KANSAS CITY (AP) - Charles King remembers in his third year teaching a parent called him aside and told him to be more authentic, to let some of his roots show because the black students in that urban Houston school needed to know he was one of them.
The encounter changed the way that King, now 39 and the head of a Kansas City teacher training program, would deal with students the rest of his teaching career. For the first time he realized the importance "and the power" of being a black man in a classroom.
Last month, the Urban League of Greater Kansas City's report on "The State of Black Kansas City" concluded schools here are "still separate and unequal" and called into question the lack of men of color teaching in district and charter school classrooms.
"Studies have found that teachers of color can improve the educational experience of all students, and compared with their white peers, they are more likely to have higher expectations of students of color, confront issues of racism, develop more trusting relationships with students (particularly those who share a cultural background) and that teachers of color tend to serve as advocates and cultural brokers," the Urban League said.
It also said some of the latest research found assigning a black male student to a black teacher in the third, fourth or fifth grades significantly - nearly 30 percent - reduced the probability the child would drop out of high school. It's a statistic of great interest to public school leaders who for decades have searched for ways to improve the graduation rate for minority students and close their achievement gap with white schoolmates.
"The impact that black male teachers have on student outcomes is leaps and bounds above any other demographic group," King told the Kansas City Star.
So now the race to hire men of color as teachers is on, said Charles Foust, superintendent in Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools, where black men make up 2.5 percent of the 2,038 teachers and Hispanic men comprise 1.3 percent.
It's not just a Kansas City area phenomenon. Education experts said it has been well documented that black students, who are regularly cited for lagging behind academically, perform better when taught by teachers of the same race.
"Kids do better when they're taught by teachers who look like them. That's just the way it is," said David Kretschmer, an education professor at California State University, Northridge.
Kretschmer helps lead the Future Minority Male Teachers Across California Project, which for the last three years has been recruiting, preparing and retaining male teachers of color at the elementary level throughout the state. "We need more men of color in American classrooms, period," he said. "There is a cultural impact and it's shared. A teacher of color has an easier time understanding the cultural background of the students in their classroom."
Yet more than 80 percent of teachers in U.S. public school classrooms are white, and most - 77 percent - are female. Among the other 20 percent who are teachers of color, black men are a mere 2 percent, even though nearly half of the nation's schoolchildren are students of color, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And, by 2024, it's estimated children of color will make up 56 percent of the student population.
Of the more than 66,000 teachers in Missouri this year, only 1.2 percent are black men. Black females fair better at 3.7 percent. But the portion who are Hispanic - male or female - is less than 1 percent. In Kansas, the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows of the state's more than 36,000 teachers, more than 95 percent are white and 1.6 percent are Hispanic. The portions that are black are so small they aren't even quantified.
Having a black male teacher flips the script for black male teens, said Pernell Barrett, a 17-year-old senior at Center High School. Three years ago, 12 percent of the teachers in the Center district were black, 3 percent of them black men. This school year, 16 percent of the teachers are black, and 4 percent are black men. The district, like others across the area, is looking to increase those numbers.
Barrett remembers his first encounter with his English teacher, Troy Butler, one of Center's black male teachers. "It was my freshman year," Barrett said. "I didn't know him, but he came up to me and was like, 'How are you doing, how's your family?' He just kept it real. It was like he just looked at me and he saw me, you know?" Even though Barrett has good relationships with most of his white teachers, it wasn't the same.
That hallway encounter, his teacher said, was like the brother to brother nod he said happens when two black men from anywhere pass each other any time, any place. It is an unspoken familiarity Butler said goes a long way in a school setting between teacher and student or principal and student to improve the performance of young black male students.
"I think that the more that our faculty and our staff look like the kids that they serve the better it is for everybody," Butler said. "Those relationships can help other teachers. Those relationships can help all the students. Even the white students like having someone who is an authority figure who does not look like them."
"Representation matters," said Edgar Palacios, president and CEO of the Latinx Collaborative, which has focused on diversity in education. "All the data shows that teachers of color tend to have higher expectations of students of color. But this is not just about students of color. Because all students have better education outcomes when surrounded by a more diverse population of teachers."