Mentor Teacher Choices Focus Attention on Minority Issues

Year after year, recommendation lists for mentor teachers that come before San Diego city schools trustees contain few nonwhite candidates, and board members vow the district will do better next time.

Last month, when the 1990 list came forward with 83 names and no black candidates, the district’s personnel chief asked the selection committees to reopen the process. Even though that apparently has resulted in the recommendation of one black candidate, the question remains of whether school administrators are doing enough to encourage minority mentor selection.

In a larger sense, the mentor problem also is crystallizing attention over how to carry out the district’s avowed goal of equity within the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system, in which 60% of the students are nonwhite. Although school administrators have been wrestling with equity for many years, new board member Shirley Weber has refocused the debate to emphasize the severe achievement problems that still remain concerning black and Latino students and the lack of minority teachers, despite a host of special programs tried over the years.

At recent board meetings and conferences, Weber, a San Diego State University professor of Afro-American studies, has been outspoken on the need to hold teachers more accountable for the success of students, as part of reforms to give individual schools more authority, no matter their socioeconomic or family situation, or ethnicity.

Weber wants to see the selection criteria for mentor teachers expanded to reward those instructors who have success in molding black or Latino children to excel, and who can help other teachers in understanding multicultural differences and ethnic learning styles.

Although Weber’s statements unnerve many district administrators and teachers, she nevertheless intends to continue setting the agenda for much of the present educational debate.

“Deep, deep down, a lot of people don’t really believe black or Hispanic kids can learn the same” as white kids, Weber said in an interview, despite district policy statements that all children “can and will learn, and that the district will have high expectations for all children.”

Weber added that “some people, in the same way, have difficulty accepting black teachers, for example, as GATE teachers (those who teach gifted classes), or placing black males who work as school aides in the classroom instead of putting them on the playground at recess to break up fights.”

Weber strongly backed the action by personnel chief George Russell last month to hold up approval of new mentor teachers selected by several committees of district teachers and administrators. For several years, the district has been sensitive about the low numbers of nonwhite teachers who were successfully completing the multi-stage selection process.

After reportedly none of the 18 black teachers who applied made it onto the latest list submitted to the board through Russell, he ordered a review of the process. About 8% of the district’s 4,440 full-time teachers are black.

Russell discovered that three teachers, two black and one white, had been dropped from consideration because letters of recommendation from their principals arrived after the application deadline, he said this week.

As a result, Russell had the committees reopen their interviews. One of the black teachers reportedly made the final proposed list, bumping a teacher previously recommended. Mentor teachers, all of whom must be approved by the Board of Education, earn an extra $4,000 a year under the state-sponsored program for leading workshops and helping colleagues.

Russell has the support of a board majority for the short-term action he took. The board discussed the change in closed session last week and will consider the revised list next week before making it public.

“We understand the rationale and the sense that equity and fairness dictated that reference letters be included in the review, particularly since the applicants made a good-faith effort to get them in on time,” board vice president Jim Roache said.

But Roache said he can understand why some district teachers will be upset at the move.

“We also need to have consistency in our procedure, and this is a deviation from standard procedure” from past years in the process for selecting mentor teachers, he added.

Hugh Boyle, president of the local teachers union, said the compromise leading to the additional interviews “is perhaps a double standard,” since the procedure probably would not have been reopened if all three teachers had been white.

“But there’s always been a double standard in this country, but in the past it operated in the other way.

“The argument (over equity) goes on all the time. I don’t have the answers, it’s just that I’m not particularly heated about this, since the standards weren’t changed and everything was done aboveboard, although the person who got aced out probably will be heated.”

But Weber sees the immediate issue as symptomatic of larger problems.

“If this district is really committed to to develop a more multiethnic, multicultural curriculum, and to different learning styles and teaching styles, then the question comes whether we are ever going to develop mentors in these areas to assist in that, people who have more diversity in experience and knowledge,” Weber said.

Weber also wants to know whether mentor teachers “are actually those who are able to get results out of their students, and not be just teachers who are kind, who are organized and who put up great bulletin boards.”

Although Russell hopes to initiate a full review of the criteria used in selecting mentor teachers, some board members are less convinced that wholesale changes are needed, especially since the idea of having teachers autonomously evaluate mentor applicants is part of the labor agreement between the district and teachers’ union.

“All of us are committed to having ethnic diversity within our teachers and administrators, but, that being said, I don’t know where you draw the line in setting up and agreeing upon rules and procedures and then, sort of from on high, ordering changes,” trustee Kay Davis said. “We need to talk about that a lot more. I realize there is a lot of frustration” on Weber’s part, Davis added.

For her part, Weber believes the district must express more outrage, not only over the small numbers of nonwhite teachers but over achievement levels of nonwhites. For example, 40% of all dropouts, a third of all special education students and a far higher number of disciplinary problems are presented by black students, although they make up only 17% of the students.

“My thing is that, if we really believe that there are very bright kids in every ethnic group, and some not so bright, and that every kid can and will learn, and that blacks are not genetically inferior--if we really believe that, then we should not accept that we have such a disproportionate number of black kids at the bottom, and we should say that what happens for white kids should happen for black kids,” Weber said.

Weber said she is not asking the district to set numerical goals, where 17% of students in an advanced placement class, for example, would be black.

“What I am saying is that we should not have these numbers that now stick out like a sore thumb, that 40% of blacks are in the bottom quartile of reading. . . . I want the numbers down to where they are more proportionate to the population, and that will happen only if the district is serious about equity, period.”

Although many educators say that the socioeconomics, level of immigration and mobility, and cultural patterns explain some of these achievement differences, Weber refuses to accept the arguments.

“I’m glad that when I was in school, none of my teachers ever accepted socioeconomics as a standard because I wouldn’t be where I am today,” she said of her own childhood in a Los Angeles low-income housing project. “I realize that the socioeconomics create difficulties for kids, but those kids will still achieve if they have the right motivation and support in the classroom.

“Even if it’s a single parent or there’s no money or whatever, a teacher still can serve as a role model, the fact that there’s no support at home should not be an excuse. Maybe the teachers have to give even more support, identify some mentors and not let the broken home or whatever be the ending statement on the academic life of the child.”

Top San Diego school administrators are sympathetic to Weber’s concerns and believe that, although socioeconomics do matter, more can be done by teachers and students if basic assumptions are challenged.

“Maybe if we don’t assume a curriculum based on teaching children with two parents, with a nice home life, then we can move to different teaching methods and other things that would work better,” Frank Till, assistant schools superintendent said.

“I know we have to make the jump from where we are to where Shirley wants us to be, but I don’t think we really know how to do it yet.”

Added Till: “I don’t think everyone is in agreement, either. When (Supt. Tom) Payzant presented these themes this summer to people in the district, he got back comments saying, ‘Payzant, you’ve got your head in the sand, you can’t have (high expectations) for these kids.’ ”