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A number of national teacher surveys revealed that Black teachers — and teachers of color generally — report higher levels of optimism about their students’ futures and the state of the teaching profession than their white colleagues. Many Black teachers we’ve spoken with expressed confusion about this, emphasizing their own struggles to navigate their work environment or that Black teachers have higher turnover rates than their white peers. 

Reflecting on this incongruity, we’ve come to the conclusion that to be a Black teacher in America today is to — as James Baldwin put it — “be in a rage almost all the time,” while simultaneously operating in a constant state of hope. And, though no community of any kind is or should be considered a monolith, we wanted to dedicate some time to exploring why that is through our own experiences and the experiences of Black teachers around us.

Hope

Eighty-five percent of Black teachers — and 90% of teachers of color — report planning to stay in the classroom for their whole career, compared to 78% of white teachers. While we can’t speak for every Black teacher, we know that for us, part of the pull to stay is the sense of activism imbued in our daily work. We know a Black educator’s presence — in the classroom, but also in the building — instills a sense of hope in our students who look like us and even those we don’t teach. Their hope gives us hope.

Thirty-six percent of Black teachers — and 29% of teachers of color — would recommend teaching to others, compared to just 13% of white teachers. In Black traditions, we train our replacements. We know that the work we are doing is so connected to children and grandchildren who will look like our own children and grandchildren, that determining who will lead the next generation of classrooms is work that must be attended to. 

Seventy-nine percent of Black teachers — and 85% of teachers of color — report that their students have recovered academically from the pandemic, compared to just 25% of white teachers. We believe part of the explanation behind this is our deep belief in the abilities of our students. We know that two teachers can look at the same student so differently, and that our belief in them is critical to their success. We also know that when the pandemic paused formal schooling, teachers of color had the antennae to pick up on the signals of learning happening outside of it. 

We recognized the leadership roles kids were playing: managing budgets, taking care of siblings and getting them fed. And we know how to tap into that resilience and independence to catch students up on the schooling they missed, because the alternative — to give up, to lose hope — is unacceptable.

Rage

The optimism expressed in these survey results must be tempered by recognizing it is not fueled solely by hope. It is also fueled by rage.

We know that if we leave the classroom, there may be no one left — not one Black teacher — to represent the culture and community when we’re gone. We don’t just ask. “Who’s going to teach my kids if I leave?” but also, “Who is going to support them in the racial and cultural context(s) in which they’re being educated? Who is going to challenge the misrepresentations in their curriculum? Who is going to make these spaces less anti-racist, less anti-immigrant, less anti-Black?”

And, while survey results show that Black teachers and teachers of color are seemingly more optimistic than white teachers, they still aren’t optimistic: 64% of Black teachers wouldn’t recommend the profession to others. It’s an unthinkable but relatable paradox, especially as Black male educators, to want more people who look like us to join us in a difficult and lonely profession. K-12 education more often than not is a hostile space for Black people, and changing it from the inside out is exhausting. 

This difficult, lonely profession sometimes looks like coming to school the day after Trayvon Martin’s murder, and listening to complaints about the broken copy machine. It sometimes looks like facing “professionalized racism:” experiencing a racist incident that brings you back to an experience you had as a student, and grappling simultaneously with the trauma of that memory and its repetition in the moment. 

It sometimes looks like school districts claiming they want more Black teachers,but refusing to take meaningful steps to stabilize, secure and support these educators, such as through the Black Teacher Pipeline Fellowship. No one has Black teachers in their backpacks, but there are steps and models for school and district leadership teams can and must take to address both ends of the pipeline: recognition, recruitment and retention.

Organizations like the Center for Black Educator Development are certainly a source for Black teachers by providing a model and a lens for how to invite youth into the profession and how to treat them — providing safe and sustainable cultures that ignite and encourage them to show their brilliance — in order to retain them.

To be a Black teacher in the United States is to live in a state of activism and analysis fueled by both hope and rage, because the alternative is to live in a state of utter despair. It has to get better. We must lift our students as we climb ourselves, even if we are also balancing on a precipice.  We work tirelessly alongside teachers of color, who believe that it will get better, who channel their hope and their rage into fighting for every one of our students. 

Teachers who express optimism do so not because they are happy now, but because they believe deeply in what they are working toward.

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