NAACP S.D. FORUM CALLS FOR RECRUITING, RETAINING BLACK TEACHERS
The need for more Black educators is well established, and the challenge is not just developing and recruiting more of them, but ensuring they stay at schools once they’re hired, experts say.
Multiple panelists spoke about the issue of recruiting and retaining more Black teachers during an NAACP San Diego forum Monday.
The event was the first of a two-part symposium about education. The second part, about the need for support to increase Black parent involvement in schools, will be held Saturday
from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Black educators have long been underrepresented in schools countywide and nationwide. Just 2 percent of San Diego County’s public school teachers for which racial data are available are African American, according to state data from 20182019, the last year for which data is available.
Having a Black teacher is important for students of all races, experts say, but studies have suggested concrete benefits especially for Black students.
Studies have found that when a Black student has at least one Black teacher, it increases their chances of graduating and going to college and decreases their chances of dropping out of school. One potential reason for that is Black teachers are more likely than White teachers to believe Black students can graduate and complete college, a similar study found.
There are many reasons why there are few Black teachers and why many leave their jobs.
Joe Fulcher, Sweetwater Union High School District’s outgoing assistant superintendent for equity, culture and support services, said during the forum that there are three common reasons why Black teachers leave the profession: they feel underappreciated, they are micromanaged, or they lack support from others in their school or district.
For example, Black teachers often get pushback from parents and their own administrators when they try teaching certain aspects of Black history, such as the Black Panthers, said Lisa Kelly, a middle school teacher and fellow with the Black Teacher Project, an Oakland organization that works to develop and support Black educators.
In many cases, Black teachers are one of the few — or only — Black educators at their school, so it can be easy for them to feel isolated, panelists said.
“The teachers in my district, they feel isolated and alone,” Fulcher said. “They often feel unwelcome, and to address that, we gave them a number of opportunities to talk.”
Fulcher said he and other administrators visited schools to meet with teachers and listen to their thoughts and concerns, then they developed an action plan to address them. He didn’t provide details of the action plan.
“We have to cultivate this type of environment in our districts and not be afraid to take a chance on teachers, Black teachers,” Fulcher said. “Let’s be disruptive and also let’s be mindful of the hard work our Black educators are doing and what they’re up against on a day-to-day basis.”
To increase the number of Black educators, Micia Mosely, founder and director of the Oakland-based Black Teacher Project, suggested that schools pay students to tutor in the summer. That program could help start a teacher pipeline within the district.
She also suggested districts partner with higher education institutions to develop more Black teachers. Like Fulcher, she suggested schools should talk with their existing Black educators and ask them what support they need.
Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born bandleader who cofounded the record label that turned salsa music into a worldwide sensation, died Feb. 15 in Teaneck, N.J. He was 85.
His wife, Maria Elena Pacheco, who is known as Cuqui, confirmed the death, at Holy Name Medical Center. Pacheco lived in Fort Lee, N.J.
Fania Records, which he founded with Jerry Masucci in 1964, signed Latin music’s hottest talents of the 1960s and ’70s, including Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe and Rubén Blades. Pacheco, a gifted flutist, led the way on and off the stage, working as a songwriter, arranger and leader of the Fania All Stars, salsa’s first supergroup.
From the beginning, he partnered with young musicians who were stirring jazz, rhythm and blues, funk and other styles into traditional Afro-Cuban music.
By the 1970s, Fania, sometimes called the Motown of salsa, was a powerhouse in Latin music, and the Fania All Stars were touring the world. The label gave birth to combustive creative collaborations, like that between Colón, a trombonist and composer, and
Blades, a socially conscious lyricist and singer; and to cult heroes like Lavoe, the Puerto Rican singer who battled drug addiction and died of AIDS-related complications at 46.
Fania dissolved in the mid-1980s amid lawsuits involving royalties, and in 2005, Emusica, a Miami company, purchased the Fania catalog and began releasing remastered versions of its classic recordings.
Juan Azarías Pacheco Knipping was born on March 25, 1935, in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the Dominican Republic. His father, Rafael Azarias Pacheco, was a renowned bandleader and clarinetist. His mother, Octavia Knipping Rochet, was the granddaughter of a French colonist and the great-granddaughter of a German merchant who had married a Dominican woman born to Spanish colonists.
The family moved to New York when Johnny was 11, and he studied percussion at the Juilliard School and worked in Latin bands before starting his own, Pacheco y Su Charanga, in 1960.
The band signed with Alegre Records, and its first album sold more than 100,000 copies in the first year, becoming one the bestselling Latin albums of its time, according to his official website. It jump-started Pacheco’s career with the introduction of a new dance craze called the pachanga. He became an international star, touring the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Fania Records was born out of an unlikely partnership between Pacheco and Masucci, a former police officer turned lawyer who fell in love with Latin music during a visit to Cuba.
From its humble beginnings in Harlem and the Bronx — where releases were sold from the trunks of cars — Fania brought an urbane sensibility to Latin music. In New York, the music had taken on the name “salsa” (Spanish for sauce, as in hot sauce), and the Fania label began using it as part of its marketing.
Guided by Pacheco, artists built a new sound based on traditional clave rhythms and the genre Cuban son (or son Cubano), but faster and more aggressive. Many of the lyrics — about racism, cultural pride and the tumultuous politics of the era — were far removed from the pastoral and romantic scenes in traditional Cuban songs.
In that sense, salsa was “homegrown American music, as much a part of the Indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hiphop,” Jody Rosen wrote in The New York Times in 2006 on the occasion of the reissue of the Fania master tapes — after they had spent years gathering mold in a warehouse in Hudson, N.Y.
Pacheco teamed up with Cruz in the early 1970s. Their first album, “Celia & Johnny,” was a potent mix of hard-driving salsa with infectious choruses and virtuosic performances. It soon went gold, thanks to Cruz’s vocal prowess and Pacheco’s big-band direction, and its first track, the up-tempo “Quimbara,” helped propel Cruz’s career to Queen of Salsa status.
The two released more than 10 albums together; Pacheco was a producer on her last solo recording, “La Negra Tiene Tumbao,” which won the Grammy for best salsa album in 2002.
Over the years, Pacheco produced for several artists and performed all over the world, and he contributed to movie soundtracks, including one for “The Mambo Kings,” a 1992 film based on based on Oscar Hijuelos’ novel “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” For the Jonathan Demme movie “Something Wild,” he teamed up with David Byrne, leader of the Talking Heads, one of his many eclectic partnerships.
Pacheco, the recipient of numerous awards and honors both in the Dominican Republican and the United States, was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1998. He wrote more than 150 songs, many of them now classics.
For many years he spearheaded the Johnny Pacheco Latin Music and Jazz Festival at Lehman College in the Bronx, an annual event in collaboration with the college (streamed live in recent years) that provides a stage for hundreds of talented young musicians studying music in New York City schools.
In addition to this wife, Pacheco’s survivors include two daughters, Norma and Joanne; and two sons, Elis and Phillip.