Sachs Foundation And Teach For America Team Up To Address Black Teacher Shortage

By Marybeth Gasman, Contributor, Forbes.com

Research shows that the presence of just one African American teacher in grades 3-5 increases low-income, African American boys’ interest in college by 29% and lowers the high school drop-out rate by 39%. Unfortunately, the number of African American teachers in the U.S. has been in decline since public schools were legally desegregated in 1954. In Colorado, for example, 150 of the 178 school districts have no Black teachers.

To address this teacher shortage, the Sachs Foundation has partnered with Teach For America (TFA) Colorado, part of the larger TFA organization, which has worked with 350 urban and rural communities across the nation since 1990. Sachs and TFA are working to build a community of Black educators in Colorado with TFA recruiting and training teachers and Sachs providing financial support for African American teachers working in Colorado.

One obstacle to recruiting Black students into the teaching profession is that they typically graduate with higher debt than their white peers due to lack of access to wealth. As a result, they tend to move away from teaching as a career even if they desire to be a teacher. Instead, they look to business. law, or engineering for careers. In order to address that challenge, the Sachs-TFA partnership augments teacher salaries. Another barrier is that African American students are discouraged by the idea of being the only Black teacher at their school. Because the Sachs-TFA partnership operates using a cohort model, African American teachers are immediately part of a community of support that also fosters networking.