Educating Preservice Teachers: The State of Affairs
Overview of Critical Issues and Strategies for the 21st Century and Beyond
Recruitment of Minority Teachers
There is a growing need to recruit and retain high-quality teachers who represent and understand the cultural context of students from cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds (Grant & Secada, 1990). As the population of America's K-12 schools grows more diverse, efforts are underway to recruit teachers who more accurately reflect the ethnic and linguistic diversity present in schools. Several institutions, organizations, and foundations have taken a role in increasing the number of minorities teaching in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.
University Programs to Recruit Minority Teachers
Several institutions in NCREL's region have programs aimed at recruiting minority teachers. Many operate in conjunction with filling the need for qualified teachers in urban schools.
Bilingual Education Teachers. University of Illinois at Chicago. To meet the growing demand for bilingual educators, this program works to help provisionally certified bilingual teachers earn their standard teaching certificates. It offers a supportive cohort for teachers as they work through their programs, an opportunity to substitute full-time bilingual teaching experiences for the student-teaching requirement, field experiences that capitalize on existing relationships among bilingual and nonbilingual professionals, and customized professional development to meet each bilingual education teacher's particular needs.
Center for Excellence in Urban Teaching. Hamline University, Minneapolis, Minnesota. This center focuses on three areas to encourage men and women of color to enter the teaching profession: (1) supporting high school students of color who wish to pursue careers in education; (2) supporting undergraduate students of color in their pursuit of education degrees and enhancing their preparation to teach effectively in urban classrooms; and (3) creating relationships and support circles among new teachers, undergraduates, and high school students of color to support their educational goals.
Opening Doors Summer Research Institute. Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Since 1992, this program has accepted 92 graduate students who have participated in a six-week summer program to help prepare talented minority students for advanced degrees in education. The goal of the program is to support these students as they enter the academic world of research and teaching. Since the program's inception, student participation has been as follows: 58 percent were African Americans; 23 percent were Hispanic/Chicano/Latino Americans; 13.1 percent were Asian Americans, and 4.3 percent were Native Americans (National Education Association, n.d.).
Paraprofessional to Teacher Scholarship Program. University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio. This program provides scholarships for part-time study to paraprofessionals from underrepresented populations to help them become teachers. The Toledo Public Schools guarantees teaching positions to graduates of this program and provides mentoring support through their beginning years of teaching.
Project TEACH. Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. In collaboration with the Columbus Public Schools and the Atlanta University Consortium, Project TEACH (Teachers Exploring the Importance of Ethnic and Cultural Heritage) works to recruit qualified persons of color into the teacher preparation programs at Ohio State University. This program provides financial, cultural, social, and academic support, along with job placement help and continued support through the first years of teaching.
NEA and AACTE Projects to Recruit Minority Teachers
Project of the National Education Association. The National Education Association (NEA) has taken a position on the recruitment and retention of minority teachers necessary to meet the increasingly diverse student population in America's schools. In 1994, the NEA Representative Assembly called for the "establishment of a national directory of successful strategies for the recruitment and retention of minority teachers" (NEA, 1999). Updated in 1998, this document, National Directory of Successful Strategies for the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Teachers (NEA, 1998) has been disseminated throughout the nation.
Projects of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) has developed two projects to recruit minority educators. One project is the Ford Foundation Minority Teacher Education Consortia Project. Composed of institutions in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, the Navajo Nation, and Regional Latino in California, this project supports efforts to uncover the reasons for the lack of minority teachers and to find ways to remedy these shortages. Through national invitational policy forums, this project targets institutional policies that prevent minority students from enrolling in and completing teacher education programs (AACTE, 2001b).
The second project is the Metropolitan Life Foundation Institute on Culturally Responsive Practice, which is funded and operated by AACTE. Its goal is to find teachers who are especially effective with African American, Asian/Pacific Island, Hispanic, and Native American students as well as students from other diverse ethnic backgrounds. Through a fellowship program in 1999, selected teachers were linked with institutions that prepare teachers through work groups that discussed the following issues:
- "Strategies for involving parents, students, and communities in joint efforts to improve local schooling."
- "Structural enhancements to and constraints on effective culturally responsive practice." (AACTE, 2001a)
This project continued with a conference in Washington, D.C., in 2000, where the regional work groups reconvened to:
- "Examine and analyze the work of the Institute to date."
- "Develop strategies to disseminate and advance the work of the Institute and culturally responsive practice in general."
- "Plan PK-16 policy and practice-oriented resources, which reflect principles and approaches endorsed by program participants and build on related accomplishments in this area to date."
- "Engage in professional development activities that strengthen the Fellows' capacity to become more effective culturally responsive practitioners and advocates for related improvements in policy and practice." (AACTE, 2001a)
AACTE also has agreed to serve as a clearinghouse for resources on culturally responsive practice, with an emphasis on those resources relevant to teacher educators.