Teaching degree programs at four-year institutions nationwide are disproportionately white, according to new Urban Institute data. But things look different in Memphis, where two local colleges, the University of Memphis and Christian Brothers University, are making strides to ensure their teaching programs reflect the diversity of the schools that house them.
Meanwhile Memphis’ LeMoyne-Owen College, a historically black institution, has a teaching training program whose student body is almost exclusively African-American. The program focuses on preparing its students to teach in diverse settings.
“Minority-serving institutions,” like historically black colleges and universities, are “doing more than their fair share of preparing diverse teachers,” Constance Lindsay, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “And then there’s lots of schools in urban settings that are sort of over-representing black and Hispanic students” in their education programs — noting that, in some places, the teaching programs have greater percentages of students of color than the schools as a whole.
The Urban Institute data was released Tuesday.
In Memphis, 68 percent of school-aged children are non-white, and teachers of color make up about 40 percent of the city’s educators. But across Memphis-area colleges, more black students pursue teaching degrees compared to other majors.
According to the study, the percentage of black education majors at the University of Memphis (40 percent) closely resembles the racial makeup of the public, four-year college. Alfred Hall, Assistant Dean of Student Success & Strategic Initiatives at the University of Memphis, said that those numbers are the result of new leadership “embracing the notion of being an urban education institution.”
“We continue to serve a metropolitan area, in which we have suburban and rural partners, and we continue to work to meet their needs,” he said. “But we have been more intentional in the past several years about serving an urban education school district and preparing teachers to have success in those settings.”
The university’s goal is to recruit and prepare teachers to “understand a local context.” Last year, the school established the River City Partnership, a student-teaching program, with Shelby County Schools. That program is centered around understanding concepts of equity and social justice, where teachers-in-training learn about the struggles of urban students as well as the best ways to unleash their potential.
“[We don’t want our teachers to just have] a deficit perspective of feeling sorry for them because they come from certain hardships, but to have an appreciation of the persistence and grit that these students have and how they can maximize those attributes to bring about student success,” he said.
At Christian Brothers University, a private religious college, black students make up 32 percent of the student body. But among students who study education, half are black. A CBU representative was unavailable Tuesday.
The Urban Institute report comes on the heels of an earlier study that found students of color were more likely to attend alternative licensing programs for teachers than to complete teacher training offered at four-year institutions. Some of these non-traditional programs, such as Man Up and Urban Teachers, target students from groups underrepresented among teachers.
But while states like Tennessee have begun to welcome some of these alternative programs, the majority of teachers still take traditional routes.
“I think we have to do a better job of just recruiting students to become interested in teaching across the board, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds,” Hall said. “[We need to help them] see the importance of having an increasingly diverse body of teachers to address an increasingly diverse body of students that have an understanding of certain cultural competencies.”
Cumberland College in Lebanon, Tennessee, is the only other school in the state that has a higher percentage of black students in its education program than it does schoolwide. Black students were underrepresented in 24 of Tennessee’s 27 listed teaching programs outside of Memphis. Here’s how they measured up:
Source: The Urban Institute
The full report allows users to search four-year programs and see how they compare to national trends in two key areas: black and white student representation upon enrolling in an education program, as well as black and white student completion rates. You can access that here.
Other teaching programs in Memphis, including Rhodes College, Southwest Tennessee Community College, and Memphis College of Art, are smaller and were not included in the Urban Institute study as a result.