The Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) wants to rebuild the national Black teacher pipeline.
Sharif El-Mekki, the founder of CBED, states that his Philadelphia, PA-based organization is focused on creating programs to encourage youth, particularly Black youth, to enter and remain in the teaching profession. The organization has developed a platform to help high school students make it through college and to later support them when they are ready to take on careers as educators.
“The reason for all of this is we see a lot of people saying they want more Black teachers,” El-Mekki told the AmNews, “they want to diversify, but their efforts are disconnected from the social, political, and economic reality of becoming a teacher, particularly for Black youth.”
Getting an education degree and then trying to live off a teacher’s salary can be trying, at best. So to push teachers toward being as debt-free as possible, CBED joined with the United Negro College Fund and created its Future Teachers of Excellence Fellowship. The fellowship awards up to $5,000 a year for each of four college years and up to $20,000 in stipends to educators at the start of their fifth year of teaching.
During the summer, the organization sponsors a five-week Freedom Schools Literacy Academy, which invites high school and college students from across the country to teach first, second, and third graders either in person or virtually. Participants also receive one-on-one coaching from CBED staff.
The organization’s efforts come at a crucial time as data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that only about 7% of public school teachers are Black. In the book “Teacher Preparation as Social Activism at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” the authors point out that before the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, Black educators made up 35% to 50% of the school workforce in the 17 states that had racially segregated schools.
Black educator attrition rates are higher, but so is morale
There’s been an undermining of the Black teacher pipeline ever since Brown vs. Board of Education, contends El-Mekki. “Brown vs Board closed Black schools and they fired Black teachers –– up to 100,000, according to Dr. Leslie Fenwick. So yes, we are absolutely seeing a decrease in interest as well as a high attrition rate for Black teachers. Yet, interestingly enough, the Black teachers who do exist inspire other demographic groups, and I think that’s because they see them as teachers with a life mission to support the next generation of their community. The interesting phenomenon is that the attrition rates are higher, but the morale is higher for our specific demographic group, according to survey data from Education Week as well as Educators for Excellence which is a nonprofit group.”
CBED focuses on developing Black teachers by emphasizing a pedagogical approach and historical perspective. El-Mekki worked as a teacher and principal in Philadelphia for 26 years before founding his organization. He attributes his cultural awareness and appreciation for education to his upbringing, influenced by his parents, Aisha El-Mekki and Hamid Khalid, who were members of the Black Panther Party.
Point number 5 of the Black Panther Party’s famous Ten-Point Program states, “We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else.” El-Mekki agrees with the sentiment, “This idea of knowledge of self: a lot of our professional development and training is in literacy because we believe literacy leads to liberation. But we also believe in this idea of a positive racial identity and understanding accurate history. We ground all of that in our professional development as well as Black teaching traditions and techniques. We look at how Black communities have always viewed teaching and learning in their communities. We’ve taken some of that, some of the research, and poured that into our curriculum, where students learn the connections between how we lead classrooms, the ethic of care, the essence of self, the nature of education, and the purpose of it. As well as the history of education created and led by Black communities.”