Giving Compass' Take:
- Rebecca Koenig spotlights Call Me MISTER, a leadership development program supporting Black male teachers throughout their education.
- What can funders do to support programs like Call Me MISTER that provide resources for Black male educators?
- Learn about why teacher representation matters to students of color.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
When Alphonso Richard Jr. walked into his first teacher education course at Clemson University, he experienced a shock.
“Being in a class where you’re the only male, I didn’t know where to sit,” he says. “Girls were looking like, ‘Oh my goodness, is that a guy in here?’”
Compounding the confusion: Most women in the room were white, and Richard is Black. The dissonance was enough to send a shiver of doubt through the aspiring educator’s mind.
“It was a scared, hesitant feeling at first,” Richard says. “Am I meant to be here? Is this for me?”
It takes courage to enter a space where you’re not sure you belong. That’s the kind of threshold that Black men training to become educators have to cross many times. They make up only 2 percent of U.S. public school teachers (men overall compose 24 percent). They’re also underrepresented in college teacher-preparation programs, as education is “one of the least diverse major fields in higher education,” according to a 2019 report from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
Yet Richard didn’t have to overcome his uncertainty alone. Outside of class, he belonged to a brotherhood of fellow teachers-in-training, all of them members of a longstanding leadership development program known as Call Me MISTER.
“It felt like a safe haven sometimes,” says Richard, a recent graduate of the program and a new fifth grade teacher. “It’s guys going after the same mission—same vision—as you.”
When the initiative started two decades ago, people “really didn't believe that we would be successful at being able to attract a 17- or 18-year-old Black male to become a second or third grade teacher,” says Roy Jones, a provost-distinguished professor at Clemson and the executive director of Call Me MISTER.
And yet, the program has graduated about 300 African American men from college education departments in South Carolina, more than doubling the number of Black men teaching in elementary and middle schools in the state.
Read the full article about the Call Me MISTER program by Rebecca Koenig at EdSurge.