Fresno schools need more Black educators. But that alone can’t fix long-standing issues

Last of a series of stories for the Fresno Voices project.

Angie Barfield worked hard and earned good grades as a top student in the late 1970s at Gibson Elementary School in Fresno.

The racism she faced made her school years the worst experiences of her life.

“I was placed into a classroom with a teacher who I remember vividly saying,’ There is no way that this Black child is at grade level to be in my class,’” the Fresno native said.

Barfield, now 48, said that moment stayed with her over the years and made her feel unsafe and unwelcome.

“Having white teachers tell me that I’m not smart, that I shouldn’t be here, constantly making me a trouble child, it was horrible,” Barfield said. “I think to be an intelligent Black child in this city can get you marginalized, devalued, dehumanized to the point where you don’t want to be in school, and you do act out.”

The Gibson campus sits in north Fresno, snuggled between Bullard High and Lincoln Park. During the late 70s and early 80s, the population was mostly white. Barfield remembers few Black students and even fewer Black teachers.

That hasn’t changed much over the years.

Gibson Elementary’s student population in 2017-18 was 12.5% Black, and there were no Black teachers, according to the most recent data from the California Department of Education.

The Bee compiled data from the 2017-18 school year on the number of Black teachers and students at each Fresno Unified School District campus, including charter schools.

Fresno Unified, the third-largest school district in California, employed 3,626 teachers in 2017-18, and 165, or 4.6%, were Black. Out of about 73,000 students that year, 8% were Black, and just under 10% were white. Yet about 57% of the district’s teachers were white.

“Kids are looking for someone who looks like them, but it’s difficult to find them,” said Barfield, who has been an educational specialist and coach at various Fresno-area schools, including Clovis Unified, Central Unified, and Fresno Unified.

In the 2017-18 school year, nearly 28% of Fresno Unified’s teachers and 68% of students were Hispanic, and about 10% of teachers and students were Asian.

According to data provided by Fresno Unified, as of Aug. 15, the district staffs 3,666 teachers and 4.39% are Black, which is just about 0.3% lower than in the 2017-18 school year.

The California Department of Education has not released updated data on teacher demographics since the 2017-18 school year.

Fresno Unified expects the percentage of Black teachers to increase in the coming weeks because not all new hires have been accounted for, said Paul Idsvoog, the chief of human resources and labor relations at Fresno Unified. About 9% of management in Fresno Unified is Black, he added.

Fresno Unified is doing better than the county as a whole. Idsvoog said in the 2018-19 school year, about 2.4% of teachers were Black county-wide.

Fresno’s ‘anti-Black sentiment ... has to be broken,’ teacher says

Felicia Quarles Treadwell, who is Black and works for Fresno Unified’s human resources department, said there wasn’t a large enough Black population in Fresno to have a Black teacher on every campus.

The white student population is only 1.6% higher than the Black student population, and there are white teachers on every campus.

According to the state department of education’s 2017-18 data compiled by The Bee, out of the 99 schools in Fresno Unified, there were 63 campuses that had at least one Black teacher. The district has Black teachers at 66 campuses as of August 15, said Nikki Henry, a district spokesperson.

Of the seven charter schools within Fresno Unified’s boundaries, only one campus — the School of Unlimited Learning — has a Black teacher, the 2017-18 data found.

Henry said, “the intent of Felicia’s comment was really referring to the fact that we have come a long way and that the majority of our schools do have Black teachers – and all of our school sites have Black staff members. What Felicia was getting at is that our pipeline is growing; however, there is still a large lack of Black educators working through the education system.”

Educators who spoke with The Bee said bringing more Black teachers into local classrooms would help Black students succeed at higher rates. They said it’s essential for students to have role models who understand the trauma the comes with being Black in Fresno.

Barfield said she still hears stories from students that remind her of her own experiences at Gibson Elementary.

“I’ve seen good in all of our districts,” said Barfield, who now works at the Fresno County Office of Education. “But this anti-Black sentiment embedded in each of them has to be broken. Being a Black educator in Fresno, it’s stressful. They want us to save the world, but they don’t want to support what our needs are.”

Black students have one of the lowest graduation rates in Fresno Unified. In the 2017-18 school year, 81% of Black students graduated, according to the state Department of Education. That number dipped in 2018-19 to 77%.

In 2017-18, nearly 87% of white students graduated, 83% of Hispanic students graduated, and 90% of Asian students graduated.

“All Black lives don’t matter in this system because this system was never designed for these children,” Barfield said. “Now everybody wants to check the box and say Black Lives Matter, but what are you going to do?”

Schools need more Black teachers

Edison High School teacher Lauren Beal said she is often the first Black teacher some of her Black students ever have.

She teaches high school seniors.

“It’s a wild thing to think about,” she told The Bee. “At Edison, in particular, we are lucky to have multiple Black educators.”

In the 2017-18 school year, Edison High had the most Black teachers out of all Fresno Unified schools. Out of the 107 teachers, eight were Black. The high school’s Black student population was 13.5%, which made it the high school in the district with the most Black students.

Beal, who grew up in Los Angeles, said her mother put her in a private elementary school so she would have Black teachers early on. She said it “definitely” made a difference in her education.

Black educators who spoke with The Bee said having a Black teacher helped motivate them and gave them someone on campus they felt they could trust. Research also shows when Black students have a Black teacher early on, they are more likely to go onto higher education.

Black students who had just one Black teacher by third grade are 13% more likely to enroll in college, findings from John Hopkins University and American University researchers showed. The students that had two Black teachers are 32% more likely to enroll in college.

Another study headed by the same researchers found the higher the expectations teachers have of their Black students, the more likely they will finish college. Both reports, published in 2018, concluded that it’s beneficial for students to have teachers who are the same race. For Black students, in particular, the research found that having a role model can have positive effects that last into adulthood and could help shrink the educational attainment gap.

“It’s very important to see someone who is mirroring you,” Beal said. “Having a Black teacher in first grade, the way I did, (changed) how I saw the role of a teacher and the way I saw how a teacher was changed.”

Like Edison High, the elementary and middle schools in Fresno Unified during the 2017-18 school year with the highest percentage of Black students were all in southwest Fresno, a historically Black neighborhood in the state’s fifth-largest city that’s been disenfranchised by systemic racism for decades.

Out of the 40 teachers at Gaston Middle School that year, six were Black, and nearly 18% of the student population was Black. Four of the 25 teachers at King Elementary were Black, and the Black student population was about 26%.

Over the last 21 years, Chris Finley, one of the Black teachers at Edison High, has worked as a math and science teacher and said he’s seen teachers’ unconscious bias creep into the classroom. There was a bomb threat on campus one day, Finley said, and he heard a teacher make a comment that insinuated people in the Edison area weren’t smart enough to make a bomb.

“Some of my African-American students had him (as a teacher) and expressed frustration with his lack of concern about the African American experience,” Finley said. “I grew up five blocks from Edison. In his mind now, this is how he sees students sitting before him. I would say a lot of teachers have a perspective they bring into the classroom, and they’re not aware of how it’s affecting students.”

Schools also need more Black principals

One way to get more Black teachers on campuses is to have more Black principals, said Dr. Daren Miller, a Fresno native who’s been a local educator for 30 years. He’s been a principal, vice-principal, advisor, counselor, teacher, and adjunct professor.

Miller completed his dissertation in 2019 that focused on Black male principals in the San Joaquin Valley and found the number of Black male principals has declined over the last 30 years. At one point, Fresno Unified had up to 13 Black male principals, Miller’s research found.

Now, five of the district’s principals are Black, according to Tobaise Brookins, the principal at Kirk Elementary.

“Black administrators whether it be male or female are usually getting into education administration because it’s a passion because they see themselves as a leader, they see themselves as wanting to make change and institute change holistically,” Miller told The Bee. “Some of the non-African American administrators are getting into administration because it’s a profession.”

The 10 principals Miller spoke with for his research all said they had Black mentors when they were in grade school that led them to a career in education.

“I thoroughly believe that being a principal is about providing service,” Miller said. “It’s not just about your service as an individual, as a principal, it’s about the school system and school site you have and the services it is providing. Ethnic principals provide a different foundation than some of our non-ethnic principals.”

He noted south Fresno neighborhoods are diverse, with Black, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian communities. Serving those communities, he said, requires “some understanding and some sensitivities to culture.”

The district’s Black principals have been working to create pathways for Black people who want a career in education. African American Principals United are seeking out people they can mentor and support, Brookins said.

“We’re making sure … to open doors and as a system, we are not being a block but an escalator for people interested in the field who might not know how to get into the field and don’t know how to navigate the waters of being an African American educator which does come with a lot of pressure when you think of even the climate we are in right now,” said Brookins, who is also a minister in Fresno.

‘You don’t need to be Black to empathize’

Although Beal considered herself lucky to have a Black teacher in elementary school, that didn’t shield her from the microaggressions and discrimination she endured from white teachers.

In tenth grade, she ran out of a classroom crying because a white teacher said Black people “have everything.”

“I remember my teacher saying, ‘They have their own schools and their own TV channel,’” Beal said. “I couldn’t argue with the teacher because I was so upset. We have our own schools because we were not able to attend white schools. We have our own TV channel, Black Entertainment Television, because white stations wouldn’t play our music on TV.”

Black students suffer trauma that not every teacher takes the time to understand or empathize with, Beal said. Black students are often put into situations where they become the “Black authority in the classroom and are always being asked about Black issues,” she continued.

Beal said one of her Black students passed her in the hallway once and told her how happy she was to be taught slavery by a Black educator.

“She said it off the cuff, and I definitely think that for Black kids, a lot of trauma is so off the cuff and so normalized students probably don’t realize what they’re expressing is trauma,” Beal said.

Often, Black teachers have the extra burden of carrying student trauma along with their own. There have been times when colleagues have asked Beal to talk to one of their Black students even though they are not in her class. She said she’s happy to provide a safe space on campus for Black students, something she also wanted growing up.

“Is it just about having Black teachers, or is it having teachers to work for Black students? You don’t need to be Black to empathize,” Beal said. “A lot of times, Black teachers are doing the work because we were those students. It’s building a pathway where, if it’s a Black issue, the Black teacher will solve it rather than the systemic support of solving it.”

What is Fresno Unified doing to hire more Black educators?

Bringing more Black teachers into Fresno Unified classrooms is a priority, Idsvoog said.

“We want adults to be able to look like the kids that we’re serving,” he told The Bee. “If a student feels understood and connected to that adult, hopefully, that means we can set that high expectation for that student.”

Idsvoog said classified employees — janitors, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and office aides - are more reflective of the student population, which is about 90% non-white. That’s an opportunity for Fresno Unified to create a pipeline that leads classified employees to teaching jobs, he said.

Within the district’s prospective teacher pipeline, 9.9% are Black, said Teresa Morales-Young, who oversees teacher development for Fresno Unified. The district starts recruitment at the student level. She said Fresno Unified has a program for training prospective instructional aides, and 13% of those enrolled are Black.

Fresno Unified also partners with local universities in a teacher credentialing program with 19% Black enrollment, Henry said.

“Those teachers then become new teachers in our system, and we’ve seen our newer teachers, those that move through the pipeline, they’re actually more apt and ready to move into leadership positions,” Morales-Young said. “So our African American percentage rate has really increased moving into the leadership pipeline.”

Fresno State is the largest local recruitment source for teachers, Henry said. In the fall of 2019, just 2.7% of the students were Black. The university’s Kremen School of Education’s Black student population was 2% in the fall of 2019.

“This speaks to the importance of growing our own pipeline all throughout our system,” Henry said in an email to The Bee. “As mentioned, we still have much work to be done, but our trends are moving in the right direction, and we are increasing representation every year.”

Fresno Unified has also worked with local Black organizations and historically Black universities to recruit teachers, said Kim Collins, who works in the district’s human resources office.

Cultural proficiency training for all employees is also in the works.

“Every single person in our district needs to be ready to work with all our children, all our Black children, and all our Latino children,” Quarles Treadwell said. “That doesn’t come easy for everybody if that’s not your experience, and that’s just reality. But you can learn.”

Just hiring more Black teachers isn’t enough

It’s more complicated than just hiring Black teachers, Beal said, it’s about retaining Black teachers.

“It’s not just the idea of having Black teachers,” Beal said, “does your district respect Black teachers? Are you being respected in your position? Are we acknowledging they are coming with another layer of trauma as a Black teacher?”

Fresno Unified has an African American networking group meant to support and help retain Black teachers, Idsvoog said.

“We want to be better for our city, and we want Fresno to be the leader of these changes , and we can be, and we have great people trying to do that,” Idsvoog said. “We have kids that need (Black) adults ... as much if not more than any other city in the country.”

Beal said she’s had moments where she’s felt depressed, exhausted, and has questioned why she’s still teaching. She’s said she’s seen Fresno Unified protect teachers who say racist things or discriminate against Black and brown students.

“I felt moments like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I spent all this money and have a career to be treated like this and see students being treated like this,” she said.

Soon after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, there were various racist incidents involving Fresno Unified teachers and other employees in June. One teacher at Kings Canyon Middle School wrote posts on social media criticizing the protests sparked by Floyd’s death.

Another incident happened at an end-of-the-year virtual celebration for Hoover High staff. At least one employee appeared to mock Floyd’s death. That same month, a Design Science Middle College High School staffer came under fire for comments made on Twitter in 2017 and 2018 related to immigration and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Fresno Unified officials haven’t said whether they are disciplining the staff. Officials have said the people involved had been talked to, but it’s unclear if the district can do anything about it.

“I think it’s important for people to understand .. there are teachers and principals and counselors and educators who really care about Black students, but we can’t protect the ones who don’t, and if the district continues to do that, then they continue to uphold a racist system,” Beal said.

Many Black people are “pushed” out of education positions because they are “burnt out,” the system isn’t set up to support them, and “we cannot do the modeling of anti-racist work alone if you expect Black teachers to stay in your district and at your school site.”

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Read more from The Bee’s Education Lab here.

This story was originally published September 9, 2020 at 5:00 AM.