(Not?) Wanted: Teachers of Color in Massachusetts

Between 2005 and 2006, only 39 percent of African-American individuals who sought to teach in Massachusetts Public Schools passed the Communication and Literacy Skills portion of the state's test for educator licensing. In the same time period, the passage rate was 75.6 percent for white teacher candidates.

Gut-check: should that be grounds for a lawsuit?

What if I told you that three teachers of color -- two African American and one Latino -- who sued the state over the test under various discrimination laws, were fired in 2006 because they could not pass the test, which state law required all teachers to pass in order to teach?

What if I told you those three teachers had been teaching in Boston public schools for several years prior to 2006, and that they had gotten satisfactory performance reviews from their principals?

And what if I added the fact that 76 percent (PDF) of Boston's students are black or Latino, but 62 percent of their teachers are white?

All of it sounds like a ripe set of facts for lawyers to jump into the fray, but for a variety of reasons, some technical and some grounded in well-settled legal principles, the teachers of color lost their lawsuit this past week (PDF).

In short, the court found that there was no alleged evidence of the kind of intentional discrimination needed to justify some of the teachers' claims, and that the teachers waited too long to file their other kinds of claims through which evidence of the test's disparate racial impact might have been enough to prevail in the case.

All of which goes to show the limitations of lawsuits and the judicial system in rectifying serious public policy concerns. The important news for folks who are concerned with the problem of under-represented minorities in the teaching force and its downstream effects on students of color is that nothing about the legal outcome precludes the possibility of policy change to bring more minorities into classrooms.

The bad news is that the policy path is a precarious one. One the one hand, policy makers interested in hiring more African American and Latino teachers in Boston and similarly situated Massachusetts cities may have to lower the proficiency levels required on the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensing in order to accomplish their goals.

On the other hand, reducing our expectations for what teachers should know before being eligible to be in the classroom doesn't sound all that appetizing either.

The best solution, it would seem, would be to get rid of the teacher test as an all-or-nothing gate-keeping device to the teaching profession. To be sure, parents and the public should have access to information on how well-educated classroom teachers are, but shouldn't we be willing to let anyone teach if they inspire students to learn, if they foster a safe learning environment, etc.?

In other words, this is a case where relying on inputs like teacher tests doesn't only prevent minorities from entering the profession -- it keeps policy makers and principals from focusing on what is most important: how much students learn from a given teacher.

Aaron Tang is the co-director of Our Education, a non-profit organization working to build a national youth movement for quality education. He also teaches 8th grade history in Saint Louis, MO.