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You have nailed the problem. I am familiar with the middle schools in the community in which I live. The public school minority population has hit nearly 50% while the minority population in the general community is closer to 20%.

The make-up of the teaching staffs at the middle schools which have a combined enrollment between 1500 and 2000 has NO BLACK MALES as teachers. There are virtually no white males either,the white males that are on staff are not teaching in the core curricula of math,English, science and social studies. The teaching staff and counselors are overwhelmingly white female. In the elementary schools there is number of black female teachers. Most of these black males hit middle school without ever being exposed to strong male authority. Middle school is a tough time for all youth no matter what the race or gender. A nearly all white female staff dealing with nearly quarter black male population is not a good mix.

There must be a lot of reasons why males do not enter teaching. The fact that schools have more committment to objectives related to further entrenching the social welfare state than they do instructional objectives must have something to do with males rejecting the teaching profession. My father was a teacher, principal, and superintendent. When I attended school in the fifties and sixties, the teaching staff was at least 50% male. All the teachers in the first four grades were female. All the teachers in the sixth, seventh, and eighth were male except for PE and home economics.

Black men and white women grouped together is not a healthy demographic for success in the public schools but it probably bodes well for the Democrats because it so reflects the hardest core constituencies of the Democratic Party.

Re posts #77 AND #98 -- Thank you for sharing your thoughts and supporting my view that there needs to be more black males in teaching.

I am always disheartened when I read of "complaints" by black leaders in FL against Gov Bush, because I taught in an all black school and IMO, there is a laundrey list of constructive things these black leaders should instead be spending their time on. Gov Bush is in the mainstream of black parents' thinking on the topic of education, as surveys show they are very interested in improving the quality of education and support vouchers. Yet, the black leaders seem to ignore this, and ignore the efforts they could be making to encourage more black males to enter teaching.

I am aware of only two programs currently reaching out to black males to get them to enter teaching: one is at Marygrove COllege, in Michigan, where 90% of the public school students in Detroit are minority and fewer than 2% of the teachers are black. And the other is in South Carolina, at Clemson, which has an innovative program, "Call Me Mister" to recruit more black males to enter teaching. But two programs like this in our nation is not enough.

I would like to see black leaders put some pressure on traditionally black universities to step up recruitment of black males for teaching degrees, and more emphasis by black leaders in communities to get parents to understand that teaching is a profession suitable for black males too.

Far too often these black parents think that every time a white teacher is hired, that white teacher has taken away a job from a black teacher. Nothing coulf be further from the truth. Also, sadly, the few black [female} teachers I know never seem to want to teach in black neighborhood schools; instead, they view themselves as successful when they get hired in a white school.

Here are three links on this important topic:

(1) Call Me Mister - Black male teaching program at Clemson University, SC

(2) Marygrove College press release -- program recruiting black males for teaching careers

(3) MenTeach.Org - Organization to supporting more males to enter the teaching profession