing one of the burning issues facing public schools across the country: the shortage of minority teachers. The numbers are stark. Nationally, according to Recruiting New Teachers (a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization devoted to improving teacher recruitment policies and practices nationwide), 14 percent of teachers are minorities, compared with a student population that is 36 percent minority and growing. In city school districts, the group reports, almost 70 percent of students are minorities, while the figure for teachers is about half that.

"Many students will complete their K-12 school without having been taught by a single teacher of color," Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, a professor of urban education at Emory University, told participants at a recent "National Summit on Diversity in the Teaching Force" held in Washington, D.C. Irvine added that the current traditional teacher pipeline--undergraduate teacher-education students--doesn't look much different; 85 percent of the students are white females.

Across the country, dozens of programs are producing teachers of color by tapping a range of sources--paraprofessionals and other non-teaching school staff, career changers, people with degrees in high-demand subjects such as math and science, and students at historically black colleges and other institutions serving mostly minority populations. But the same demographics and market conditions that make the overall teacher shortage so ominous are, if anything, stacked even higher against efforts to make the teaching force look more like the student population.

Historically, teaching and nursing were virtually the only professions open to women and to African-American females, in particular. But in today's world, qualified college graduates across the board have a vast number of career options. The black teachers who joined the profession in sizable numbers back in the 1960s are reaching retirement age, and they're not being replaced by a comparable number of new minority educators.

As she describes the situation in her own school district, Molly Drew of the Toledo (Ohio) Federation of Teachers could be talking about almost any place in the country. "Young minority men and women can walk out of college and choose an industry that pays twice as much as teaching," Drew points out. "Until people find education and teaching valuable, [the profession] won't attract young people." School districts can recruit aggressively across the country, but the teaching market is more regional than national, so not many prospective candidates are willing to relocate long distances. "People aren't going to move from Mississippi to teach here," Drew says.
 

Why it matters

No one claims that a teacher needs to be the same race or ethnicity as his or her students. But there are compelling social and educational reasons for a more diverse teaching force--and some notable recent research on the topic. As our society in general and our schools in particular become more and more diverse, there's an undeniable benefit in exposing students to all sorts of role models.

The need for positive role models is clearly on the minds of some recent entrants to the profession. Jannis Glover was a paraprofessional in the Chatham County-Savannah (Ga.) school system when she entered the Pathways to Teaching program at Armstrong Atlantic State University. (Pathways programs, financed in part through the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, have been around for a decade or more in locations around the country. They aim to help non-teaching school staff--minorities in particular--make the transition to the classroom.)

"It's critical for these children to see African Americans as role models," says Glover, a teacher at Mercer Middle School and a member of the Savannah Federation of Teachers. "That's not to say that someone else can't teach them; that's a given. But if they don't see their own kind in positions of leadership, they have no one to aspire to become like."

Glover is an inspiring testament to the fruits of dedication and hard work. Like virtually all students in Pathways to Teaching and similar paraprofessional-to-teacher programs, Glover continued to work full time while completing the necessary college courses. But she didn't stop with earning a degree and a teaching certificate. This summer, after her fifth year in a program affiliated with Breadloaf College in Vermont, Glover will earn a master's degree from Oxford University in England.

"Some of my students have never even been to the beach--and it's 18 miles from the city," Glover laments. "I'm always trying to show them there's a whole wide world out there, and they can go anywhere they want in it." In addition to weaving in her own travels to inspire the youngsters, she can point out that for her and other successful professionals, education is a never-ending process. "My message is there's a better future for them, but education is the key."

Despite the obvious power of such sentiments, improved student performance--especially on standardized tests--is the bottom line for policymakers from President Bush on down through local school board members. So a new working paper from Thomas Dee at the National Bureau of Economic Research is especially timely. Using data from Project STAR, the same landmark study in Tennessee that has boosted the case for smaller class sizes, Dee was able to analyze results of students assigned to teachers of their own race. He reports in "Teachers, Race and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment" that "exposure to an own-race teacher did generate substantive gains in student achievement for both black and white students." More specifically, he writes, a year with a same-race teacher increased students' math and reading scores by about 4 percentile points. Dee points out that his analysis can't pinpoint the reasons for the results, but it does confirm the need for further research on the topic.
 

Reaching them early

Programs like the pre-teaching academy in New York that reach down into high schools--some even start in middle school--are an especially powerful approach to broadening the teaching pool because they do a couple of things. In addition to exposing students to the profession and to the foundations of teaching and learning, they provide excellent college preparation. Of the approximately 800 students who have enrolled in the Lehman College-affiliated program since it began in 1984, approximately 95 percent complete high school in four years and more than 90 percent attend college. About 200 have gone on to become teachers.

"We've always said that the skills they learn in studying teaching are the same skills they need to be successful in any business or career," says Lehman's Anne Rothstein, a member of the AFT-affiliated Professional Staff Congress who coordinates the program for the college. She reports that the graduates include lawyers, social workers, ministers and many others in addition to educators. Adds teacher Johanie Hernandez, "Our goal is not for them to become teachers, although that's a great benefit. Our goal is to get them ready for college. If they want to be teachers, that's a plus."

Although many in the high school programs already have their sights set on a teaching career, others come to the teaching profession later in their academic careers or after having worked in other occupations. Teach for America is one alternative-route program that has enjoyed significant success in attracting minority teachers from some of the nation's top colleges and universities. This year's group of teachers is about one-third minority, while the proportion in some past years has been closer to half.

One of these teachers is Chari Patterson, a Baltimore Teachers Union member. A psychology graduate of Xavier University in New Orleans, Patterson says she joined Teach for America in part as an alternative to graduate school. As it turned out, she didn't avoid graduate school: She not only finished the classes she needed to become certified, but she also earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University during her first two years of teaching; she's now in her third year. "I was a full-time student, a full-time teacher and full-time tired," says Patterson, who teaches fifth grade at Curtis Bay Elementary School. "It was definitely challenging.

"After my first year, I knew I was going to quit," she adds. But she stuck with it, and the growth she has seen in her students has helped keep her going. Although Patterson has already continued past the two years that Teach for America requires of its participants, she's unsure of her future in the profession. But if she does leave the classroom, she says it will probably be for something related to education, such as counseling or psychology. Although this program and others that train teachers through a few weeks of intensive preparation are not without their critics, Patterson believes Teach for America candidates "really are the best of the best" because the program attracts so many high-quality applicants.

Some university-based programs, such as one at Montclair State University in New Jersey, are similarly interested in finding promising recent graduates with math and science degrees and preparing them to teach in urban settings--the Newark and Paterson school districts, in this case. Teacher Recruitment for Urban Schools of Tomorrow (TRUST), one of a number of programs run by the university's Teacher Education Advocacy Center (TEAC), produced its first group of teachers for the start of this school year. Among them is Kevin Mason, a biology major in college who worked for 10 years at a Veterans Administration hospital in New Jersey before enrolling in the Montclair program.

Mason got his first exposure to teaching as a substitute in rural Pennsylvania, where he was the only minority teacher in the district. While that experience helped sway him toward a career change, "I couldn't see myself working there for 30 years and retiring," he comments. A product himself of the Newark public schools, Mason is now teaching at the city's Camden Middle School. "I feel good about teaching there," he says. Mason quickly has earned a reputation as a demanding but caring teacher who expects a lot of his students--something he says is new for many of them. That was driven home recently when he gave failing grades to 11 students in one of his classes. "They see now that I'm not going to give them a D if they don't do the work," he says, adding that getting an F seems to have stimulated harder work in some students.

Jennifer Robinson, a member of the AFT-affiliated Montclair State University faculty association who directs TEAC along with Wandalyn Enix, says, "We've gotten very positive responses from the Newark schools" about the TRUST teachers. "They're very committed and focused on the students." The teachers' biggest challenge is not necessarily their content knowledge or teaching skills, which are both strong, she says. "Teaching anywhere the first year is difficult," Robinson adds. "Teaching in an urban district, however, has built-in challenges, such as high staff turnover and limited resources."

While their numbers are small, Mason is proud of the impact that he and his peers in the program are already making. "Even though there are only eight of us, these are eight people who are really concerned about the issues of urban schools," he says. "We really do care about what we're doing."