One teacher won’t be getting a “Happy Teacher’s Day” card this year: In April, a 61-year-old Texas educator denied claims she ever fondled a 7-year-old black student because, stating in her own defense, she “doesn’t like black students because she was prejudiced.”
For the rest of the nation’s educators, the entire week of May 6-12 is set aside each year – including National Teacher Day, May 7 - as “National Teacher Appreciation Week.”
While there is no question that, with the changing demographics, educational institutions need to hire more teachers of color to meet the demands of an increasingly diverse nation, a more critical question is are schools willing to meet those teacher’s needs?
The vast majority of Americans continue to have confidence in teachers, according to the 2012 The Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup survey, The Public’s Attitudes Toward Public Education. The poll found the American public believes that teachers should be treated like true professionals – as they are in nations that have much higher rates of student achievement. And 89 percent of Americans agreed that it is important to close the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students.
The survey also found that the public believes the lack of education funding is the biggest problem facing teachers today and say they would be willing to pay higher taxes to improve the educational system – particularly urban schools.
While teaching is stressful on all levels, minority faculty experiences stress more frequently than their white peers because of perceived discrimination and worries about personal finance, according to a survey released October 2012 by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. Some of the stress among minority faculty was attributed to the fact that minority teachers tend to have lower “rank” in academe. But the survey also found stress gaps by ethnicity in terms of personal finance. American Indian faculty were the most likely at 85.6 percent to cite personal finance as a stressor, followed by mixed-race faculty at 76.3; black faculty at 72.5 percent; Hispanics at 69.2 percent; and white teachers at 64.7 percent.
Teachers also agonize about America’s achievement gap between poor and privileged children. A new book released April 2013, “Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance,” says more attention needs to be paid to the “opportunity gap” that exists when poor and minority students lack the same access as affluent students to skilled teachers and well-equipped schools.
One problem is that even within the same school, lower-achieving students are more likely taught by less-experienced or educated teachers, according to an April 2013 study from the Stanford School of Education and the World Bank. The study also shows that teacher class assignments vary within schools by the teacher’s gender and race.
A similar message was echoed in February 2013 by the 27-member Congressional Equity and Excellence Commission, which noted that poor students “are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students.”
Another stressor for teachers is in balancing the amount of attention or praise they should offer students.
A study from Rutgers University indicates that white public school teachers under-challenge minority students by providing them more positive feedback than they give to white students, for work of equal merit. The study suggests that the “performance gap” may be perpetuated by the nature of feedback from white teachers to minority students. Another Indiana University study that analyzed differences in practices between faculty at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly white institutions found that faculty members at HBCUs were more likely to engage students in certain "educationally purposeful" activities both in and out of the classroom.
These are a few of the pressures, and issues, teachers have to deal with, and why there has been a National Teachers Day celebration, since 1980.