Editor's Note: This story has been updated to include a Department of Education statement about retention efforts.
The New York City Department of Education has been trying to recruit and retain teachers of color, bilingual teachers and male teachers in an effort to have the adults in the classroom look more like the students, who are overwhelmingly students of color with many speaking a language other than English at home.
A look at the the city's NYC Men Teach initiative reveals some of the challenges. First, the disparities between the teaching force and the student population are daunting. This past year, 600 men of color out of a total of 6,000 new teachers were hired to teach in the public schools; systemwide, just 10 percent of the city’s 76,000 teachers are men of color. Yet, black, Latino and Asian kids make up over 85 percent of public school students.
According to a recent report from The Education Trust-New York, "See Our Truth," 150 schools in New York City don’t have a single black teacher and 97 schools don’t have a single Latino teacher. Nationally, 82 percent of teachers are white and most are female.
Brent Nycz, a self-described "big Puerto Rican man with a beard," is breaking the mold of the "typical" teacher: “I’m 6 foot, 270 right now. I can look intimidating.”
A 5th-grade special education teacher, Nycz told WNYC his students at Archer Elementary in the Bronx respond to him differently. So do other teachers. Throughout his nine years teaching, Nycz said some have tried to make him the school disciplinarian. Bias among colleagues was another challenge to diversifying the workforce, researchers said.
“Just because you're a person of color, who is a man, you might be put in that role.” Nycz said. “That’s not my role. That’s not who I am.”
Nycz is mentoring new male teachers of color in the NYC Men Teach program. Since 2015, the initiative added 900 men of color into the teacher "pipeline," which includes college students who have expressed a commitment to becoming teachers, according to a spokeswoman at the Department of Education.
The spokeswoman could not provide a number for how many more men of color are now teachers because of NYC Men Teach. But in the 2015-16 school year, she said, 350 more men of color, including aides and assistants, were in the classrooms as a result of the initiative.
Prof. Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, questioned the value of the recruitment effort. Currently, teachers of color leave the profession at higher rates than their white peers and Cherng says they will continue to without the proper support and training.
There’s an assumption that “all we need to do is put this black male teacher in front of a bunch of black male students and the magic will happen,” Cherng said, adding that white teachers need to put in the work, too, when it came to tackling bias and being more culturally responsive to their students.
“If we have all of our hopes placed in teachers of color, it literally means that white teachers don't actually have to work as hard,” Cherng said.
"NYC Men Teach focuses on retaining male teachers of color once they are hired," the department spokeswoman said. "Through the initiative, new teachers are provided ongoing mentorship, culturally relevant professional development opportunities, and the support of staff networks that have been instituted across the system to better address the needs of a diverse teaching workforce."
And Crystel Harris, the director of teacher recruitment and NYC Men Teach, said the initiative aimed to diversify the teacher force. It made no claims about who was a more effective teacher.
“We have not made any statements in regard to who is having a larger impact,” Harris said. “But what we can say for sure is we don't see men of color reflected in our teaching population as much as we we would like to.”
Michael Peterson is in his first year as a physical education teacher at P.S. 297 — his former elementary school in Brooklyn. A subway ad for NYC Men Teach inspired him to make a career change.
“I grew up right across the street in Marcy Projects," Peterson said. "My perspective with a kid who goes to the same laundromat that I went to, who walks around the same blocks, who might have the same challenges, my perspective is very much the same.”