Source: Center for American Progress

Center for American Progress, based in Washington, D.C., published two studies: one that provides a state-by-state analysis of teachers of color, noting that while 40 percent of K-12 students are non-white, only 17 percent of teachers share those characteristics. The second study proposed solutions for expanding recruitment and retention of qualified minority instructors.

“While our schools are very diverse, our students aren’t seeing that diversity reflected in their teachers,” said Saba Bireda, one of the two reports’ writers, during a conference highlighting the reports’ findings. “Teachers of color are role models to students of color. They are real-life examples of a career path towards teaching.”

Using 2008 data compiled by the federal National Center for Education Statistics called Schools and Staffing Survey, the CAP researchers found 20 states have gaps of 25 percent or more between minority teachers and students.

California leads all states: 72 percent of students are of color while only 29 percent of teachers identified as non-white. Two-thirds of Texas students are non-white yet only one third of teachers share similar backgrounds.

Ulrich Boser, who compiled the national data, spoke starkly about the results. “Diversity is the litmus test for modern society,” he said.

Others studies also point to the educational benefits of having more teachers of color.

A 2004 paper  analyzing teacher racial composition and pupil test-results in Tennessee found a small boost in student performance on standardized tests when taught by teachers of the same race. After four years of receiving instruction from a same-race teacher, students improved test scores by a range of 8 to 12 percentage points. Inconveniently, those findings applied to white students as well.

More recently, a 2011 working study by economists focusing on a large community college in California pointed to strong gains by minority students taught by instructors from any minority background.

“Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans are 2.9 percentage points more likely to pass courses with instructors of similar background and 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass courses with underrepresented instructors.”

The authors add: “These effects represent roughly  half of the total gaps in classroom outcomes between white and underrepresented minority students at the college. The effects are particularly large for Blacks.  The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black  instructor.”

But a combination of employer bias, undesirable working conditions and a lag in numbers of minorities with college degrees explains why white teachers are over-represented in U.S. classrooms.

In 2004, researchers at Harvard conducted a famous study  partly titled, “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” It determined job applicants with more caucasian-sounding names receive 50 percent more call-backs from potential employers than those with black-sounding names.

High-school graduation rates favor whites to blacks and Hispanics by roughly 20 percentage points, with some 77 percent of whites having graduated in the class of 2007. College completion rates show much of the same, with whites wrapping up their college studies more frequently (by 12 to 20 percentage points).

CAP’s study also found minority teachers are generally less satisfied with their work conditions, with whites showing more approval (78 percent) than blacks (70 percent.) And while the pay gap along racial lines is modest, with whites earning $49,570 to $48,890 and $49,260 for blacks and Hispanics, respectively, satisfaction with pay differed wildly: 53 percent of caucasians were happy with their pay versus 37 percent for blacks and 46 percent for Hispanics. Much of that disparity, the researchers reason, is the result of teacher placement: whites tend to stand in front of more affluent pupils, while minority instructors are more likely to be placed in schools with many low-income and high-risk students.

However, the shortfall of minority teachers should not be blamed on demographics, alone, says Boser during a brief interview with TAI.

“I would argue that the the question is not the relative percentages of graduation rates, but the absolute numbers of available potential teachers, and I do think that a sufficient pool of well-qualified potential teachers of color exists in most areas.”

Source: The New Teacher Project via Center for American Progress

Non-traditional accreditation programs are one way recruiters can bolster the number of minority educators in classrooms across the country, the researchers argue. So far, 25 percent of Hispanic, and 27 of black, school teachers have come through alternative pipelines, compared to 11 percent of whites.

The New Teacher Project, which has placed 37,000 teachers in high-needs urban schools, tries to respond to the demographic needs of school districts by recruiting mid-career and older college graduates. TNTP estimates some 37 percent of their fellows, teachers who receive multi-year on-going education towards a teaching certificate, are of color. Its various fellowship projects are also known to attract minority candidates with professional backgrounds in math and the sciences — despite usually taking pay cuts to enter the teaching profession.

Source: Teach for America via Center for American Progress (percentages are rounded)

And unlike fellows of Teach For America, a teacher accreditation program that boasts of recruiting young graduates from top national universities, TNTP fellows teach longer, especially minority candidates. 60.5 percent of TFA teachers continue working as public school instructors after their two year commitment. 35.5 percent taught after four years. Comparatively, 72 percent of TNTP fellows come back for a fourth year of teaching. Among blacks and Latinos, 78 percent remain.

Leaders of non-traditional teacher programs sharing their experiences at the CAP event placed additional emphasis on retention. “I want to sure [new teachers] are growing in their profession,” said Rachelle Rogers-Ard, a teacher who manages a recruitment and retention program in Oakland  that seeks out teachers of color. “We’re recruiting folks because we want them to remain in education.”

But targeting minority populations to staff classrooms does not mean the instructors will be highly qualified or effective. “We wouldn’t support lowering certification standards, they are really low to start with,” says Sandi Jacobs of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that is critical of teacher assessment standards nationwide.” Still, she sees value in alternative accreditation routes to help add more diversity in the teaching profession. “There are things that alt routes do that help remove … barriers for anyone, specifically to promote that diversity.”

Rogers-Ard, however, thinks nurturing new talent is an aspect of education many critics of the teaching profession overlook: “That first year doctor might not be as effective as a fifth year physician.”

In late February, a New York City billboard by Austin-based Life Always (affiliated with Austin-based Heroic Media) was taken down soon after it went up after public outcry over the billboard’s message. Today, CBS New York reports that fliers advertising a video from Denton-based Life Dynamics Inc. are now sparking outrage at Princeton Theological Seminary.

CBS reports that the fliers appeared on the New Jersey campus in November, and reappeared in February for Black History Month. One of the fliers from Life Dynamics says, “In the new Klan, lynching is for amateurs,” pointing to website KlanParenthood.com. [Editor's note: Website contains graphic images.] Another points to Life Dynamics website Maafa21.com, which advertises a DVD purporting to link slavery and African-American oppression to modern-day reproductive rights. The DVD is called “Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century.”

According to records from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, the registered agent for Life Dynamics is Denton resident M.H. Crutcher III, who is also the registered agent for Prolife Texas Inc.

According to Internal Revenue Service records, one recent donor to Life Dynamics was Priests for Life, a New York-based group where the director of African-American outreach is Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr. The group gave Life Dynamics more than $58,000 from July 2008-June 2009.

The motto of Life Dynamics is, “Pro-Life: without compromise, without exception, without apology,” according to its website.

A Life Dynamics spokesperson was not immediately available for comment early Tuesday afternoon.

A spokesperson for Lamar Advertising (the company that owns the billboard) said the company decided to remove the billboard because of “concerns for public safety,” according to CNN.

The spokesperson told CNN that the company did not object to the content of the billboard — featuring a picture of a young African American girl and the message “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Rather, the spokesperson said patrons were harassing wait staff at a restaurant in the building to which the billboard was attached, and a protest had been scheduled for today.

A Life Always spokesperson told CNN that more billboards will appear “across the country” in the next couple of months.

In December, Follett told the Texas Independent that he hoped to help groups establish crisis pregnancy resource centers in major urban areas such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. He also said he planned on expanding Heroic to places such as Houston, Connecticut and the Los Angeles area.

The Wall Street Journal reported the advertisement cost $20,000 and was expected to be up for a month, and that Life Always now does not expect to be charged.

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on the Follett family’s frozen food fortune and large-scale philanthropy, plus Heroic’s campaigns in Florida and Texas.

Read the Florida Independent for previous reporting on a prominent Florida Republican who said he “does not condone” Follett’s comparison of African American abortions to “genocide,” plus Mike Huckabee’s continuing support of Heroic Media despite criticism from a Democratic Florida congresswoman.

Records show that Life Always was registered with the state on Jan. 14, at the same northwest Austin address as Follett’s other nonprofits, including Heroic and The Life Foundation.

The Manhattan billboard, featuring a picture of a young African-American girl and the phrase “The Most Dangerous place for an African American is in the womb,” went up earlier this week and has already been the subject of many local news stories and a topic of conversation on ABC’s “The View.”

(Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on Heroic in Texas. Read the Florida Independent for previous reporting on Heroic’s efforts in Florida.)

Dallas’ WFAA-TV reported that pastor and former congressional candidate Stephen Broden is also leading the effort in New York City. Broden — who has been a featured Heroic speaker — like Follett, has compared the abortion of African Americans to ‘genocide.’

While similar Heroic billboards in Texas and Florida feature links to websites DangerousPlace.com and PPabortsAA.org, the NYC billboard has a link to the website ThatsAbortion.com. (Billboards in Houston and Austin do not specifically mention Planned Parenthood or African Americans.) In addition to Broden and Follett, other members of the board of directors for Life Always include Abby Johnson — a former Planned Parenthood director who recently gave testimony in favor of pre-abortion sonograms in the Texas Legislature; and Derek McCoy — a Maryland pastor.

The main banner on the PPabortsAA.org website now also refers to the ThatsAbortion.com website — clicking on that button takes users to Heroic Media‘s website. The banner on DangerousPlace.com also refers to the ThatsAbortion.com website but does not contain a hyperlink.

The websites also link to the website OptionLine.org, a joint project of Care Net and Heartbeat International that refers women to nearby crisis pregnancy resource centers. Heroic, Care Net and Heartbeat International are all faith-based nonprofits.

Follett previously told the Texas Independent that Heroic is partnering with African-American pastors to help them open crisis pregnancy resource centers in their communities. (Heroic also is expanding into Latin America.)

A reporter for the FOX affiliate in NYC interviewed the mother of the girl whose picture appears on the new billboard. Tricia Fraser told the FOX reporter that she signed her children up with a modeling agency to be photographed, and although she realized the photos could be sold as stock images, she never intended for and does not want her child’s image to be the face of an anti-abortion campaign targeting African Americans. According to the FOX story:

“I would never endorse something like that,” Fraser said. “Especially with my child’s image.”

“I know what I went into that shoot for,” Fraser said. “And that’s not what I agreed to. I want them to take it down.”

“It’s bad enough you’re saying this about African Americans, but then you put a child with an innocent face,” Fraser said. “I just want the image off of it. Use another image — just not hers.”

In the giddy, post-electoral haze in 2008, many people hoped and believed that the election of President Obama would herald a new, “post-racial” America. But a look at some recent economic statistics tells a different story.

While overall employment in March stood at 9.7 percent, some 16.5 percent of African-Americans were unemployed. A staggering 41.1 percent of African-Americans between 16 and 19 years of age are unemployed, based on the March numbers, while 19 percent of adult African-American men and 12.4 percent of adult African-American women are facing unemployment. With the exception of the unemployment rate for teenagers, those seasonally adjusted numbers were up over February statistics, even as white unemployment stayed the same.

[Economy1] The numbers weren’t much better among Hispanics.

Latinos face a 12.6 percent unemployment rate overall, while Latino teenagers face a non-seasonally adjusted 30.1 unemployment rate and Latino men and women are unemployed at rates of 12.8 and 12 percent, respectively

Meanwhile, seasonally adjusted white unemployment stood at 8.8 percent (and non-seasonally adjusted unemployment declined from 9.7 to 9.3 percent). While unemployment in the general population — and the white population — seemingly peaked last October, it didn’t peak for African-Americans or Latinos until January 2010 and has already nudged back up. Latino women, in fact, continue to see an expansion in their rates of unemployment.

But the Obama Administration has done little, so far, to target higher rates of unemployment in communities of color as a result of the recession — let alone the existing conditions that lead to ongoing disproportionately high unemployment rates, specifically within African-American communities.

The jobs bill passed by the Senate doesn’t contain even the money for youth employment programs — like the ones mentioned approvingly by the president in 2009 — passed by the House, and it doesn’t contain provisions pushed by African-American lawmakers to make sure that at least 10 percent of the budget for each section of the bill goes to communities where 20 percent of the population is low-income. It has been criticized by African-American lawmakers like Rep. Elijiah Cummings (D-Md.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, for not focusing on the unique problems facing the African-American community and, in particular, hard-hit urban communities facing chronic unemployment. Cummings spokesman Paul Kincaid said, “The congressman and the CBC are really focused on the need for expanding job training as a way to combat these issues.”

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, agrees with Cummings that the president hasn’t gone far enough, saying “[The administration has] been way too meek on it. One thing in particular they could have pushed employment programs targeted to areas of high unemployment. They could focus on areas where unemployment rates are above 20 percent or something, and get money for job creation to areas like Detroit, which employment is just falling through the floor.” If the administration focused on communities disproportionately affected by unemployment, even if it didn’t specifically target African-American communities, its efforts would have a disproportional impact on those communities suffering most from unemployment, including African-Americans, he said.

Baker noted that such statistics have, unfortunately, been typical for years. “African-Americans suffer a disproportionate impact to their employment at every downturn, in part because they have a disproportionate rate of unemployment to start with,” he said. Unemployment in the African-American community was in the double digits prior to the economic downturn and continued, as it always does, to climb up to disproportionately high rates; no one expects it to achieve parity with white unemployment rates as part of the stimulus or jobs bills, let alone because of the recovery.

When asked in 2009 about the African-American unemployment rate — which economists expected could hit 20 percent by the end of the year — and why he hadn’t yet targeted programs at the African-American community, Obama said: “We know that the African-American unemployment rate, the Latino unemployment rate are consistently higher than the national average. And so, if the economy as a whole is doing poorly, the African-American community is going to be doing poorly, and they’re going to be hit harder. The best thing that I can do for the African-American community, the Latino community, the Asian community, whatever community is to get the economy as a whole moving.” The president then went onto the describe some existing programs that target urban teenagers with job skills training, and how the administration might duplicate those programs eventually, in a roundabout way of answering what the administration might do if African-American employment rates did not improve. At the time, reports indicated that if unemployment in the African-American community continued to get worse, the administration would look at more targeted programs.

The National Urban League, in a report issued March 24, suggested a similar program: $150 million in grants to cities, states, non-profits and universities based on local unemployment rates to create three million jobs in the hardest-hit communities. Urban League president and CEO Marc Morial said, “The first thing that needs to be done is direct job creation to put people to work, because fixing structural problems can’t happen while so many people are out of work. What we did in the 30s, what we did in the 70s, with the government hiring people directly, is a good place to start. Congressman Miller’s bill, which would give money to cities to hire people, with 25 percent allocated to community-based organizations to help put people to work.” He also suggested that one way for the president to resolve the criticisms that funding infrastructure projects disproportionately puts white people back to work is to invest heavily in construction training programs in urban areas, where those skills are often in short supply and unemployment is highest.

Economics professor and author Boyce Watkins of Syracuse University thinks a jobs program needs to go much further than that: “Put in place $80-100 billion to a direct effort to create jobs in urban centers around the country, with a disproportionate amount of resources targeted at cities with the highest unemployment. Then you can have a dramatic impact on unemployment very quickly. It would be more effective than giving tax credits to small businesses to hire people,” Watkins said in an interview. The president, he added, “doesn’t have to have a black agenda, he can simply have a strong urban agenda,” but he’s concerned that, with Larry Summers and Tim Geithner at the helm of economic policy, the president won’t hear much about an economic agenda that addresses poverty issues, let alone economic issues of concern to African-Americans or other people of color, because, he says, neither man has any background or apparent intellectual interest in those areas. “If people’s hearts aren’t in the right place, then their intellects won’t be,” he said.

Like the Joint Education Committee report, Morial and Watkins also highlighted the need for significant investments in job training and adult education over the coming years to address the larger structural problems in the African-American community and resolve the apparent mismatch between skills and available jobs. Morial said, “People with long term or structural unemployment generally have high school education or less, and we need a significant, sustained investment in job training, community-based job training and adult education programs to even begin to think about changing the structural problems.” But at this stage, neither a targeted jobs program or a significant investment in targeted job training appears to be on the president’s agenda.

Latinos and blacks have faced obstacles to winning government contracts long before the stimulus. They own 6.8 and 5.2 percent of all businesses, respectively, according to census figures. Yet Latino-owned business have received only 1.7 percent of $46 billion in federal stimulus contracts recorded in U.S. government data, and black-owned businesses have received just 1.1 percent.

Most of the $862 billion in stimulus funds was awarded in block grants to states, but there is no reliable system for tracking how states award contracts to minority-owned businesses.

The Obama administration argues that the numbers are slightly better then they appear.

The White House also pointed out that about $21 billion of the $46 billion is guaranteed, and the rest are options. Latino-owned businesses have received 3.7 percent of the guaranteed total, and black-owned businesses 2.4 percent.

That’s still a disproportionately small share, and indicates that when the government is paying strict attention, minority-owned business do better.

Minority business owners report continuing problems in obtaining government contracts, from “old-boy” networks that control to whom contracts get awarded and tend to favor existing contractors, to being hired as subcontractors by white contractors to meet standards and then dumped when the government wasn’t looking.

Although the administration is committed to helping racial issues by addressing class issues, since African-Americans and some other minorities fall disproportionately into lower income brackets, studies increasingly show that institutional discrimination and sometimes overt discrimination contribute to economic disparities between racial groups — and that simply working to assist the poorest Americans may not help African-Americans achieve proportional economic parity.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, marshaled a raft of statistics to argue that Wells Fargo offered one lending reality for whites and another for blacks. In Shelby County, which includes Memphis, one of every eight Wells Fargo loans in predominantly black neighborhoods resulted in foreclosure, compared with only one in 59 such loans in white neighborhoods, the lawsuit said.

Such charges, if proven, amount to reverse redlining — marketing expensive loan products specifically to black customers.

For anyone who’s been following the reporting of TWI’s Mary Kane on Wells Fargo, this should come as no surprise. First, there was that Cleveland case in which Wells was found to be violating public nuisance laws by failing to clean up its foreclosed properties. Next came the charges from the state of Illinois that Wells had targeted Latino residents for subprime loans, even in cases when potential borrowers could afford less expensive options. Then came the California-based class-action lawsuit alleging subprime discrimination against the bank. And finally, Mary uncovered the bank’s alleged strategy of hiring high-profile black figures such as Tavis Smiley to lure potential black borrowers to “Wealth Building” seminars, where Wells employees would be waiting to sign attendees up for more expensive subprime loans, according to a lawsuit filed by the Illinois attorney general.

Almost seems like there’s a trend here.

“If anyone does a fair analysis of the crowd, it’s a cross-section of the population,” he said in a phone interview.

I agreed that it was a geographically and economically diverse crowd, but I noted that the protesters were at least 99 percent white — in fact, in my four-plus hours at the event, I’d only seen three African-American demonstrators.

DeMint had a simple explanation. “It’s probably just the time and organization and the media that promoted it,” he said.

Well, that explains that.

Update: Thanks to our readers for bringing more realistic crowd size estimates to my attention.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

Roy Edroso collects some of the duller commentary that I have seen.

Rightblogger MacsMind, for example, says that racism is yet with us: “It’s a forgone conclusion that the main reason that Barack Obama was elected president had little to do with the content of his character, but with the color of his skin,” and therefore “It’s not a day of rejoicing, it should be a day of shame.”

Other rightbloggers, like Clayton Cramer, also felt that we haven’t overcome racism: “there is still racism out there — but much of it isn’t whites against blacks, but blacks against whites.”

You hear this sometimes on conservative talk radio: blacks are the most racially-biased voters, because they went for Barack Obama because he’s black. I don’t quite get it. Black voters went 95 percent to four percent for President-elect Barack Obama over Sen. John McCain. That’s up from Sen. John Kerry’s 88 percent to 11 percent win among black voters in 2004. From 2004 to 2008, black support for the Democratic candidate surged a whopping … eight percent. And black voters had gone for Al Gore by a margin of 90 percent to nine percent. So from 2000 to 2004, black support for President George W. Bush had surged by 22 percent. I don’t recall a lot of commentary about the collapse of black “racism.”

The point is that black voters don’t like the national Republican Party, though they can be occasionally moved to support individual Republicans like Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio). Conservatives who blame black voters for this … well, they’re sort of revealing the problem.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Mich., a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the coming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed…

Carabelli is not the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. In Ohio, Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told the Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues.

However, at least one expert challenges the legality of the plan:

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting-rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Dept. who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

Such an effort would by its nature tend to favor Republicans:

The Macomb County party’s plans to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African-Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. More than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans — the most likely kind of loan to go into default — were made to African-Americans in Michigan, according to a report issued last year by the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

Melzer also notes that that the McCain campaign’s Michigan headquarters is located in the office buildiing of Trott & Trott, a law firm that specialized in foreclosures, whose founder is a major Republican fund-raiser.

The article raises some interesting questions. Will the strategy be limited to swing counties in certain states? What, if any, preparations being undertaken to counter such efforts in November? Perhaps most important, should you lose your right to vote because you lose your house to foreclosure?

In June, Marc Ambinder reported GOP and McCain campaign officials would scale back efforts to prevent potential “voter fraud.” However, with another close election predicted, a substantial campaign to prevent some voters from casting ballots in a few key counties could easily tip the balance in one direction or another.