Giving Compass' Take:

• Adriene Thorne shares how her daughter, the only African-American girl in her class, was impacted by having a teacher who looks like her.

• How can funders help to increase diversity in the teacher workforce? 

• Learn more about the benefits of black teachers for black students. 

In first grade, my daughter was the only one: the only African-American girl in her entire classroom.

A girl in class announced that she didn’t like my daughter’s hair and that same girl, at a party later in the year, told my daughter that her brown-skinned doll’s hair was scary. We might chalk it all up to a mean girl behaving badly except my daughter announced to me, in first grade, that she didn’t want to be African-American anymore. She figured out what all brown-skinned kids in this country figure out at ages much too young: “You aren’t. You don’t. You shouldn’t.” My whole family felt my daughter’s pain.

There is one African-American teacher for the second grade in my daughter’s school, and I was determined my daughter would be in her class. I told this teacher, on the first day of school, what our first-grade experience had been, and she couldn’t have been more amazing. She was bold and bodacious; sassy and loud.

Who she was really spoke to who my daughter was. In a parent conference, this teacher told me: “When I call on her, she shrinks. She’s playing small, but she knows things other people don’t know.” She turned to my daughter and said: “You have a personality just like me.” My daughter had this beaming smile. By just being herself, this teacher modeled for my daughter it’s okay to be big, and smart, and sparkly.

Read the full article about having a teacher who looks like you by Adriene Thorne at Chalkbeat.