Donald Moses never planned to teach. The 25-year-old went to college with the hope of helping people as a lawyer doing criminal defense.
“I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and what could I do to actually help people – because the whole purpose of me being a lawyer was to help people,” Moses told theGrio in an interview from his home in Houston, Texas.
However, a college program that provided extra credit for mentoring and a pipeline to teaching revealed an epiphany he had never expected to have.
“As I was engaged in it, it became more something I started to like more, and [I could] see myself doing teaching,” he said.
Moses is part of the 1.3% – the increasingly smaller number of Black men who serve as classroom teachers. Just five years ago, the number was 2%.
Schools are generally struggling to fill slots with 36,000 teacher vacancies across the U.S., and 45% of schools reported feeling understaffed when they started this school year. When isolated to poorer neighborhoods, 55% of schools in high-poverty locations had at least one vacancy.
Teachers also face increasing pressures in a career that has become more politicized and finds itself in the center of cultural battles over vaccinations, curriculum, and book bans.
All of these challenges sit against a backdrop of unspoken judgment around what kind of people enter the teaching field.
“High achievers learn through explicit and implicit signals that teaching is not appropriate for someone like them,” wrote scholar Zid Mancenido, who conducted qualitative interviews to understand the forces that push young people to enter career fields other than teaching.
“You say ‘teacher’ and a lot of people are like, ‘Man, teachers don’t get paid that much; that’s not worth it,’’ Moses recalled people telling him. “The kids nowadays, you watch on social media, you see how they act… They have a bad outlook on teaching now because of social media, the pandemic, and the pay.”
Despite any negativity, Moses is steadfast.
“I know this is something I want to do,” he told theGrio.
Aside from the general challenges of recruiting teachers, there are unique factors for Black men that make their entering the field both remarkable and challenging.
Some Black male educators have described what is known as an “invisible tax” – an expectation that is both racialized and gendered and expects that they serve primarily as disciplinarians of children rather than be the academic and intellectual leaders they may prefer to be.
“We are more than just PE [physical education]; we are more than just coaches,” says KJ Johnson, a 23-year-old educator in Buna, Texas, who wears multiple hats as a girls’ basketball coach, special education teacher, and honors anatomy and physiology teacher.
Johnson comes from a family of educators, including a mother who is a math and science teacher, a father who is a superintendent, a stepmother who is a guidance counselor, and grandmothers who worked as teachers. With a legacy like this, Johnson’s respect for teaching was ingrained, and he was encouraged to pursue it as a career.
Nevertheless, he has experienced the common realities Black men face in the classroom. He observed that Black men often have to assert their desire to expand beyond the limitations others put on them.
Scholars have pointed out the plethora of media stories about Black men as solely “role models.” However, new research is emerging, reflecting that many Black men are drawn to the field for nuanced reasons that speak to their complexity as people.
“Given the enormous challenges in recruiting and training Black male urban community teachers, the end result is not to place males in urban schools to serve simply as role models,” scholars Amber Jean-Marie Pabon, Noel S. Anderson, and Haroon Kharem wrote in the Journal of Negro Education article “Minding the Gap: Cultivating Black Male Teachers in a Time of Crisis in Urban Schools.” They continued: “Rather, it is a longer-term commitment having their presence in urban public school classrooms to reframe pedagogical practices and curriculum and transform communities alongside young people.”
A growing crop of special programs aim to do just this by encouraging Black men to become teachers and providing them with training and community on their educator journeys, such as Call Me Mister, Teach For America, and Black Men Teach.
Both KJ Johnson and Donald Moses are members of the Summer House Institute, a fellowship program that provides support via a cohort model before young men enter the classroom. Fellows are matched with a current Black male educator for guidance, and they receive a stipend for program participation to encourage the completion of their degree program.
The fellows must complete 80 hours of volunteering in K-12 classrooms after their summer experience to give them significant exposure to the realities of teaching. Summer House’s goal is to get 1,500 Black men to become teachers by the year 2050.
The young men in these programs are building careers of impact and substance while also being mindful that their choices to commit to careers of service defy prevailing stereotypes about Black males.
“It’s so easy to create your own narrative of what a Black man or even a Black person is,” Johnson told theGrio.
“If any Black male – young Black male – wants to go on to teach, I’ll tell them to do it just for the simple reason that you can show [the students] who you really are. You can introduce him to a different type of culture, a different type of thing to where they can broaden their perspective. Because when they leave us, especially at the secondary school, you know, they’re going to have to learn it for themselves sooner or later,” he continued.
Donald Moses, now in his fourth year of teaching, doesn’t look backward with longing or regret about choosing to teach over a law career. He’s found something that feels like his greater calling.
“People discourage you or just may not have the same outlook on it as you do, but I enjoy every day interacting with kids knowing that they have someone they can trust or someone they can come to. You have good days and bad days. But now I try to lean more into the good days because that’s what makes the job what it is,” Moses told theGrio.
“I feel like what I’m doing is a good thing. And I actually believe in it.”
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Natasha S. Alford is VP of Digital Content and a Senior Correspondent at theGrio. An award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and TV personality, Alford is author of the forthcoming book “American Negra” (Harper Collins). Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @natashasalford.