U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and filmmaker Spike Lee teamed up Monday to urge more black men to consider teaching.
More than 1 million teachers will retire during the next decade, according to federal estimates, and leaders have embarked on a nationwide drive to build a more diverse teaching force. Duncan on Monday took the campaign to Atlanta’s Morehouse College, the nation’s only all-male historically black college.
Teachers should look more like the people they serve, Duncan said. While more than 35 percent of the nation’s public school students are black or Latino, less than 15 percent of the teachers are black or Latino, according to federal figures. Less than 2 percent of the nation’s teachers are black men.
In Georgia, about half of the public schoolchildren are black or Latino, but only about 25 percent of the teachers are.
“Something is wrong with that picture,” Duncan said. “We’ve got to fix it. We’ve got to fix it together.”
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article courtesy of ajc.com
