I have spent over a decade working as a teacher and principal. In 2015, I left the classroom for a year to try something different and that completely changed my job.
I took on a role as a teacher recruiter at Achievement First, where my focus was working with principals to recruit teachers. At the time, I had just finished my commitment to Teach For America at my placement school, Miami Northwestern Senior High School, where I had the benefit of working in a historically black community at a public high school with a majority black staff and a team of leadership with members who looked like me.
Our blackness was elevated and celebrated every day, so when I started recruiting, I wasn’t aware of the racial disparity between The teaching staff of the United States and the student population of our nation.
I assumed that all black students had black teachers at school. I made a mistake.
When I became a teacher recruiter, part of my job was to visit each school, observe classrooms, and talk to students to better understand the atmosphere and personality of each school community. There was a trend that was consistent in most of the schools I worked with: the majority of students identified as black, while the majority of teachers were white.
As a recruiter, I saw this picture very clearly and I wasn’t the only one. In fact, one of the principals I worked with looked me right in the eye during one of our check-ins and said, “Damen, I need black teachers.”
I didn’t have an immediate solution for her, but I did have a community I could turn to to find strong Black teacher candidates. I graduated from a historically black college (Morehouse College), am a member of a historically black fraternity, and many of my family members had ties to the education profession.
I looked for references on my network and it started working. Some of the principals I worked with began hiring more black teachers. One of them, the principal of Achievement First High School in Brooklyn, hired six black teachers that year, including me.
When I returned to the classroom after my recruiting year, I noticed the problem again. Our students were mostly black but (at the time) our staff was mostly white. Although my decision to return to the classroom was helping to change the narrative in my own school building, the the gap persisted and was not in a position to change it systematically.
Now, eight years later, I am the principal of that same school and I am proud to say that each student has several black teachers each year, an anomaly given that in the United States, only 7 Percent of Public School Teachers Identify as Black according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics.
This change did not happen overnight; It took years to ensure that our staff reflected the diversity of our student body. To get there, I had to shift my mindset toward equity and apply what I learned from my role as a recruiter to refine our hiring process. But before all that, I had to turn to history to understand more deeply how we got here.
Going back to the story
When I began this work, I found it critical to understand why there are so few Black teachers in American public schools. The 1954 decision between Brown and the Board of Education was revealing. Although the case overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal” and set the stage for racial integration in America’s public schools, it decimated the workforce of black teachers and administrators. Generalized resistance to integration led to the dismissal, dismissal or demotion of 100,000 black principals and teachers between 1952 and the late 1970s, according to the Brookings Institution. Since the 1970s, the number of black teachers has been decreasing.
Much research has been done to demonstrate the positive effects that a qualified and effective Black teacher has on the achievement of Black students. academic and social results. Black teachers can serve as role models whose presence can leave a positive effect long after the student graduates. When we do not prioritize the recruitment, development, and retention of Black faculty, we deprive Black students of the benefits of having faculty of their own race.
As I learned about the history of the issue, I reflected on my own journey as a Black student, teacher, and administrator. I grew up in an upper-middle class neighborhood where most of my neighbors were white, which had a huge impact on my experience with race at school. I have never lived in a majority black neighborhood or attended a majority black school. But I did have Black teachers and administrators at school and in my community who made me feel seen and valued in spaces where I was a minority. In fact, my first elementary school principal was a dynamic black woman whose kindness and warmth I still feel and carry with me as a principal today.
I carry these memories as reminders of the tremendous impact Black educators had on my confidence, identity development, and academic success. Their representation validated, motivated, and pushed me to not only pursue excellence in my own education but also to build a career in this field.
Turn a problem into an opportunity
Becoming a principal was a career-defining opportunity in several ways, but primarily because it positioned me to make even more changes at my school by turning a challenge into an opportunity. At the top of my priority list was hiring a diverse and effective staff to represent our student body.
As director, I interview and make the final hiring decision for all staff, so the buck starts and ends with me. I have the power to create the team I think students need, but to do so, I had to rethink our hiring practices, including our hiring strategy and interview process. I have made it a priority to ensure that every child in my care has the teachers they deserve and have reviewed our practices to make this happen.
I made some big changes to our hiring process. First I navigate the national teacher shortage leaning on a lesson I learned when recruiting and reaching out to my staff for referrals. Great people know great people, so whenever there is a vacancy or departure, I reach out to my community for support, which has led to tremendous success. My operations team, instructional staff, and leadership team have been strengthened by turning to those who work in my organization for candidate recommendations.
Second, I always include members of my leadership team in interviews to broaden my perspective and mitigate any unconscious bias that may be at play. I intentionally choose a hiring committee that reflects the role, skills, and diversity of life existing at my school, and after each interview, we use a competency rubric—not just our intuition—to evaluate each candidate objectively.
Finally, I ask explicit questions in the interviews about race and its impact on our work as educators of Black children in the public education system. I will pose a question like this: “Leading for racial equity is something we value here at my school. Given your personal identity and values, what do you see your role in leading on racial equity? Or, “What do you think your role is in dismantling systemic racism, given your role as a teacher?” These types of questions allow my team and me to evaluate a candidate’s alignment of values and commitment to our mission. These questions also make it clear where my school stands, showing the candidate that we care about diversity and are not afraid to talk about it.
When I took a year off from teaching to become a recruiter, I never thought it would shape my career the way it has. It taught me to question the status quo, to lean on history to get a clearer idea of how some of the complex problems in education emerged, and most importantly, it reminded me that the presence of Black educators and school leaders is more than just “Nice to have” – is critical to the success of all students, particularly Black students.
