‘A LOT OF THESE KIDS NEED ROLE MODELS’
Following 1st-year black teacher through early months at CPS
While driving to his first day on the job, Jonathan White thought about his dead father and wept. Then 36 years old, White was going to teach sixth grade at a Chicago public school. It was his sixth job in 14 years and a rare career choice for a black man, especially him. White has an MBA.
The thought that overwhelmed him that morning was how proud his father would be; how closely this work aligned with the life of Jonathan R. White Sr., who had died nine months earlier.
When White ascended the steps to Room 203 at A.N. Pritzker School that morning, he carried a measure of personal resolve — an eldest son asserting his father’s legacy. He also represented something broader, more significant — a man willing to fight the odds to address a crucial need for a greater good.
“We’re going to have a great year,” he told his 28 homeroom students that first day. “But we’ve got to be disciplined. We’ve got to be disciplined.”
An estimated 2 percent of teachers in public schools across the country are African-American men, acwcording to the U.S. Department of Education. About half of students enrolled in
public schools are nonwhite.
In Illinois public schools, the percentage of African-American male teachers is even lower, hovering around 1 percent, according to an analysis of 2017 figures, the most recent available from the Illinois State Board of Education.
In Chicago Public Schools, about 665 of 21,000 teachers are black males; fewer than 375 of them work at the elementary level. Here’s why that matters: A growing body of research underscores the premise that having black male teachers can mean more success at school for students of color, particularly boys, lowering dropout rates and the achievement gap between black and white students.
The research also indicates that black students with black teachers are suspended less often than those with white or Hispanic teachers and that — test scores and other factors being equal — black students are three times more likely to be assigned to gifted programs when taught by a black teacher than a nonblack teacher.
In addition, one study found that having at least one black teacher in elementary school — female or male — reduces by 39 percent the probability that very low-income black boys will drop out.
“I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if … male black teachers are more effective to male black students,” said Nicholas Papageorge, an assistant professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University who researches and writes about teacher diversity. “The more similar a role model is, the more effective it could be.”
But recruiting young black men to become teachers — and retaining them — is an enormous challenge, he and other experts note. Many of the brightest, most promising black male college students are lured to higher-paying, more stable professions with better prospects for advancement, experts say.
And black teachers tend to burn out more frequently than their white counterparts.
“I don’t even know who he is, but I already admire him,” Papageorge said of White. “He’s going into the trenches. A lot of these kids need role models.”
Rules, Social Fridays and hygiene — all on Day 1
That morning after Labor Day in Room 203, White had arranged desks in five clusters and left the room’s fluorescent ceiling lights off, preferring natural light from a wall of windows and three table lamps. The aroma of essential oils wafted through the room. Two new, cushy chairs were set up in a reading nook.
He immediately introduced the classroom rules, which are posted on the wall and which he would repeatedly drill into his students: Listen when the teacher is talking; follow directions quickly; respect others, yourself and your class; raise your hand to speak or stand; be safe, honest and kind.
He had the students practice several times quietly pulling out their chairs and sitting. He ordered them to turn off their phones and later placed the devices in a locked cabinet next to his desk.
“When I say, ‘Class,’ ” he told the group, “You say, ‘Yes.’ “Class,” he called.
“Yes,” the students replied. “Class, class,” White said. “Yes, yes,” they said. He explained that he only affirms positive behavior. “Thank you for using your intelligence,” he told them at one point. “Thank you for your patience,” he said another time.
He was very direct and probing in speaking with students, a trait that put off student Jah’Elle Smith.
“When I first met him,” she recalled later, “I did not like him. He gave me an attitude.”
Classmates Malik Newsom and Juliana Clay said he was strict, “but I think we need that for sixth grade,” Juliana added.
White introduced Social Fridays, where students earn free time on the last day of the week by accruing good behavior points but can also lose it through bad behavior.
He placed himself on the “hot seat,” allowing students to ask him anything about himself, before encouraging others to volunteer for the spot. “When I was in middle school, I was a D student,” he said. “Why? Because I was bored. I was a daydreamer. I would look out the window and not do my work.”
Then he had them try to arrange their seating based on their birth months, but without speaking. This led to chaos. He told them that “making mistakes actually grows your brain. It’s science.”
And he broached a sensitive topic.
“I’m not trying to have a puberty conversation here,” he said, eliciting groans across the room. “Whatever your method is, you need to wash your body every day.”
While leading his students around the school’s halls, they passed a sixth-grade boy sobbing in the stairwell. During a break later, the boy walked into White’s empty classroom, sniffling. The teacher pulled up a chair.
“I know how you feel,” he told the boy. “You know what happened to me this year? My dad died. I still miss him. In fact, on my way here today, I cried. It’s good for you to cry. It’s healthy.”
He waited for the boy to say something.
“It’s going to be OK,” White finally said.
At the end of the day, he directed the class to stand in line quietly to wait for dismissal. Then he huddled with five African-American boys. In a low voice, he told them that there was only one alpha male in the classroom: him.
“It’s not our classroom yet,” he said to the students. “It’s mine for now.”
After everyone left, White wiped sweat from his head and face, saying they’re good kids. They just need some work. He was planning to call the parents of three or four students.
He said the longer he had the students, the tougher it was to keep their attention. He said he learned he has a lot to learn.
“I just gotta keep working on it,” he said. “There are a lot of gaps in my practice, and I need to take care of this. “I pulled out all my tricks,” White added. “I am so tired. I am so tired, man.”
In the stairwell, another teacher approached him.
“One (day) down,” the colleague said, “179 to go.”
Call me ‘Mister’
As White does his part to address the dearth of African-American male teachers at Pritzker School, the University of Illinois at Chicago is attempting to solve the problem in a broader, systematic way.
Last fall, the university launched its Call Me MISTER program, which recruits and trains male elementary education majors of color almost as the school recruits and trains athletes.
The acronym stands for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models, and each of the young men involved — six Latino, one black — receives full tuition and room and board, academic and mentoring support and job placement assistance.
Alfred Tatum, dean of UIC’s College of Education, started the program, which is affiliated with the original, national MISTER initiative based at Clemson University.
Tatum called the inaugural group “soul models” who “come in your life and stay in your life. This is not just becoming a teacher,” he said, adding that the school is planning to invest about $1 million in the effort.
“This is becoming a leader.”
A long road to teaching
White loves watches and hates to be interrupted. He carries a leather-bound journal with an owl on the cover. He is married to a kindergarten teacher, and they have a 5-year-old daughter.
His head is shaved. He wears glasses and sports a goatee. He is introspective, long-winded and confident, eloquent and candid. He plays bass guitar and is reading “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.” He writes notes in the margins of the pages.
Born in 1981 in Waukegan, White is the eldest of three brothers separated by less than three years. He took a circuitous and perilous route to teaching sixth grade.
His father was an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal denomination, and worked for Allstate, then for Montgomery Ward. His mother, Regina, also heavily involved in the church, worked for the Lake County Circuit Court clerk.
The family’s life was woven deeply into their local church. But in 1988, they moved to Columbus, Ohio, to help a friend start a church.
The family ran out of money, and for about a month, they were homeless, White said. He recalled routinely stopping at a church that provided hotel vouchers and bags of food, and later subsisting on fast food.
“I will never eat a Whopper again in my life,” White said. “We lived on those.”
His father found work on the third shift at a White Castle. His mother started nursing school.
“I remember that being a pretty stressful time for him, having to leave us” to go to work at night, White recalled of his father. “Some hotels were pretty shady. We were babies … 7, 6, 5 years old.”
They found subsidized housing in an apartment, White recalled, with “a crack house above us … a crack house next door to us,” where children were living in squalor. Despite their own hardships, he recalled, his mother and father bathed and fed neighbors’ children and got them ready for school each day.
“So even in those experiences,” White said, “my curriculum around serving people was formed by watching my parents do that.”
In first grade, his teacher recommended special education for him. His parents fought and prevailed.
By the time he was in third grade, his family’s life had stabilized some. They’d moved to slightly better public housing and then to a rental house in a working-class, multiracial neighborhood. They got an orange and white cat they named Tiny. His mother started working at a clinic. His father became a school bus driver.
At the second school where he attended third grade, he was the only black male in his class. His teacher accused him of stealing a pencil — an infraction he said he didn’t commit — and decided to make an example of him.
“She did this by making all of the students line up along the perimeter of the room, and with me — only me — and her in the middle,” White recalled from his own classroom, nearly three decades later. She pushed over his desk, spilling all its contents on the floor, he said, his voice tightening.
“Oftentimes, when I think of instances that inspired me to be a teacher — that put me on this pathway — they’re instances where my own schooling was traumatic,” White said. “That’s not the kind of environment that any student should be experiencing.”
Despite the sometimes-hardscrabble existence, White recalls a mostly rich childhood of neighborhood adventures with buddies of all races, of Saturdays spent at the library, of the old black-and-white films his father loved, and discussions
“I knew that I was supposed to be doing something more meaningful, and teaching was that thing. And so I answered the call.” — Jonathan White
about history and politics his father led.
In 1995 White’s family returned to Waukegan, where he attended the same middle school as his father had. At Waukegan High School, he was a cut-up who competed in track and field and football. His 1.7 GPA knocked him off the sophomore football team until he raised his grades through 7 a.m. study sessions.
He focused, and by the time he graduated, had brought his GPA up to 3.3. But he scored a 17 out of 36 on his ACT, and the only college that would accept him was Chicago’s North Park University, White said.
He and his brother Tim — who was 10 months younger but in the same class as White — enrolled together. They were roommates all four years.
He thrived at North Park and graduated in 2004. But he had trouble finding a job, settling for portrait photographer at Sears. Then he moved to a label and decal manufacturer as a production artist, then to a marketing coordinator at a Mount Prospect company in 2007.
About a year later, he was fired. “I made too many small mistakes,” he recalled, adding that he had difficulty navigating the corporate world. For months, White stood in unemployment lines in Waukegan, “eating humble pie” and “learning a little bit about life,” he said.
He obtained student loans and enrolled in Keller Graduate School of Management’s MBA program while he also did freelance graphic art and design work. He created his own business, White Flair Design.
At church he met a Chicago Public Schools teacher, Candice West. They married in 2011. Their daughter, Morgan, was born in 2013.
Candice encouraged him to try teaching. She said her husband had a natural capacity to help her solve classroom challenges. His father had also suggested it over the years.
But White resisted, in part because he wanted something perceived as more respectable and lucrative. He drifted and bounced, at one point working in a stockroom at Bed Bath & Beyond. His business was stagnating and he was uninspired. He studied for and took the law school entrance