Lack of Latino teachers felt in Sonoma County

Plucky and high-spirited, Alma Chavez traveled a rocky passage through school. From Bellevue Elementary School to Lawrence Cook Middle School, through Elsie Allen, Nueva Vista and Ridgway high schools, she struggled. She graduated, proud and relieved, from the Santa Rosa alternative Youth Connections high school in November.

For most of that time, Chavez was out of sync, she said, with most of her teachers. She felt many did not get her - a Latina who lived in a tough neighborhood with parents who spoke little English.

The U.S.-born daughter of Mexican immigrants said the “handful” of Latino teachers she did have, better understood her, illustrating how she might have benefited if she’d had more

“They understood my reasons to why I didn’t go to school that day, or why I didn’t have the motivation, because my parents were too concerned about the bills getting paid or what we were going to eat,” said Chavez, 20, now an aide in a home for developmentally disabled people.

“Latino teachers took the time to call my parents,” said Chavez, estimating she had no more than five. “To ask what was going on and honestly understand, due to their own experience.”

Of Sonoma County’s 71,096 public school students, 45 percent are Latino. But in a disparity that educators and students say can be problematic, just 6 percent of the county’s teachers are Latino.

“We do know it’s important to have a representative population of teachers in the classroom,” said Carlos Ayala, dean of the Sonoma State University School of Education.

“In this way, students can see themselves as being academic, as part of the college or career-going group, because they have role models in place to support them,” Ayala said.

That resonates with Andres Correa, who often struggled through Piner High School and then Elsie Allen High without much sense that he could go further.

“It would probably have motivated me a lot to see that someone of my culture or who looks like me is able to go to college and that they accomplished their dreams,” said Correa, 21.

He said he found inspiration from a Latino Spanish teacher at Piner who helped him find new energy for school, and from a white teacher at Elsie Allen who did the same, convincing him he could get a higher education. He graduated on time from Elsie Allen in 2012.

“The teacher doesn’t have to be Latino in order for a person to relate to them, but it does help because then you can see that there’s someone that looks like you that’s made it in life,” said Correa, who works as a youth health educator and is studying to be an emergency medical technician.

“That’s one of the things that made me want to go into education. I know I’m not the only kid who grew up with those concerns,” said Jenny Cavins. A Latina teacher at the Spanish-English dual immersion Flowery School in Agua Caliente, Cavins saw several friends drop out for reasons she believes had to do with an absence of Latino teachers. Though she did well, with a lot of support from her parents, she felt the lack, too, growing up in Glenn County, she said.

“At times, it was discouraging,” she said.

Out of 3,902 kindergarten-through- 12th-grade teachers in the county, 235 are Latino, though there are 31,104 Latino students. In Santa Rosa City Schools, the county’s largest school district, 66 out of 856 teachers are Latino, or 8 percent; 8,277 of its 16,710 students are Latino, just under 50 percent. The data are from the state education department.

“There’s a need for us to do more,” said Jason Lea, the Santa Rosa district’s assistant superintendent for human resources.

A teacher’s ethnicity isn’t a substitute for quality, he said. But with the large number of Latino students in Santa Rosa schools - 25 percent are learning English; 15 percent of Latino students in the 2013-2014 class dropped out - it clearly matters, he said.

“The key really to helping kids at risk, regardless of whether it’s socioeconomic, first-generation or whatever, is really relationships. That goes beyond ethnicity - and most of our teachers do that very well, establishing strong relationships. That and solid direct instruction is the most impactful thing that can happen,” Lea said. “But do we need more Latino teachers? Heck, yeah, we do.”

When he started kindergarten in the small town of Lamont, south of Bakersfield, Ricardo Alcala spoke no English. His teacher, whom he recalls as elderly and white, changed his name, writing “Ricky” on his name tag.

It stayed with him for some two decades. Alcala, a Spanish teacher and wrestling coach at Elsie Allen, is just now reclaiming the name given him by his parents, immigrant farmworkers from Mexico,

“I wish she had never changed my name,” he said. “I think she was trying to Americanize it, but my name wasn’t Ricky; it’s Ricardo.”

For Alcala, the story is not only about his name being Anglicized without his permission but also about how, without teachers of their ethnicity, many Latino students can go without a particular kind of support and understanding, affirmation and inspiration in school.

“I know the added responsibilities of Latino students. You’re also raising your little brother or sister. You’re helping put up sheet rock, you’re helping fix the house, you’re inclined and sometimes expected to work to help provide for the family,” he said. “I see myself in them. I see the possibilities. Because a lot of people doubted me and I like to say, now, I’m pretty successful.”

He added: “And it’s really important for Latino kids to see someone that when they see them they’re able to say, ‘You’re like my brother,’ ‘You’re like my uncle,’ ‘You’re like my dad.’ That they see them and that they are in positions of authority and power and success.”

At Hilliard Comstock Middle School, Kathy Shanklin, an advanced history and college prep teacher, stands out in her classroom: she is white in a school where 323 of 377 students are Latino.

Visitors to her class witness a room of apparently fully engaged eighth-graders. One reason, she said, is that she is in regular communication with most of their parents, who are deeply involved in their children’s schooling.

And that, she said, is because 12 years ago she started taking four hours of Spanish lessons every week, and since then, has traveled several times to Central America to hone her language skills.

“I think anybody could be a good teacher if they really learn Spanish,” she said. “Once I learned enough rudimentary Spanish to be able to talk to the parents of my students, my job as a teacher really kind of changed.”

Parents quickly began to communicate “their desires for and concerns about their children,” Shanklin said, and, “I get what I want from my students because I can speak to the parents now.”

Still, Shanklin thinks it is important that the district do what it can to hire more Latino teachers. Latino students, she said, need role models in school. But also, she said, because in a time when cross cultural trust can seem lacking, if not absent, students of all races and ethnicities would benefit.

“It would be fantastic because it would bridge a lot of understanding between communities,” she said. “I think a lot of racism is fear of the other, and I think it would relax tension in the community when people understand each other better and are more comfortable sharing elbow space and culture.”

The question of whether having teachers of the same ethnicity affects the performance of racial or ethnic minority students is discussed regularly in education circles.

Two reports in 2014 about diversity in the teaching force said students are helped by having teachers of their race or ethnicity.

A National Education Association report, “Time for a Change: Diversity in Teaching Revisited,” cited seven research papers and said: “The research also implies that same-race teachers are more effective in teaching students of their respective race.”

The other report, called “Teacher Diversity Revisited,” was by the Center for American Progress. It pointed to research for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education by two University of Pennsylvania professors, Henry May and Richard Ingersoll, and said, “Students of color also do better on a variety of academic outcomes if they are taught by teachers of color.”

But there is no unanimity on a subject with so many variables.

“It’s so complicated an equation: the quality of teachers, experience of teachers, background of students, language skills. It’s almost impossible to do the study where you say, ‘Do Latino teachers make a difference for Latino students on test scores?’?” said UC Santa Cruz education professor Kip Tellez, who has researched the issue.

“When you look at the data, they don’t have enough controls yet for us to really answer that questions definitively,” Tellez said.

Sonoma County Office of Education Deputy Superintendent for Instructional Services Mickey Porter said the lack of Latino teachers in local schools is a problem.

“I think all educators see it as an issue; I think the research bears that out,” she said.

But she said that getting Latino students on par with their better-performing counterparts is not necessarily a matter of hiring more Latino teachers.

“You can have a system that’s equitable and maybe not have the population reflected in the teaching ranks,” she said. “So I wouldn’t say that’s the answer. Is it a piece of the answer? Yes.”

In the Roseland School District, where the proportion of Latino students, 91 percent, is the highest of all county districts, the Latino dropout rate is 4 percent for the class of 2013-2014. That’s less than half the countywide dropout rate for white students, which is 9.4. Of the Roseland district’s 129 teachers, 18 are Latino, or 14 percent. That’s one of the highest proportions in the county’s 41 districts, but still notably low.

Roseland District Superintendent Amy Jones-Kerr said that while she would like to have more Latino teachers, the numbers don’t concern her and it’s a lower priority than simply finding quality hires.

“It does matter, because we want to make certain that we have a population of faculty that the kids can relate to, absolutely. But our focus has been getting the best,” Jones-Kerr said. “That is going to help meet the needs of our students, people who make connections with our students.”

The disparity is ameliorated, too, she said, by the district’s large Latino support staff: 30 of 32 instructional aides are Latino, as well as four of six counselors and all six student service managers, whose responsibilities include mentoring, discipline issues and parent meetings.

If the academic effect upon Latino students of not having Latino teachers is unclear, the impact in other areas is easy to see, say those who have experienced those circumstances.

“I really learned to compartmentalize who I was. I was someone at home and I was someone else at school. I sort of grew up with ‘Am I really a part of that?’?” said Esmeralda Sanchez Moseley, principal of the kindergarten through fifth-grade Flowery School.

“When you’re preoccupied with how you socially fit in too much, it really takes away a little bit from your ability to immerse yourself in the education environment,” said Sanchez Moseley, a daughter of Mexican immigrants whose mother was a nurse’s aide and whose father was a farmworker before he opened a menswear store in Woodland.

Still, she said, the heart of the matter may be the degree to which teachers commit themselves to embracing their students’ diverse backgrounds.

“I think when we have educators who understand equity and diversity and truly immerse themselves in understanding the students and families they serve, I think that can be equally powerful as having teachers of the same ethnicity,” she said.

Andres Correa’s sister, Gricelda, who spoke no English when she entered kindergarten in Santa Rosa, didn’t have that experience through her schooling, she said. Now 25 and, like her brother, a health educator with Santa Rosa Community Health Centers, she is also a student at Santa Rosa Junior College, where the Latino instructors she has stand out because she can’t remember having one from first through 12th grade.

“I really enjoy it,” she said of her SRJC experience. “I feel like I can relate to them, it makes me want to attend class. In high school it was different, I didn’t have any Latino teachers and I felt intimidated. It made it difficult for me to speak up.”

With Latinos now outnumbering white residents in California, but with their academic performance still substantially lower, helping to rectify that issue is increasingly urgent, Cavins said. Diversifying the complexion of the state’s teaching staff is a key way to do that, she said.

“It’s vital in California that there be more Latino teachers,” she said. “With the demographics of our state right now, it’s important for students to see that there are people of similar backgrounds teaching them and that they have something to work toward and aspire to.”

Staff Writer Jeremy Hay blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach him at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay.