On the first day of school in Rhode Island’s largest city, 170 classrooms had no full-time teacher and 65 had no substitute. This problem spilled into the first month of school. By the end of September, there were still nearly 80 open teaching positions across the city’s public schools.
The teacher shortage is particularly acute in such areas as math, science, special education and, perhaps most ominously, in English as a second language.
The state’s new education commissioner, Angélica Infante-Green seems to understand this problem. She has called for a $1 million campaign to recruit new teachers. Rhode Island, Infante-Green says, has been losing teachers to Massachusetts and Connecticut.
In the short run, some of the teacher vacancies have been filled with young teachers from Teach for America and substitutes. These band-aids are necessary now, but you have to wonder if this would be the solution in such affluent suburban districts as Barrington, Lincoln or East Greenwich.
One element that has barely been mentioned is the composition of the city’s teacher corps. About 80 percent of Providence teachers are white, while 91 percent of the 24,000 students are people of color. Roughly 65 percent of students are Latino. English isn’t the first language for many of these children.
It’s well past time to address racial and ethnic equity in the teaching corps. For too many years, local politicians and education bureaucrats have paid little more than lip service to the need to recruit more minority teachers.
This isn’t the case in other city jobs. Col. Hugh Clements has forged a diverse police force by aggressively reaching out to minority communities. The city police much better reflect the 21st Century community in the state’s capital city than the teachers.
So Infante-Green is right when she says that a new recruitment regime is necessary. But it goes deeper. Providence may be able to retrain some white teachers to better respond to the reality of the sweeping demographic change. We know that English learners have been neglected for years. Two years ago, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice cited the city for failing to provide adequate instruction for students from Spanish-speaking backgrounds.
The United States is growing more diverse. By next year no single race group will make up more than half of U.S. children, according to Census Bureau projections.
Today’s children are tomorrow’s workers and business and political leaders. We owe them nothing less than a first-rate education that prepares them for our new country.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon.
