Teaching’s Diversity Problem
Travis Bristol is working to keep male teachers of color in public schools
Travis Bristol was just 22 when he arrived at Manhattan Hunter Science High School in September 2004, armed with a bachelor’s from Amherst, a master’s from Stanford, and a passion for introducing New York City 10th graders to the intellectual thrills of Candide, Oedipus Rex, and Othello. But by late October, school administrators were leaning on Bristol—their only black teacher—for something else: what they saw as his skill at managing teenagers—specifically, boys of color.
Brett McLean (right) credits BU’s Travis Bristol (left) with helping him achieve his dream: becoming a teacher in a Boston public high school. Photo (above) by Jackie Ricciardi.
When a colleague couldn’t get her class under control, several boys who had been branded as “troublemakers” were reassigned to Bristol. “There was this assumption that I could manage them,” he says. “I was able to do that not because I was a black male, but because I was getting to know the students and designing content that was engaging and rigorous. The students weren’t the problem.”
Bristol soon learned that other teachers like him felt similarly typecast. His experience shaped his research for his PhD: asking 27 Boston teachers what it was like to be the only black male teacher, or one of just a few, at a big-city public school. Their answers helped explain why black men were leaving classrooms across the country at higher rates than their white and female counterparts. A study by University of Pennsylvania education professor Richard Ingersoll found that in the 2004–2005, 2008–2009, and 2012–2013 school years, turnover among teachers classified as “minority” was, respectively, 18, 24, and 25 percent higher than white teacher turnover.
The Boston teachers told of being turned into disciplinarians—the black man charged with controlling students of color. They spoke of white colleagues who didn’t seem to value their intellects or ideas about teaching. They felt isolated—“like all eyes were on me,” as one put it.
“They were surprised that anyone cared,” Bristol says. “They said to me, ‘Who’s going to listen to you?’”
As it turns out, a lot of people listened. Today, as a School of Education assistant professor of English education and educational leadership and policy studies, Bristol is at the forefront of efforts to bring more men of color into the nation’s teaching workforce—which remains 82 percent white even as children of color have become a majority of public school students—and to keep them there.
He is the principal investigator for New York City’s $16 million NYC Men Teach initiative, begun by the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, in 2015 to recruit, support, and retain 1,000 male teachers of color within three years—the largest such effort in the country. Bristol is intent on making those teachers feel welcome, supported, and empowered.
“Having a teacher of color matters. But it isn’t enough to be Latinx or black. They have to be good teachers.” –Travis Bristol
Such recruitment drives have come and gone for decades in school districts across the country; the Obama administration launched a nationwide effort in 2011. But recruitment, Bristol knew, wasn’t enough. He helped persuade city and school officials that NYC Men Teach had to focus on retention as well as recruitment.
“Travis was an original thought partner,” says W. Cyrus Garrett, executive director of the NYC Young Men’s Initiative, the umbrella program for NYC Men Teach. “He had actually done the research. He showed us how our assumptions around male teachers of color not being interested in the profession because it was mostly women were actually completely wrong. It was that they didn’t feel welcome in that space.”
While boys of color make up 43 percent of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students, only 8.3 percent of some 77,000 teachers are black, Latino, or Asian men. Nationally, the teaching workforce is 76 percent female. Men and women of color account for 18 percent of teachers, according to a 2016 US Department of Education study. Latino men make up 2 percent of teachers, and about 2 percent are black men.
With the nation’s public school student population becoming more racially and ethnically diverse (children of color are expected to make up 56 percent of that population by 2024), and a growing body of research showing that children of color do better, academically and socially, when they have a teacher who looks like them, the need to recruit—and even more important, retain—teachers of color has never been more urgent, educators and policymakers say.
“Having a teacher of color matters,” says Bristol, who did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education under faculty director Linda Darling-Hammond, an authority on educational equity who led President Barack Obama’s education policy transition team in 2008. “But it isn’t enough to be Latinx or black. They have to be good teachers.”
A New York City School Student Returns at the Head of the Class
The son of Guyanese immigrants, Bristol, whose mother is a preschool teacher, grew up in Brooklyn’s working-class East New York neighborhood. The high school he attended was overcrowded and underfunded and served mostly students of color. They entered Washington Irving High School, in Manhattan, through metal detectors, Bristol recalls, and in some classrooms, the desks were bolted to the floors. Bristol makes the point that one of that school’s most inspiring teachers was a white 11th-grade English teacher named Elayne Shapiro.
It was his election to student body president that led to a revelatory journey in his senior year—a subway ride downtown to meet his counterpart at Stuyvesant High School, an elite exam school where most students were Asian or white.
“I remember being filled with anger when I walked into Stuyvesant and saw that I could travel just 20 minutes on the train to another school that looked very different from mine and that had all these resources that I didn’t have,” he says. “There were no metal detectors. There was a swimming pool. The student council had their own offices. There were escalators. The paint wasn’t coming down from anywhere.”
And, he says, “clearly, the students at Stuyvesant were being asked to do a lot more academically.”
At Amherst, Bristol majored in English, volunteered as a tutor in the Holyoke schools, and fell in love with teaching. Earning an MA in education at Stanford, he did his teacher training at Menlo-Atherton High School, near Palo Alto. While he was assigned to regular classes, he spent his breaks sitting in on honors classes that had large numbers of affluent white students. “I wanted to know what the honors students were reading,” he says.
“The sophomores were reading Candide. I decided that if those students who are living in multimillion-dollar houses can read Candide, then wherever I go, if I’m teaching 10th graders, I’m going to teach Candide.” And so in September 2004, when Bristol began teaching English to 10th graders, mostly students of color, at Manhattan Hunter Science High School, he put Candide at the top of the reading list.
Bristol’s experience in the New York City schools, both as a student and as a teacher, enhances his role with NYC Men Teach, Garrett says. “Travis knows the system because he was in it. He understands the hurdles.”
And for novice male teachers of color, who tend to be concentrated in schools—in cities across the country, not just in New York—that have large numbers of students of color from low-income families and lack resources and support for just about everyone working there, the hurdles can be especially daunting. In a nod to the crucial role of black teachers, both men and women, in educating black students in segregated schools more than 60 years ago, Garrett chose the word “Anchors” for novice teachers involved with NYC Men Teach.
“They helped build the black middle class,” he says. “Teaching was one of the only professions that many people of color who sought college degrees could find employment in, which led to a high talent pool of people who would otherwise have become doctors, lawyers, or PhDs.”
It was an unintended consequence of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregated schools: while black students entered previously all-white schools, black principals and black teachers did not follow. Instead, tens of thousands of men and women—a battle-tested army of role models, mentors, and community leaders—were let go. (Before Brown, there were 82,000 black male and female teachers in the United States. Between 1954 and 1964, 38,000 of those teachers lost their jobs.)
After teaching for several years, Bristol concluded that the schools, not the students, needed fixing. Photo (above) by Jackie Ricciardi.
These men and women viewed their role not just as teachers, says Bristol, but as surrogate parents. Many teachers of color embrace a similar role in urban schools today, he says.
With input from Bristol, NYC Men Teach has set out to provide experienced teachers as mentors to help its Anchors develop their classroom skills and feel welcome in their schools. Bristol has also recommended that school administrators be provided with racial- and gender-awareness training; one of the aims, he says, is to get principals to “understand how their unconscious biases influence the roles they assign teachers from particular subgroups.”
Bristol has published his research on male teachers of color in Urban Education (March 2014), a peer-reviewed journal focused on inner-city schools, and Kappan(October 2015), a magazine aimed at elementary and secondary school teachers published by Phi Delta Kappa International, a professional association for educators. In addition to his work with NYC Men Teach, he is consulting with policymakers and school officials in a number of different cities and school districts on how to support and retain male teachers of color.
A diverse teaching workforce benefits children—and adults—of all races, says Bristol, who in 2015 received the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education inaugural Teacher Diversity Research Award. Teachers and administrators of color provide leadership role models; their educational achievement and professional status help counter negative racial stereotypes, says Bristol, a Peter Paul Career Development Assistant Professor at BU.
“Travis has spent years examining black male teachers’ pathways into the profession, their experiences, and their retention rates, and his findings have served as a catalyst for national conversations on these topics,” says John B. King, Jr., who was secretary of education in the Obama administration in 2016 and 2017, and is now president and CEO of the Education Trust, a national nonprofit that seeks to close achievement gaps from pre-K through college.
“He’s been dazzling to watch,” says Hugh Price, a former National Urban League president, who became a mentor to the 19-year-old undergrad at Amherst College—Price’s alma mater—when he was a summer intern at the Urban League. “He speaks with authority because of his combination of the academic and the practical. Given his understanding of the intersection of research, teaching, policy, and practice and his ability to operate in all those domains, I think he has the potential, if he keeps evolving and growing, to become another Linda Darling-Hammond.”
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Author, Sara Rimer can be reached at srimer@bu.edu.
Photojournalist, Jackie Ricciardi can be reached at jricc@bu.edu.