Black men make up just 4% of Maryland teachers
The result is a shortage of mentors, which some pipeline programs seek to address
Zaire Bond always knew he wanted to be a teacher, even though most of his educators didn’t look like him.
Back in kindergarten, most of the now-18-year-old’s peers said they wanted to be a teacher when they grew up. These days, the Western School of Technology senior says he’s one of the only students he knows still planning to pursue a career in education.
Meanwhile, Zaire’s list of potential career mentors from his public-school experience is thin. None of his high school teachers is Black like him. Only five of his teachers over the years have shared the same skin color as him — and the number gets even smaller when Zaire considers how many were men.
“I have to be prepared that I may be the only Black teacher there,” he said about his chosen career.
Research shows that Black students are more likely to graduate and attend college when they are instructed by educators who look like them.
Yet nationwide Black men account for just a fraction of the teacher workforce at about 1.3% for the 2020-21 school year, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. This was the second-lowest demographic; Asian men made up 0.5% of the nation’s teacher workforce.
In Maryland, 4% of the public schoolteacher workforce are Black men, though 17% of students are Black and male, according to the state Department of Education.
Baltimore fared somewhat better, with 10% of teachers as of October 2021 being Black males, but so is 38.4% of the student body.
Meanwhile, Carroll County Public Schools had just seven Black male teachers, 0.4% of its teachers, while just 2.2% of its students are. Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford and Howard counties counted Black men as 1% to 3% of their public schoolteacher workforce, while just over 1 in 10 students in each are Black males.
Zaire’s father Anthone Bond, who’s also Black, remembers his experiences in the classroom before becoming a teacher himself. He found that when the teacher didn’t look like him, the educator wouldn’t call on him or ask him questions.
Now that Anthone has found himself in the teacher’s seat, he said he tries to give his students the education he wishes he had gotten.
“Teaching is [a] way to directly give back and influence the future,” he said.
The limited number of Black male teachers stems from multiple factors, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which led to many Black educators from Black-only schools not being incorporated into the integrated schools.
A 1994 article in the Journal of Negro Education reported that white superintendents at the time didn’t want to give Black educators authority over white students.
Black male students also don’t see older mentors in the profession, advocates say.
Pipeline programs aim to help solve that issue, but such programs are almost as rare as the teachers themselves.
One program, the Center for Research & Mentoring of Black Male Students & Teachers at Bowie State University, a historically Black college in Prince George’s County, has helped Zaire join a supportive community of Black male teachers and students.
Bowie State professor Julius Davis founded the center in 2019 to give older students opportunities to learn about what it means to be a Black male teacher. Today, the program brings in Black male students in grades eight to 12 from across the country. The center also works on research about Black male teachers and aims to build a safe space for Black boys and men.
The U.S. Department of Education awarded a $1.5 million grant to Bowie State’s Black Male Educators Project on Feb. 16 that will go toward increasing the number of Black male teachers who have the skills to help teach English for Speakers of Other Languages.
“A lot of folks that I have seen in this space, they’re looking for mentors.,” Davis said. “That is not a problem we have, in terms of access to Black male educators or Black men. So students get the opportunity all the time to interact with folks within our local geographical region, as well as nationally, just based on who our network is.”
The Bond family has its own network of Black educators, from Anthone’s mother, Ordean Wynn Bond, who worked as a schoolteacher, to Anthone and Zaire.
Anthone Bond discovered mentors outside his family when he reached college. He decided to attend Virginia State University, an HBCU in Petersburg, Virginia, and recognized how differently he was taught when the educator was Black. He found comfort in the HBCU atmosphere and was inspired by the university’s initiative to fully develop all students.
At times he has let Zaire try out his teaching skills with his dad’s classes on Zoom. They found Zaire was strict in his lessons. In between classes, Anthone poses scenarios to Zaire to pick his brain: What if a lesson doesn’t work like you want it to? How do you plan on decorating your classroom?
Some of the hypothetical scenarios he throws out to Zaire relate to race and potential aggressions he could experience in the workforce. Anthone discusses with his son the importance of tact and how taking racism head-on isn’t always the best option.
“We just talk about being a Black male, period,” Anthone said.
But the conversation on being a Black male teacher doesn’t just focus on the negative. Anthone Bond reminds his son that being a minority teacher means always being a role model.
He exemplifies that to his son by teaching every student as though they were his own. Anthone helps his students search for scholarships and has even started his own in memory of his mother: the O.W. Bond Memorial Scholarship. Before she died, Ordean Wynn Bond said she wanted to establish a scholarship for students wanting to pursue education.
Zaire hopes to teach history when he gets his own classroom. His interest in the subject stems from his father, who also taught history. At home, Zaire lives with iconic Black figures such as Malcolm X and Erykah Badu watching from the picture frames on the wall.
Anthone Bond recognized the importance of history because of the events he and his family experienced, especially in the American South. Living in Georgia, he heard about how his dad was the one of the first kids to integrate his school.
At 10 years old, Anthone attended the first parade honoring Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. There, he saw the tall, pointy hats of the Ku Klux Klan standing behind him. He brings these experiences and more with him to the classroom.
Today, Anthone and Zaire Bond are living out modern history.
In 2020, following the death of George Floyd, the family took part in the Black Lives Matter protests that occurred all over the country. Anthone hopes that Zaire, like him, will be able to share these stories with his students.